My question was basically this: Why do you think it is permissable to cause someone so much suffering that they literally kill themselves? The fact that they can kill themselves to remove that suffering doesn't justify causing it does it? — khaled

That's still straw men, are you doing it on purpose or do you not see it? Nowhere did I claim what you're implying I think.

Risking that someone might suffer a lot, while doing our best so that they don't suffer, is not the same as causing someone to suffer a lot. If I do my best to raise a child, and the child is happy, and because of unforeseeable circumstances he/she gets abducted and repeatedly raped and tortured by some monster, and as a result he/she suffers horribly and becomes suicidal, I'm not the cause of that, the monster is the cause. The happiness and the suffering would have been prevented by not having the child, but the suffering alone would have been prevented by identifying that monster beforehand, by understanding what leads people to commit this kind of atrocities, and by taking preventive measures so that people never get to the point that they become monsters.

In my view, people who do that kind of things suffer a lot themselves, it seems most antinatalists have also suffered a lot because of others, because of constant bullying or stuff like that, and in many cases people who have suffered that way either kill themselves, or become chronically depressed (and form the idea that bringing a being into the world is wrong because of the suffering they have experienced), or move on to commit atrocities themselves. If you have suffered a lot because of others, the solution is not that everyone stop having children, it is to understand why others caused you that suffering and what could be done to prevent it. In my view little is done to understand how suffering comes about, our society is immersed in the belief that medication or punishment or imprisonment is the best way to prevent and relieve suffering, but I see it as a really poor model, many people suffer because of others in ways that are socially accepted, and they internalize that suffering until they end up causing suffering to others later on. The suffering an individual causes eventually ripples through the world, but so does the joy that an individual brings. The solution isn't to make humanity go extinct, it is to spread joy and stop spreading suffering. And if you can understand that, maybe you can bring more joy and less suffering to the people who live now and to those who are yet to be born. Whereas spreading antinatalism is spreading your suffering.

I'm going to address some arguments for antinatalism that were mentioned in the beginning of this thread.

I. Keep in mind that no actual person is deprived if not born. However, some actual person will always experience harm if born (the Benatar asymmetry argument). — schopenhauer1

This argument assumes that avoiding harm is more important than having positive experiences, which many don't agree with. Also it doesn't take into account the fact that would-be parents are often deprived and harmed from not having a child.

II. Being born means moving into a constantly deprived state. In other words, prior to birth, there is no actual need for anything, after birth, needs and wants are a constant (Schopenhauer's deprivational theory of suffering). — schopenhauer1

Many people don't see their life as being in "a constantly deprived state", they would rather describe it as full of experiences and feelings, so I don't agree that life is being in a constantly deprived state.

III. Life presents challenges to overcome and burdens to deal with. When putting a new person into the world, you are creating a situation where they now HAVE TO deal with the challenges and burdens. It does not matter the extent or kind of adversity, the fact that a parent forced a new person to deal with challenges and burdens of life in the first place, is not good. Forcing something to play a game that cannot be escaped, or to burden someone with tasks that cannot be escaped, including enduring one's daily life challenges, is not right, no matter how much people later "accept" or "identify with" the game they were forced into (i.e. the "common man's view" used so much to counter the antinatalists "extremism"). — schopenhauer1

Whether a particular experience is seen as a "challenge to overcome" or a "burden to deal with" is subjective. When you enjoy what you do, you don't see it as a challenge or a burden, it's when you don't enjoy what you do that you see it that way.

So again, you're focusing on the negative part (the unenjoyed experiences), and not the positive part (the enjoyed experiences). Whether you confer more weight to the negative part is a subjective view, not an objective one.

I could equally make the opposite argument and say that life presents wonders and joy. When putting a new person into the world, you are creating a situation where they will experience wonders and joy, ...

IV. Contingent harm is harm that is situational. You simply do not know how much harms there are in life for a certain person. This creates huge collateral damage that was not meant for the child to endure, but he/she must do it nonetheless. Some people will find the "love of their life" others will be loveless for life. Some will struggle to keep food on the table for themselves, others will become highly successful in a career. Having the capacity for achieving one's happiness, does not mean this will occur for any particular person. In fact, if we are to be really real here, the ones that will be successful with much of what most consider "happiness" are using the ones that will fail at this. Why? One cannot know who will be successful or not prior to birth, so you must take chances with peoples' lives to see the actual outcomes. — schopenhauer1

Again, you don't know how much wonder and joy there will be in life for a certain person. I think we can agree that a given person can see their life as a net positive or as a net negative. You're not saying why it is more important to avoid a potential net negative than it is to create a potential net positive. Especially if the parents believe that they can give a happy life to their child.

