Believing where we cannot prove

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Boots13

Yes and No ! LOL.
I appreciate, greatly, the terms and examples you used in your reply. Easy to read, easy to understand. I wanted to quote and respond to your whole reply but fear that I would end with a multi page jumble of idiotic questions and statements! I'm interested, but not well versed.

When responding in my first post, I haphazardly introduced why I hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence. And that basically is : what is an unsupported (evidenciary) belief today, may become a supported rule tomorrow and ultimately a basis for learning and believing yet additional unsupported ideas in the future.

I know, a big grey zone. It still doesn't answer why I believe in the hand of something greater than I.

I agree with you in that questioning absolutes is good..even though they appear irrefutable. Newtonian Physics = absolutes. I believe in them, the evidence shows why the apple falls (or in your example, doesn't) or why the car skids. But do we stop there? What if science believes there is more, yet there is no proof?

So this is another example of hanging on to 'beliefs for which there is no evidence':
Quantum Physics-Dimension. It started with three, now arguably four. Even more astounding mathematics project six postulate it could be infinite?!
While there is no hard evidence, I believe !


.

It's interesting that you should bring up extra-dimensions because string theory is a near-perfect case-study in how the scientific process works out. Everyone I know who has read up on string theory finds it beautiful and WANTS the Universe to work that way. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that string theory is *deeply*, perhaps *fatally*, flawed as a theory. Part of that vulnerability is the requirement of up to 9 extra-dimensions to make it work (in any of its millions of possible permutations).

To understand why, I first need to explain a bit about the four dimensions that we KNOW exist. Let's say we're going to meet up in downtown Portland. You need to know where I'm going to be and when I'm going to be there. Those coordinates are: Let's meet on the Second floor of Powell's books at the corner of Broadway and 10th at 4:00 PM. Those are the four dimensions. The X coordinate is Broadway, the Y coordinate is 10th, the Second floor is the Z coordinate. These are the three-dimensions that people are all familiar with. 4:00 PM is the fourth dimension which is Time.
If you have the XYZ and T coordinates then you and I can agree where and when an event (our meeting) will take place. What's more ANYONE given those coordinates can know where the event will take place (thus making it invariant).

String theory, in order to work, requires that there be between 6 and 9 extra-dimensions that are all curled up into incredibly small, very complex shapes using what's called Calabai-Yau topologies OR they are extremely large dimensions called 'branes' (for membranes). The problem with this is that, depending upon who you ask, those dimensions are either completely undetectable (although you can demonstrate how they would work mathematically) or they require such huge amounts of energy to penetrate that it will be a VERY long time before we are ever able to build a device that will penetrate them. (To give you a sense of scale, the LHC in Europe is a collider with a 17 mile circumference. A collider that could potentially probe these curled up dimensions would need to be the circumference of the solar system! Taking the Oort Cloud as the absolute outer edge of the solar system at 18 *trillion* miles (the radius) the circumference of the solar system is approximately 113 *trillion* miles! Needless to say we would have to be a much more sophisticated space-faring civilization in order to build such a device.)

Herein, then, lies the problem with string theory. If it can't be falsified then it isn't science. It may be mathematically elegant but it isn't *science*.

From my way of thinking any statement about the world in the form of "X exists" or "X works this way" should have implications. For example, the statement Barack Obama is the 44 President of the United States has the implication that he was NOT the 43rd President and that George Bush is NOT the current President of the United States. If it could be shown that George Bush IS still President then that would, by definition, mean that Barack Obama is not the President. I think that almost any statement we make about the world that involves the collective reality we all share should have implications. A world where there is a secret Illuminati controlling everything should look *different* than one where there isn't one. If there's no way to determine either way then we should always default to the least convoluted explanation, following Occam's Razor.



Cheers
Aj

[Boots13]

There you go again, being your amazing Geek self ( a most enviable position, I might add) !
I returned home from a weekend at the cabin, marveling at the granite cliffs, snowbound peaks and this space that my heart seems to naturally occupy...and for a nanosecond thought about dimension ! But I know enough to misquote theory and perhaps be dangerous in my assumptions. In other words, I don't know very much at all.

So it all brings me back to your initial point, that being "Why hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence".

And I cannot help but think the evolution of an idea or theory has advanced technology, it has advanced (depending upon ones viewpoint) civilization.
Intuition has no credible evidence, nor is theory immediately provable so I wonder what is outside science and logic ? And I would ask can intuition or theory without evidence be dis-proven?

But with this approach comes a "double edged sword" . I would add a disclaimer that supporting an 'absolute' theory outside of logic and science has the potential to be a dangerous path.

[Boots13]

And I think what I'm saying in my "laymens" terms is also expressed in your scientific approach.
And that is,
"If there's no way to determine either way then we should always default to the least convoluted explanation, following Occam's Razor.
"
A consistant approach to maintaining civility, order, and perhaps consistancy in our method of relating a belief to the masses...

But what about religion ? Or Spirituality....how would this apply?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Boots13

There you go again, being your amazing Geek self ( a most enviable position, I might add) !
I returned home from a weekend at the cabin, marveling at the granite cliffs, snowbound peaks and this space that my heart seems to naturally occupy...and for a nanosecond thought about dimension ! But I know enough to misquote theory and perhaps be dangerous in my assumptions. In other words, I don't know very much at all.

