Quote:
Originally posted by djmcmath
I was following you real good for a while, then you lost me with this one. I'd say that more accurately our understanding of truth is fluid, subjective, etc. For example, the earth has always been round, but we have only recently come to understand that.
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It seems to run even deeper than that. Basically, what Isaac Newton called physical "laws," Einstein later demonstrated are not laws at all but "conventions." He noted that there is no requirement that nature follow Newton's laws. Instead, we call them laws because we think we notice that they are never disobeyed by nature. Well, Einstein and the rest of the quantum physics community discovered otherwise. Sure, nature seems to follow Newtonian physics, but nature also occasional disobey's those "laws." This was somewhat of a surprize to the scientific community, and beyond. To some degree, the dynamic social environment you live in has even been affected by this finding.
As a second example, quantum physics also noticed that truth is subjective. That the results of an experiment actually depend on the specific point of view of the observer. An observer in one location will see one result, another observer to the same phenomenon will see a different result, and the two results cannot be different. But they are.
Then there's what's called the "uncertainty principle" which basically states that there is no actual facts in science. That the length of a rod, under completely controlled conditions, using tools that are incapable of error, will be different each time you measure it. Not because of expansion/contraction. But because the rod does not have a single length. It has a distribution of lengths it will show you.
So yeah. I'd argue, and the scientific community seems settled on this one, that the whole concept of "fact" and "truth" is not so reliable or objective as we thought prior to the 20th century.
So again, the way you can tell who is objective from who is not, who is FOS versus who is providing reliable information, is by whether they seem to think they are certain of stuff. The nimrods are certain of their conclusions. The folks who are objective and reliable are the ones still asking questions. At least, that's how I tell them apart on a daily basis, and it seems to work.