This is not to say that people should have as many babies as possible, if the would-be parents feel like they couldn't take care of one or couldn't make him/her happy then better not to have one.

V. We are used as "technology/progress" advancers by a circular-production system. We rely on the productive forces to make stuff, and are forced into a system where we are constantly producing and forcing others to produce with our consumption. Once this system subsumes everything, there is no escaping being a part of its productive forces. We try to "self-help" people into accepting a "job that you like!!" so that this seems less painful, but we are just extensions of the machines we create. Plastics, chemicals, metals, materials of all kinds, mining, transportation, engine-building, building-building, any damn product in the world, manufacturing, utilities, engineering, etc. etc. — schopenhauer1

Yes this is a problem, but it's separate from antinatalism. We are educated to become efficient cogs in a great industrial machine that progressively destroys nature and other species and cultures, and that's a huge problem, and a source of great suffering. Does that mean that to solve this problem the whole of humanity has to be thrown away and go extinct? No, some individuals are much more responsible for this state of affairs than others. That's what I see as the important fight, changing course, elevate consciousnesses, make people see this state of affairs and rise against it, against those who are responsible for it, for a great part of the suffering that antinatalists and people around the world experience, that's the important fight, not convincing people that life is fundamentally horrible and that it's better to put an end to it all, because then those who are destroying humanity and the world will have won and we will have lost.

Your definition doesn't say "the un-observable, personal experience of a person's awareness or perception of something." It's perfectly possible to talk about consciousness as an objective fact about a state of mind.

We talk about consciousness of non-human animals and try to determine what types of observable behaviors show us what the animal's internal state is. — T Clark

The problem is that in looking at brain activity or at observable behaviors of a particular being, nothing shows us that this being experiences anything at all, it could be a philosophical zombie for all we know. The huge unknown lies in explaining why these observations imply that the being experiences anything. Assuming right from the start that other beings have a consciousness is explaining away the problem of consciousness.

I'm skeptical, but I'll see if I can track down the references. If you have something more specific, it would be helpful. — T Clark

That's where Dirac said it: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspa.1929.0094

The 1998 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded for the "development of computational methods in chemistry" based on quantum mechanics, and it mentions the Dirac quote without questioning it. Here are some other excerpts from the press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1998/press-release/

computational methods making possible the theoretical study of molecules, their properties and how they act together in chemical reactions. These methods are based on the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics as defined by, among others, the physicist E. Schrödinger.

The laws of quantum mechanics as formulated more than 70 years ago make it theoretically possible to understand and calculate how electrons and atomic nuclei interact to build up matter in all its forms.

Quantum chemistry is today used within all branches of chemistry and molecular physics. As well as producing quantitative information on molecules and their interactions, the theory also affords deeper understanding of molecular processes that cannot be obtained from experiments alone.

It doesn't sound like they're implying that laws in chemistry aren't a consequence of physical laws, rather they're implying that the underlying physical description gives a more detailed picture that cannot be obtained from chemistry experiments alone. They see laws of chemistry as high-level approximations.

Some quotes from other well-known physicists, all Nobel Prize laureates:

Heisenberg: Physics and chemistry have become fused in quantum chemistry (in his book Physics and Beyond)

Feynman: The Schrödinger equation has been one of the great triumphs of physics. By providing the key to the underlying machinery of atomic structure it has given an explanation for atomic spectra, for chemistry, and for the nature of matter. (in The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 3 Ch. 19)

Gell-Mann: I know of no serious scientist who believes that there are special chemical forces that do not arise from underlying physical forces. Although some chemists might not like to put it this way, the upshot is that chemistry is in principle derivable from elementary particle physics. In that sense, we are all reductionists, at least as far as chemistry and physics are concerned. (in his book The Quark and the Jaguar)

Gell-Mann goes on to say: A science at a given level encompasses the laws of a less fundamental science at a level above. The laws of elementary particle physics are valid for all matter, throughout the universe, under all conditions.

and

What about the relation to physics and chemistry of another level in the hierarchy, that of biology? Are there today, as there used to be in past centuries, serious scientists who believe that there are special “vital forces" in biology that are not physico-chemical in origin? There must be very few, if any. Virtually all of us are convinced that life depends in principle on the laws of physics and chemistry, just as the laws of chemistry arise from those of physics, and in that sense we are again reductionists of a sort.

and

Complex adaptive systems on Earth give rise to several levels of science that lie “above” biology. One of the most important is the psychology of animals, and especially of the animal with the most complex psychology, the human being. Here again, it must be a rare contemporary scientist who believes that there exist special “mental forces” that are not biological, and ultimately physicochemical, in nature. Again, virtually all of us are, in this sense, reductionists.

