By John Horgan on September 4, 2019 *> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything?* >
No. If the chain of "why" questions are infinite then obviously science can't answer an infinite number of questions nor can anything else. And if the chain is not infinite then eventually you'll run into a brute fact, and by their very nature there is no how or why about brute facts, they just are. For example, I think a brute fact is that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed. *> Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine > creator.* > Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, everything? Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, *ANYTHING*? > *> Let’s say physicists convince themselves that string theory is in fact > the final theory, which encodes the fundamental laws from which nature > springs. Theorists must still explain where those laws came from, just as > believers in God must explain where He came from.* > I don't think science will ever be able to fully explain why there is something rather than nothing, however it's already done an excellent job explaining why there is a great deal rather than very little. Meanwhile the God theory can explain precisely nothing. *> As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. > In spite of all the advances in biology since Darwin, we still don’t have a > clue how life began,* > That's just not true. We certainly have a clue, but the beginning of life was a historical event so if 4 billion years of geological activity has erased the evidence then we may never be able to definitively say "life started this way and it couldn't have started in any other way"; but I think we're well on our way of developing a plausible scenario describing how life *could* have started. > *Brain scientists still have no idea how our brains make us conscious,* > What's with this "us" business? All I know for certain is I'm conscious and I'm the product of Darwinian Evolution. > *> and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human > consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness, which > determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious states.* > I know for certain I'm conscious. If Darwinian Evolution produced me then I know for certain that something Evolution can see must have the ability to produce a conscious state, something like intelagent behavior. And you can't have intelagent behavior without data processing. > > *It would not tell us whether it feels like something to be a bat,* > John Horgan might someday know what it would be like for John Horgan to be a bat, but to know what it's like for a bat to be a bat John Horgan would have to turn into a bat, and even then John Horgan wouldn't know what it's like because then John Horgan would no longer exist. Only a bat can know what it's like for a bat to be a bat and only John Horgan can know what it's like for John Horgan to be John Horgan. > *> The older I get, the more I appreciate what philosopher Paul Feyerabend > said to me in 1992 when I broached the possibility of total knowledge.* > It's one thing to say we can't know everything but Feyerabend seems to think we can't know anything and so we should give up even trying and just howl at the moon or something. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2_t_Qtk_e6p94gP%2BO%2BqR6%3D9gAxAqrSn%2B4c8JzMO6q8Cg%40mail.gmail.com.
