Being that this is a Star Trek post I’ll just add this.
Lt. Cmdr. Data: “Sir, our sensors are showing this to be the absence of everything. It is a void without matter or energy of any kind.”
Commander Riker: “Yet this hole has a form, Data; it has height, width…”
Lt. Cmdr. Data: “Perhaps. Perhaps not, Sir.”
Captain Picard: “That’s hardly a scientific observation, Commander.”
Lt. Cmdr. Data: “Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is, “I do not know”. I do not know what that is, Sir.”
That’s fair. But the idea of approaching the universe from a standpoint of not being able to truly “know” is kind of the basis of all science isn’t it? We can have evidence of something, maybe even enough evidence to make reliable, repeatable predictions in the context of our infinitely short existences, but it will forever and always be transient knowledge. Nothing in the universe is static and unchanging forever.
If we want to define knowing things to an extreme degree of gnostic certainty then yes. I prefer though to approach that by saying that there will always be a certain level of technical uncertainty to what we can say about the universe. Because to me this is an asterisk, not a headline. I would not come at it from the opposite angle and say we cannot know anything. It is a question of where the emphasis is, and I find the OP takes the “we can’t know anything” path for literary effect, which I object to because, as I said above, this creates some real world harm.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, I realized very quickly that I am FULLY out of my depth with this conversation haha. You all are very thoughtful and knowledgeable.
I believe that we can know things. I just don’t believe we can know things objectively. We need a better standard for knowledge than objectivity, because objectivity is worthless.
Being that this is a Star Trek post I’ll just add this.
Lt. Cmdr. Data: “Sir, our sensors are showing this to be the absence of everything. It is a void without matter or energy of any kind.”
Commander Riker: “Yet this hole has a form, Data; it has height, width…”
Lt. Cmdr. Data: “Perhaps. Perhaps not, Sir.”
Captain Picard: “That’s hardly a scientific observation, Commander.”
Lt. Cmdr. Data: “Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is, “I do not know”. I do not know what that is, Sir.”
“I don’t know” is quite different than “no one can ever know anything.”
That’s fair. But the idea of approaching the universe from a standpoint of not being able to truly “know” is kind of the basis of all science isn’t it? We can have evidence of something, maybe even enough evidence to make reliable, repeatable predictions in the context of our infinitely short existences, but it will forever and always be transient knowledge. Nothing in the universe is static and unchanging forever.
If we want to define knowing things to an extreme degree of gnostic certainty then yes. I prefer though to approach that by saying that there will always be a certain level of technical uncertainty to what we can say about the universe. Because to me this is an asterisk, not a headline. I would not come at it from the opposite angle and say we cannot know anything. It is a question of where the emphasis is, and I find the OP takes the “we can’t know anything” path for literary effect, which I object to because, as I said above, this creates some real world harm.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, I realized very quickly that I am FULLY out of my depth with this conversation haha. You all are very thoughtful and knowledgeable.
I believe that we can know things. I just don’t believe we can know things objectively. We need a better standard for knowledge than objectivity, because objectivity is worthless.