Biology is not predictable using chemistry and physics. It's not a short cut, it's the only way we can know the principles of higher levels of organization - by observing them directly. Reductionism doesn't work. It doesn't reflect reality. — T Clark

Gell-mann does say "The science of biology is very much more complex than fundamental physics because so many of the regularities of terrestrial biology arise from chance events as well as from the fundamental laws", but these "chance events" are the only thing he sees as preventing the prediction of the specific life forms here on Earth from chemistry and physics.

When Nobel laureates in physics all tell a similar story, it's no wonder that the reductionist view is the widespread one in physics.

Now after doing some looking up I have to admit that the non-reductionist view seems a little more widespread than I thought it was, but not among physicists or most scientists, rather among philosophers as Anderson mentioned in the article you linked.

But if you argue against reductionism, you would have to show that the laws at the higher levels are not predictable from the more fundamental laws not because of "chance events" that couldn't have been anticipated (for instance the laws of biology on Earth could have been different if other events had occurred in the past, so the laws of chemistry couldn't have predicted the particular laws of biology that would arise on Earth, but in principle these laws of biology could still be reduced to laws of chemistry). You would have to invoke something other than more fundamental laws and "chance events", something other than "our computers are not yet powerful enough to make more complex simulations", and what is that additional thing?

What is a cell made of besides molecules? Or what are the forces that dictate the behavior of a cell that don't reduce to the forces between the molecules that make up the cell?

The crux of the matter is that if the reductionist view is assumed (as it is by most physicists), then consciousness cannot arise from the more fundamental laws and from chance events, because these chance events are still constrained by the fundamental laws.

And if reductionism is not assumed, then one would have to explain for instance what is it about the behavior of a cell that doesn't depend on the behavior of the molecules that make up the cell, and if we can't describe that in any way then we might as well say something magical is going on, and similarly say that consciousness arises from the brain because something magical is going on.

But there is a way out of this conundrum: to stop assuming that our perceptions allow us to model what we are. Models of what goes on within our perceptions are not models of what gives rise to these perceptions. Then the question of reductionism becomes irrelevant, because then physics and chemistry and biology and neuroscience all together only tell a tiny part of the whole story, they only describe what goes on in one movie some of us are watching.

Of course looking at brain activity associated with conscious experience is "looking at consciousness." Consciousness is something other than personal experience. All mental phenomena are something other than personal experience. — T Clark

Definition of consciousness: a person's awareness or perception of something

So no, looking at brain activity associated with conscious experience is not looking at that conscious experience. That's like saying "of course looking at a fossil associated with a dinosaur is looking at a dinosaur".

Obviously if you define consciousness as brain activity then there seems to be no great unknown about it, it's just a matter of associating observed brain activity with reports of the person whose brain activity is observed. But that's not how consciousness is defined. Just like if you define dark energy as the discrepancy between observations of supernovae and the predictions of the CDM model of cosmology then there is no great unknown about dark energy, it's just a matter of computing that discrepancy from observations of supernovae, but that's not how dark energy is defined.

Although biology must be consistent with the principles of chemistry and physics, it cannot be derived in principle from either or both. It operates on principles and according to "laws" that are not predictable from the laws of physics or chemistry. And so on on up the line. This is what people mean when they talk about "emergence." — T Clark

There are physicists like Dirac who claimed that the whole of chemistry can be derived from the laws of physics: The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.

It seems to be the implicit hypothesis of many physicists, we now have the field of quantum chemistry where computer simulations based on quantum mechanics are run to solve chemical problems. There doesn't seem to be a widespread belief among physicists or even chemists that chemistry is not completely determined by physics, it is simply that equations are not solvable exactly and require computer-intensive simulations to find accurate solutions.

