[bubblyworld]

The stories do match over time in some domains though. Notably many (but not all) scientific domains, but also in a lot of day-to-day interactions. That's arguably what makes scientific theories so useful.

Not the person you're responding to but for me that's compelling evidence that there is something like an objective reality out there (even if apes can't perceive it clearly).

[mistermann]

They do not match over time (or geography) at the societal/cultural level is what I was getting at - the dominant metaphysical framework of the time/location determines what is "true", and often even what "is".

Also: science can change its story whenever it likes[1], and this is to its benefit (of reputation) rather than its detriment.

Science has the best rhetoric/marketing game in existence imho. Whether it is the best possible remains to be seen.

[1] Christianity did this too with The New Testament, which satisfies those who subscribe to that framework, but it is highly vulnerable to an attack from other ideologies with better game (currently: only science).

[bubblyworld]

Yeah, I agree with you on the truth front. It's a pretty slippery concept, and indeed our best "model" of truth has changed many times, even in realms like mathematics where you'd think that stuff would have been nailed down by now.

But I also think you're making a bit of a map/territory conflation. I think what "is" has nothing to do with human culture - you drop a rock from head height, it's going to hit your foot, and this is "true" (observable maybe a better word) regardless of who you are (and more importantly, regardless of what you claim!). This is what I meant by the stories matching over time in some domains.

The ontological claims (the "map") change all the time in science, as they must! But I don't think reality (the "territory") does, in the same way that the ocean doesn't manifest dragons if I draw one on a seafaring chart.

Completely agree that science may not be the best epistemic theory possible. In fact, I'd stick my neck out and say that the scientific habit of reductionism seems to be floundering for things like complex biological systems (brains/ecologies/controversially even consciousness?) and maybe even understanding machine learning models. Perhaps we'll see some interesting developments in the next few decades =)

[mistermann]

> I think what "is" has nothing to do with human culture - you drop a rock from head height, it's going to hit your foot, and this is "true" (observable maybe a better word) regardless of who you are (and more importantly, regardless of what you claim!). This is what I meant by the stories matching over time in some domains.

Right....but:

- what is that has nothing to do with human culture (or consciousness, or the machines we build) is only a subset of the larger set of what is

- quite often, humans drop rocks and other things onto the heads of other humans - religion has always got a lot of blame for this phenomenon, but a lesser known fact is that science plays a massive role in it as well: giving us the technology to do it in ever more powerful and affordable ways

> This is what I meant by the stories matching over time in some domains.

Some stories match, some do not. Religion also has plenty of each.

> But I don't think reality (the "territory") does, in the same way that the ocean doesn't manifest dragons if I draw one on a seafaring chart.

Dragons may not exist in The Universe, but that doesn't mean they can't can exist in reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds

If you don't believe me, go do a survey of the general public about things that "don't exist" and see what kind of results you get. For bonus results, try disagreeing with some people and see how that goes over.

> Completely agree that science may not be the best epistemic theory possible.

You and I are members of an exclusive group!

> that the scientific habit of reductionism seems to be floundering for things like complex biological systems (brains/ecologies/controversially even consciousness?) and maybe even understanding machine learning models.

Also: Reality.

> Perhaps we'll see some interesting developments in the next few decades =)

Yes...perhaps we will!

[bubblyworld]

Ah, I think I'm starting to see where you're coming from. I'm using "reality" in the pretty narrow sense of the physical universe (Popper's world 1?), which I guess is actually quite hypocritical given that I'm also attacking the common (semi-religious) belief that everything can be reduced scientifically to fundamental physical interactions.

Ideas seem to have a dynamics of their own, and I'm pretty open-minded to the possibility that things which exist in the collective human mental substrate (world 2?) can exert causal influence of their own, in a certain sense, on world 1. In a way that maybe can't be reduced to physical interaction in any kind of useful predictive fashion?

I don't have the language to think about those concepts clearly right now!

You've left me with lots to ponder, thanks =) it's actually very cool to see Popper himself talking about the metaphysics of this stuff. Some of my physics friends would probably be a bit shocked by that...

[mistermann]

Popper's three worlds is one of my favorites to lay on science fans, because they typically love them some Popper, and an enemy in their own ranks is just too good to go to waste!! :)

[llamaimperative]

Yeah this comment also points to William James and the rest of the Pragmatists. Something is true if and only if it is useful. Our good scientific theories are good specifically and solely because they're useful to us -- their actual underlying truth is not only indiscernible outside of the context of validating useful claims, but any such concept of "underlying truth" (below/separately from what's useful) doesn't even have meaning.

[mistermann]

> Our good scientific theories are good specifically and solely because they're useful to us

Watch out for how you're calculating utility though (or, if you are not actually calculating it and this fact isn't even on your radar).

> but any such concept of "underlying truth" (below/separately from what's useful) doesn't even have meaning

Watch out for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_(psychology)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

[bubblyworld]

You know this already, I think, but a pretty widely-used metric of utility in science is whether or not:

a) a theory makes predictions that match the results of a set of prescribed experiments

b) those results are reproducible by unrelated third parties following the same experimental guidelines

For some theories like EM we're at the point where the body of known experiments and predictions is so vast, and so many edge-cases have been probed, that we basically expect the results to generalise to the known universe.

But yeah, there's a long tail of science with a much weaker claim to "truth" or utility than this. I agree with you (I think? might have misunderstood you) that it starts to become more of a cultural or social phenomenon in these cases.

[mistermann]

> it starts to become more of a cultural or social phenomenon in these cases.

Very much part of my concern. And within that there is the phenomenon whereby the harm science causes (say, global warming") somehow doesn't count. Only the end users of the things science brought into existence bear any burden of responsibility.