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Mission-Editor-4297 t1_j3ac3j4 wrote

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

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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