In the same way it is imagined that molecular biology could be derived from chemistry, cellular biology from molecular biology, and so on, but that in practice it is simpler to find laws at a given level than to infer them from the laws of the level below.

Consciousness and other mental experiences are emergent phenomena of biological anatomy and physiology. And that's why it's not a mystery, any more than the emergence of chemistry out of physics is a mystery. It's not magic, it's the way the world works. — T Clark

If you say that laws at a given level emerge but couldn't be derived even in principle from the laws of the lower levels, then what is it that makes them emerge, at what point is the magic infused to make these new laws appear? You're saying we couldn't find a mechanism that would explain how cells behave based on how molecules behave, so what is the additional thing that cells are made of which isn't molecules? If it can't be described in any way then it might as well be magic.

And I've had a hard time understanding how scientists revel in evidence, yet think. Thinking has no evidence. There's no evidence for the empirical method, it was born of thought. "Science" (personifying it here), from a certain persepective is stuck at the level of sensorium. The senses have nothing to say, they're dumb. Any time we have a thought, idealism has entered the domain. Scientists are exceedingly ignorant of this point. The entire enterprise of science lies on a foundation for which there is no evidence because it is idealism. A heavy contradiction to put it mildly.

I oriented in science until realizing it can't address truth. It makes sense for the half of reality which is physical...but to only see half of reality is a chimerical chase...especially when the part of reality closest to each of us is without evidence. — Anthony

Well said.

If you have trouble grasping how the mechanics and electronics of our minds turn into feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, that doesn't have anything to do with consciousness. — T Clark

The scientific tools for looking at it closely are relatively new. — T Clark

How do you look at consciousness closely? Measuring brain activity is not looking at consciousness, it isn't seeing what the person sees or thinks or feels.

If you think biology could be derived in principle from chemistry, and that chemistry could be derived in principle from fundamental physics, then you think biology could be derived in principle from fundamental physics. Fundamental physics claims to describe the fundamental constituents of the universe and how they move, through equations of motion. These equations allow to derive where some particle will be at some point in the future, or what probability there is to detect one in some location, or even how some arrangement of matter is going to move or change, but by construction they can't allow to derive that any arrangement of matter perceives or thinks or feels anything at all.

If we claim the laws of fundamental physics govern the universe, and it's impossible to derive consciousness from these laws, then there's something huge missing in these laws. Essentially these laws only model what's within our perceptions and omit everything else, like feelings, thoughts, and the existence of perception itself. These laws can model how a brain looks like and how it behaves, but they can't say anything about what it experiences, they're only modeling appearances and not the underlying stuff that gives rise to these appearances. The best they'll give is models of brain activity, which boils down to motions of particles like electrons.

Or if you think biology couldn't be derived in principle from fundamental physics and you invoke some emergence to account for the existence of consciousness, then that amounts to invoking magic, to say there is some magical stuff happening that makes a bunch of moving particles become conscious. To say that we don't know yet how consciousness emerges from these particles but one day we'll find out, is just wishful thinking, it's logically impossible without sprinkling magic in the middle. Believing that it's possible is not proof that it's possible, it's just blind faith.

I think you truly have a misconception about what suicidal people go through. Suicide is nothing like "Damn life sucks lemme just go jump off a bridge real quick". I think you are severely underestimating the resolve required to actually commit suicide — khaled

I know very well what suicidal people go through. You're still not addressing what I said, your analogy wasn't suitable.

You say that in order to leave this world, people have to go through extreme suffering, as if to say if they want to leave they can't do it without going through extreme suffering, and that's wrong. If they want to leave, they can do it in painless ways. The thing is that usually it is the people who go through extreme suffering who want to leave, precisely because of that suffering, but they can put an end to it in painless ways, they don't have to cut their wrists for instance. If you don't see why your analogy wasn't appropriate and as such why it doesn't support your argument for antinatalism, then I suppose you aren't willing to have a reasoned discussion on the subject.

"It is not ok to create a being that will be in a constant state of suffering" well no shit sherlock, I never thought someone would consider to set the bar THAT low. And then you say "One baby out of a million is born like that". WHY IS THIS BAR SET SO LOW? So as long as I commit an action that causes less suffering than a genetically engineered baby's suffering it's ok? What would you think if someone forced you to, say, cut a finger off and then said "Oh I'm not doing anything wrong here, at least I'm not forcing him to live with 8 broken limbs, this is totally negligable" — khaled

I have a hard time uncovering your argument through all these appeals to emotion. Do you see appeals to emotion as a valid form of argumentation? Some straw men in there too, bundled with begging the question as you're basically assuming in the first place that having babies is wrong. Why is your bar set so low?