So it all brings me back to your initial point, that being "Why hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence".

And I cannot help but think the evolution of an idea or theory has advanced technology, it has advanced (depending upon ones viewpoint) civilization.
Intuition has no credible evidence, nor is theory immediately provable so I wonder what is outside science and logic ? And I would ask can intuition or theory without evidence be dis-proven?

But with this approach comes a "double edged sword" . I would add a disclaimer that supporting an 'absolute' theory outside of logic and science has the potential to be a dangerous path.

Interesting. Well, I have a hypothesis about intuition and what it is. Now, as my starting place let me claim my bias: I look at human beings as evolved animals (because all the evidence points to us being exactly that). Thus not only did evolution give us stereoscopic color-vision (useful for when we were chimp-like animals living in trees) but also gave us our mental facilities. Intuition, I submit to you, is the brain's way of making on-the-spot decisions in the face of imperfect information. To see this, take yourself out of your familiar setting and imagine that you are one of our paleolithic ancestors (homo habilis) eking out a life at the edge of the African savannah. Survival requires you to forage for food across a pretty wide territory some of it out on the open savannah. So there you and your foraging party are, moving across the grassland and you hear a rustling in the grass far off to your right side. Is it a lion, a jackal, or just the wind? If you wait around to find out, it's probably too late to do anything with the information. So you make an *intuitive* leap that it's a lion and respond correctly. Now, here's where evolutionary logic kicks in. (And yes, nature really does work this way) If you run and it turns out you were wrong about it being a threat, you've burned some calories that could've been used for foraging but that's a very small price to pay given that if you didn't run and were wrong that it *wasn't* a lion, then your reproductive fitness would very quickly drop to zero while *greatly* enhancing the lion's fitness (in as much as it gets to eat for another day). Given this nature would favor a system that makes snaps decisions, in the face of imperfect information, even IF there were false positives (determining that there's a lion when there isn't one) over a system that either doesn't make snap decisions (deliberately weighing all options all the time) or one that was more prone to false negatives (determining that there's no lion when there is one). I'd be willing to bet that what we call intuition is a system for making workable-enough decisions on the fly.

As far as your second question that's a bit more of a sticky wicket. In science nothing is ever proven forever. Anything in science--the atomic model, Relativistic Gravity, evolutionary biology, any of it--could be overthrown tomorrow on better information. However, it's very much unlikely to happen because those things I've listed above are very robust (meaning that they have been tested and passed and then tested again in a different area and passed again). The problem with non-evidence based ideas is that there's no way to disprove them.

To give you a contrast, we'll look at a field of study near and dear to my heart; evolutionary biology. I LOVE this theory. I would say it is one of the deepest, most elegant in all of science. Best. Theory. Ever. Hands down. Yet, I could come up with three or four things, off the top of my head, that would definitively demonstrate that evolution through natural selection was false. This isn't the same as saying that it IS false, just that it's possible to set up conditions under which it would be false.

Here they are:

1. If there were no means of inheritance, then evolutionary biology wouldn't work since it depends upon offspring being similar, although not identical, to their parents.
2. If there were no variation within a population, then evolutionary biology wouldn't work. Natural selection requires that there be variation within a population that is heritable in order for nature to have something to 'favor'.
3. If there hadn't been enough time for evolution to work. Evolution is a very slow process. If the Earth were younger than it is by one or two orders of magnitude then there wouldn't be enough time for life as complex as us to evolve.*
4. If we found a large number of late-stage mammals (post Dinosaur mammals) in an early stage fossil layer (say pre-Cambrian) then evolutionary biology would be in serious trouble. ONE rabbit fossil in the pre-Cambrian era isn't a problem. Millions of rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian era is a problem since they shouldn't be there.

There are others, of course, but you should get the idea. My question is this: what kind of similar list could one draw up for homeopathy or astrology or what-have-you? Ideally, such a falsification list would be drawn up by those who believe in homeopathy or astrology and then they would go out and seek to find evidence for or against. That's how science works. You explicitly state the problems in your hypothesis or theory and how you have addressed them.

Lastly, because the Universe is a unified whole whatever one purports to be true should fit within that unified whole. By this I mean that, for instance, if your pet hypothesis violates the conversation of mass or conservation of energy or entropy then it's *wrong*, it's not the Universe that has it wrong. (If it isn't wrong then clear off your mantle because if anyone ever proves that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is wrong, that person is guaranteed a Nobel prize) So if your belief is supposed to be some kind of field, it should be subject to the inverse square law because every other field is. If it's based upon an energy then it should, under certain circumstances, behave like a field and there should be some way of detecting it, at least in principle.

Cheers
Aj

*The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. One order of magnitude would be 450 million years old. Two orders of magnitude would be 45 million years old. Three orders of magnitude would be 4.5 million years old. Four orders is 450,000 years. Five orders of magnitude is 45,000 years old. Six orders of magnitude is within the age that Young Earth Creationists believe the Earth to be. Anything more than 1 magnitude off with the age of the Earth and there might be *life* but it would be pretty simple life. Keep in mind that life didn't get started until about 500 million years after the Earth had formed and cooled a bit. Life was then pretty much bacteria until the Cambrian era which was a few billion years later! So the history of life on Earth, in short is first 500 million years, nothing. Then very simple, bacterial and archae life for the next 3.5 billion years. Then the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago and then life becomes var more varied and interesting.