[njohnson41]

Especially if you assume that the scientific method is always valid--that all true statements can be determined empirically--you can't make statements like "Ultimate Meaning doesn't/does exist". If Ultimate Meaning cannot be defined, it cannot be tested for or measured, so no statements about it can be true or false. The answer to meaning would not be false, but null (or maybe 42).

Just like 42, "atoms and the void" here is just a science-flavored attempt to answer a non-question.

[squidlogic]

Positivism has fallen out of favor precisely because it cannot withstand its own criteria for meaning.

For example, the statement that "all true statements can be determined empirically" is not itself verifiable by empirical means.

[njohnson41]

Fair enough; I'll be a little more precise.

I think the correct way to state it is: "all true statements are either tautologies, or can be determined empirically (with arbitrarily high but not necessarily measure-1 probability)". This statement is itself a tautology, because tautologies are by definition true, and because "determined" implies some method of determination, which if it actually can be used to determine truth, means it can be used empricially. Determination and empiricism are secretly defined in terms of each other, basically. The reason this tautology is worth stating is that it gives a simple criterion for discarding non-questions: questions that have no method of determining whether they are true or false (with arbitrarily high probability), are always non-questions.

[titzer]

Gödel's incompleteness theorem already rules this out for mathematics, so why should we believe it about the universe?

[grenoire]

What if you do do the determination of all true statements empirically? Is that not the empirical way to determine the truth of that all-inclusive statement?

[dragonwriter]

> What if you do do the determination of all true statements empirically?

How would you demonstrate that you have done this? Particularly, how would you demonstrate that there is no true statement which you have not empirically demonstrated?

[rimantas]

But if it cannot be measured it by definition cannot have any effect on reality so can be safely ignored.

[Natsu]

I assume you mean that in the absolute sense, but one also has to realize that "cannot be measured" can also be a measure of our ability to measure things. So you certainly can have real effects that we're simply not able to measure.

And so in that sense, I'm not sure the premise follows, as some of the things we cannot measure are things like the conditions of the early universe, which certainly did effect[1] us.

[1] It affects us too, but I chose that word deliberately

[arthur_pryor]

sorry to ruin the joke if that's what it is, but this is sarcasm, right? (my point being: our instrumentation constantly gets better, and there are things that we can't now measure/might never be able to measure which have a material impact on things we can measure)