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Tim,
I'm somewhat puzzled... how did we get from "scientifically
proving the existence of" something unperceivable to what you have
below:
Tim Gwinn wrote:
Going back to the
original thread, if we take the hypothesis that there is
an unperceivable
primary structure and unperceivable conformation which is
causally
responsible for phenomena, and we build a formal representation of
that
primary structure and conformation, then I think that we have created
a
metaphor, not a model. Because they are both unperceivable, there is no
way
to do any encoding from the primary structure or conformation to the
formal
side of the modeling relation. Thus, we do not have a commuting
modeling
relation, and our formal representation is not a model, but a
metaphor. How
does that sound?
Once you know something exists , you can study it further to
try and learn the hows and whys of it. Why would you need to model it from the
start? Clearly, if you don't know enough about a system to model it in any
useful way, you would have to keep working to learn more about it,
right?
As I
understand it, you were proposing that something which we cannot perceive
(primary structure + conformation) exists. I don't know what it
means to say we know something exists other than to
have observables of that something in a commuting modeling relation with a
model of that something. Outside of that, as has happened in science many
times, we might have phenomena whose behaviors suggests that
there is some unknown causal factor at work. We may hypothesize that the
unknown causal factor is some particular thing called "X", for example. But I do
not think science can or wants to say "we know X exists" until we have that
commuting modeling relation.
But I find it hard to believe that you won't accept the
notion that it is possible to prove, indirectly but scientifically, the
existence of something that is beyond our current abilities to perceive
directly. Am I misunderstanding your point of view?
I think
this kind of indirect "proof" is in large part responsible for the
morass of confusions and interpretations known as quantum mechanics. We draw
inferences from experiments and create formalisms that can predict behaviors,
but if and how we can impute the elements and entailment
structures in those formalisms back to material reality is, to
me, an open question in quantum mechanics.
Regards,
Tim
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