Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 7:18 pm
Yeah, I do, actually.
As per your own admission. You only "understand" it 99.5%.
What a shame in those 0.5% you made an error.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 7:18 pm
It's not Relativism, because the "measure" is fixed by a general human standard, not by the individual.
"General human standard" is an appeal to authority.
Whatever the average/median human standard is - my standards are higher.
I am in the risk/harm game. I can't afford errors.
Those in the story-telling game can afford errors.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 7:18 pm
I did define it, actually: it was in my last message. And you just agreed to it above.
I agreed to your definition, not to your bar for sufficiency. Your standards are piss-poor. 0.5% margin for error. means 1 error in 199 attempts.
In my field of work this results in 4 million errors a day.
Such mediocrity is intolerable.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 7:18 pm
No problem. Specify your confidence range.
It's a function of ethics. No harm. Not going into that rabbit hole..
If 0.5% certainty results in 4 million errors and I expect zero errors - do the math yourself.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 7:18 pm
Actually, that's not true: "a theory that explains everything," by definition "explains everything."
Your mind is trapped in a silly language-game. Focus. A theory that explains everything conveys zero bits of information.
What's 1 bit? The
CORRECT answer to a yes/no question.
So let me give you a hypothesis: people don't care about truth. People care about information.
If your theory answers "God did it" to all possible questions, it's less useful in practice than toilet paper.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 7:18 pm
But I'm not offering one of those. What I'm offering is not a theory, and does not propose to cover every possible question that could come later.
If you choose "God did it" as First Cause, unfortunately "God did it" is an answer to every question that has been or will ever come.
Every question EXCEPT: Where did God come from.
That's the lunacy of the "origin" question. If you explain everything - you've explained nothing.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 7:18 pm
Rather, it's a mathematical-logical demonstration of what must necessarily follow if certain obvious facts are as we observe them; and they are facts of such a kind that we can only doubt them by doubting the very possibility of science itself.
All of your "facts" about the beginning of the universe are untestable AND unfalsifiable.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 7:18 pm
The need to "test" is only for matters open to empirical experiment, as you say. But I'm not offering an empirical experiment, but a mathematical-logical deduction here.
No! It matters to any an all explanations.
If you bothered to do an undergraduate statistics class you would quickly learn that given a finite set of datapoints, there exist an infinite set of mathematical functions to satisfy them. Translated into Simpleton: finite datasets have infinite explanations.
It's called Curve-fitting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_fitting
And for as long as you keep looking for an "origin", using present-day observations, trying to retro-fit them into past events without the ability to test/falsify any of your hypotheses all those pitfalls of human reasoning stand before you.
So. Good luck with the "origin" story
The way I solved it? Don't care where we come from - where we are going is more important.
Prediction is important. Explanations are not.