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NaimKabir OP t1_j395krh wrote

Reply to comment by Mission-Editor-4297 in Occam’s Deepest Cut: Occam's Razor isn't a guide towards the truth—it *defines* the truth by NaimKabir

That's kind of getting at my thesis: in science, nothing is ever really there. All we have is the ability to falsify statements given some basic statements we make given sensory information.

There are a vast number of statements we can make that would be unfalsified by sense statements: what we call true are the theories and models that have highest potential for falsification. Because of some set theory assumptions I make in the article, the models with the highest potential for falsification are the simplest ones! (Out of a set of as-yet unfalsified theories)

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Mission-Editor-4297 t1_j3ac3j4 wrote

I disagree entirely about the base premise here. Science is all about discovering what is actually there, by eliminating the flaws and biases inherent with our position as conscious observers. The entire premise assume that something IS there that awaits discovery. Newton didn't invent gravity, he just discovered an equation that governed the way it works, and created the name.

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NaimKabir OP t1_j3adb2h wrote

You can disagree with the premise, but this is the philosophy that underlies most of scientific method today.

Science is a series of propositions that happen to be useful. Gravity is a name: we can model in different ways. In one case it's an ever-present force emanating from a mass, in other cases it's a geodesic in spacetime. These are models to put our observations into simple elegant pictures.

Reality is composed only of instances of observations: not theories (and so, not forces, laws, particles, etc.). Theories are just a net we throw over observations to give them a gestalt overall picture: but it's not real, the same way constellations aren't real. It's a picture connecting dots.

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