> Science is provisional. In my opinion we should always approach it with humility. What I am seeing more and more is people who somehow feel elevated by science to be better than their peers.
You seem to be making an odd distinction here. I find the idea that humans are easily fooled and one shouldn't believe things until you have evidence, rigorously checked by other people and with techniques based on hundreds of years of experience in how human beings fool themselves and get things wrong, to be very humble.
I don't see more and more people feeling elevated by science and becoming condescending or superior. I do see people get that way when the idea of evidence is casually dismissed because of some gut feeling. That condescending response isn't helpful and doesn't do the scientific or intellectual community any good but it's because of the incredible arrogance behind the cavalier dismissal of all that experience in searching for what's true.
> Science is provisional
That's quite the statement. Scientific findings are provisional. At this point, it's really hard to argue that science itself is. The idea that one is most likely to be right if they don't believe things without evidence and the enormous philosophical machine humanity has built that turns hard work into facts isn't provisional. It's the only thing we've ever discovered or built that works.
As to the simulated universe: What if the universe where the beings who simulate our universe is also simulated in another 3rd universe, and that one in a 4th universe and so on up until you get to 7. Then it stops.
That's just as likely as 2 nested universes or that the universe is the dream of giant inter-dimensional turtle or that your own mind is the only thing that exists and the rest of the universe is a hallucination.
All these things are possible, and impossible to be disproved, but even if they are true, science is still the only working method for figuring out what the rules are to the simulation/dream/hallucination. So go ahead and believe we are in the matrix, I will still have the same simulated contempt for other simulated people who decide that thousands of years of work by human beings attempting to learn about the matrix is worth the same as what they "feel" should be true. That's incredible arrogance.
You seem to be making an odd distinction here. I find the idea that humans are easily fooled and one shouldn't believe things until you have evidence, rigorously checked by other people and with techniques based on hundreds of years of experience in how human beings fool themselves and get things wrong, to be very humble.
I don't see more and more people feeling elevated by science and becoming condescending or superior. I do see people get that way when the idea of evidence is casually dismissed because of some gut feeling. That condescending response isn't helpful and doesn't do the scientific or intellectual community any good but it's because of the incredible arrogance behind the cavalier dismissal of all that experience in searching for what's true.
> Science is provisional
That's quite the statement. Scientific findings are provisional. At this point, it's really hard to argue that science itself is. The idea that one is most likely to be right if they don't believe things without evidence and the enormous philosophical machine humanity has built that turns hard work into facts isn't provisional. It's the only thing we've ever discovered or built that works.
As to the simulated universe: What if the universe where the beings who simulate our universe is also simulated in another 3rd universe, and that one in a 4th universe and so on up until you get to 7. Then it stops.
That's just as likely as 2 nested universes or that the universe is the dream of giant inter-dimensional turtle or that your own mind is the only thing that exists and the rest of the universe is a hallucination.
All these things are possible, and impossible to be disproved, but even if they are true, science is still the only working method for figuring out what the rules are to the simulation/dream/hallucination. So go ahead and believe we are in the matrix, I will still have the same simulated contempt for other simulated people who decide that thousands of years of work by human beings attempting to learn about the matrix is worth the same as what they "feel" should be true. That's incredible arrogance.