Quote from: TheBlueEyedBitcoinDragon on July 26, 2015, 08:59:46 PM

Quote from: the joint on July 26, 2015, 07:36:21 PM

You do understand, however, that Science conducted upon observation carries assumptions that are empirically unfalsifiable, right? It must, by definition, take for granted the assumption that observation has no causal effect on that which is observed. There is precisely zero evidence for this assumption.
In other words, there is a total lack of evidence to support the entire methodology of empirical exploration.

I'd like to come in and comment about that. You point out a very interesting issue with an empirical philosophy. We must assume that our senses are reasonably reliable and that what our senses "show" to us is the reality around us. The brain in a jar problem comes up (the matrix, etc). I take this issue to be irrelevant to the validity of empirical research (science), because of a pragmatic stance. Does it work? It seems to. It got us fast transportation, it got us off the ground in planes and spaceships ^{To the moon! ┗(°0°)┛} . We have computers and TVs that work on principles found by doing empirical research.
Now, that doesn't solve the problem. I might still be a brain in a jar being fed electric stimuli to emulate the feeling of typing up a response to a comment, or we might be in a matrix-like network (for whatever reason), or our senses are fooling us all in some odd way that makes certain real things seem like something else under our perception of them. I don't think that problem has a solution. I don't think it necessitates God to come solve it, I don't think God solves that particular problem.
Maybe God can bypass our senses and reveal things to us directly into our consciousness... but how do we know them to be true? How do we know them to be accurate? We take God's word for it? You might say God is the source of all good, the moral law giver... but I'm sure fucking with our perception of reality could be done to spare people pain and suffering, perhaps even death. Who are you to say that God doesn't make us all think we're mortal, when in fact God grants immortality to all, removing people from earth at time of "death" and sending them off to a heaven/hell/purgatory/etc that exists within this universe?

I don't think god solves the problem because we could never know for certain whether God was fucking with our perception of reality (if this is reality, and not some God-created simulation to temporarily place us in) to serve a good our minds can't even begin to comprehend. That's just what I think. And at the end of the day, our senses seem to be the only things to guide us in this universe, be it a simulation, hallucination or something completely different.

Empiricism works because we can defer to the rules of sound inference as they pertain to inductive reasoning. We simply must blare this inductive limit at all times -- it is precisely because this limit exists that empirical conclusions carry a margin-of-error.

While empirical conclusions carry a margin-of-error, knowledge of the inductive limit itself does not -- we know this at a 100% level of confidence.

We can know things logically at a 100% level of confidence because logic is self-referential, i.e. logic validates itself. This is why logical consistency is recognized as the trump card in theory-making. Because any theory of anything must be consistent in a logical way in order to be true, knowledge of this self-referential property of logic, and its structure, serves as a root of all conceptual understanding -- it is a limit of theorization itself. Utilizing this limit, if we can evoke categorical relationships between this limit and objectively real content, then we've devised a logical way of forming tautologies at the height of generality. This is the next step in scientific understanding.