And this: "but then by the same token we should stop doing anything because there is a risk of causing suffering in anything"

sounds bonkers to me. Doing something that risks harming someone else is shunned upon agreed? Yet we do it to survive OURSELVES. The case with antinatalism is extremely different. You can always adopt, so the suffering due to not having a child is just an excuse and instead you spare someone a LIFETIME of suffering. — khaled

If living means that you risk harming others, why don't you kill yourself? Because that would risk harming others too? Then whatever you do you risk harming others. So risking harming others is not a valid argument for antinatalism.

You're assuming that an individual experiences a lifetime of suffering, many people wouldn't describe their life that way, so I disagree that having a child is creating a lifetime of suffering.

If you assume that it's ok to risk harming others as long as we do it to survive, many people would claim that they can't live if they don't have a child, so then it's ok for them to have a child right? There aren't as many children to adopt as there are people who need to have a child.

Also, if existence is a lifetime of suffering according to you, why don't you go around and kill babies? You would spare them a lifetime of suffering, you could even do it in a painless way for them, isn't that the compassionate thing to do according to you? That's how you become a monster.

No because I have to do that to survive. Antinatalism doesn't say "don't do anything that risks harming someone else". It says "Ok guys, I know life sometimes sucks and you have to hurt others to avoid getting hurt yourself but can someone please explain to me what's going on with having kids? You are literally dooming someone to a lifetime they didn't ask for that may or may not be terrible for no good reason whatsoever when you can adopt." Antinatalism is simply the view that the risks of harm associated with coming into existence are astronomically high in comparison to the rewards, which I'm sure everyone would agree with — khaled

You don't have to drive a car or talk to others to survive, you could live in complete isolation to risk harming others as little as possible, only eating plants. If life is as horrible as you say it is, why is it ok in your view to harm others to keep on living a horrible life? Wouldn't you want to make the life of others less horrible? Or you don't really care about other people who are alive now, you only care about people who aren't born yet?

Adoption is not always an option, if more people start doing it it will most often not be an option.

Your view that "the risks of harm associated with coming into existence are astronomically high in comparison to the rewards" is your view, many people do not agree with it, that's why many people are not antinatalists.

Given that we don’t really know what energy IS (only what it does) — Possibility

The concept of energy is problematic when we say that it causes things, or that it is what matter is made of.

If I launch a ball upwards and it decelerates, why do I have to say that it decelerates because its kinetic energy is converted into potential energy, why can't I simply say that I observe it decelerates and I model that through the concept of gravitational acceleration, or through the mathematical concepts of kinetic and potential energy? Energy there appears simply as a concept, a tool of thought, a model of motion or of change, not a cause of motion or of change.

Then if we say that energy is what matter is made of, and we can't say what energy is, then what does it mean to say that matter is made of energy? If we say that energy is the ability to do work, what does it mean to say that matter is made of an ability?

In my view it's only confusing to say that energy causes anything or that it constitutes matter, it gives an illusion of explanation while committing the fallacy of reification.


People like to mention E=mc² as evidence that matter and energy are interchangeable, or that matter is made of energy, or that matter and energy are the same thing, but before making such claims one ought to understand precisely what that equation means and in what context it was formulated, I'm gonna try to explain as succinctly as possible.

First of all the concept of mass m, mass is not defined in isolation, it is a relative property, if we say that some thing has a mass 10 times greater than some other thing, it means that in some experiments the first thing accelerates 10 times less than the other thing, so mass is a measure of how hard it is to accelerate a thing.

E refers to the energy of a photon. They say a photon has energy because it has the ability to cause change, to accelerate electrons, but there again energy is not the cause of that ability, it is a model of that ability, it doesn't say anything more to say that a photon has energy than to say it has the ability to move some other things. The energy of a photon is a measure of its ability to accelerate things.

The easier it is to accelerate a thing, the less that thing has the ability to accelerate other things, and reciprocally (that observation is what allows to define the concept of mass in the first place). So when some object emits a photon, that object loses a tiny bit of its ability to accelerate things, so it becomes a tiny bit easier to accelerate it. That's what E=mc² boils down to, that's even more or less how Einstein put it in his original paper: radiation conveys inertia between the emitting and absorbing bodies (radiation refers to photons).

There is no need to reify energy as some substance that matter is made of, we can simply say that matter is made of things that have abilities, including at least the ability to move other things. When a photon is emitted by a body and absorbed by another, the first body loses some ability that the other gains, but the two emit and absorb photons constantly so it's more like they are constantly interacting. Also we don't have to interpret 'absorption' literally as if the body was absorbing a substance, if we want we can think that the photon is still moving inside the new body in some way.


But the idea that matter is things that interact with one another through their abilities, seems a lot like what you are saying when you say that matter is the interactions of potentiality. I guess we could say that the universe is made of things, things that have abilities, or a potential, that gets actualized through their interaction.

However I'm not sure it makes sense to say that what exists deep down is potentiality or ability, because those are concepts that we ascribe to things. But at the same time if the things we see are already the result of an interaction, then we're not seeing things with a potential, we're already seeing actualized potential, but that has to be the actualized potential of something else, which I guess you could call God or the cosmic consciousness or something.

I think Hume's point was to show the arbitrariness in our propensity to draw generalization. The words "habit" and "custom" are his words. Why does he use those words? What is he trying to convey? — Purple Pond

He says: For wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always say, that this propensity is the effect of Custom

I take it that he refers to things we do without thinking about them, out of repetition. Like tying one's shoes or walking, there is no reasoning that goes into them when we do them, we're not thinking about how to tie our shoes or how to walk, we do them out of "habit" or "custom".

Like we infer generalities from particular instances without thinking that we're doing it, if everytime we observe some object A we observe the object B nearby, then out of repetition the next time we observe object A we assume the object B is nearby, out of "habit" or "custom".

The words "habit" or "custom" are not meant to be a justification of induction, he's just relating our habit of generalizing an observation from previous instances of that observation to our habit of renewing an act from previous instances of that act.

In a sense, when we observe object A, we're renewing the observation of object B even if we haven't actually observed it yet. Like we renew the act of walking because it worked the previous times that we did it, even though in principle it's possible that the ground is going to suddenly disappear or that gravity is going to be suddenly 1000 times stronger, but we act as if the way we walked in the past is still going to work, it's just what we do.

And we act as if the correlations we identified in our past observations will keep being the case. Until we find an instance where the correlation stops working, then we come up with a new habit.

It seems like there's no justification for his conclusion that we all have that propensity. I see no reason to agree with him. — Purple Pond

There is no more justification to his conclusion that we all have that propensity, than there is justification to the conclusion that object B will be there when we observe object A, or that the way we walked in the past will keep working in the future, but we act as if the conclusion is valid until we find a counterexample. Hume couldn't think of anyone who didn't have that propensity, so out of habit he said that we all have that propensity. You don't have to agree with him, but you can make your own observations and reach your conclusions out of your own habits.

I think there two propositions here regarding induction:

1. The use of induction cannot be justified. (Logical claim.)

2. Our use of induction is based on something arbitrary such as a habit, or a custom. (Empirical claim.)

I do agree that first proposition is really a problem. However I don't see how the second one can really be demonstrated. — Purple Pond

I wouldn't say the first proposition is only a logical claim, it is also empirical, if we were omniscient I suppose we could justify induction in some cases. It is our empirical observations showing that some generalizations we made are not always valid even though we thought they were, that lead us to say that we can't know whether a generalization is valid even if we think it is.

Regarding the second proposition, I wouldn't say Hume is attempting to prove that induction is based on something arbitrary. Rather he's using induction to relate induction to what we usually call habit or custom.

Is it a problem to use induction to say that we cannot know whether the generalizations reached through induction are universally and eternally valid? I wouldn't say so. The conclusions he reaches can be taken as temporarily valid until we find a counterexample. Until then, it works, just like tying our shoes or walking works.


Taking a step back, it seems to me your desire to justify induction is the desire to find universal and eternal truths. But does it really matter if we can't find them? What if we can't find them because there is no such thing as "the way the world is", but rather the world changes through us? If we participate in shaping the world through our will, then there are no universal and eternal truths to be found out there, rather if they exist they would be found in here, in us. Such a truth wouldn't be arrived at through induction, but through something else, say a profound feeling. Or it could even be that there is no universal and eternal truth, but you could still hang on to your own truths, your own beliefs, your own habits or customs, which could work long enough for you that you don't have to care whether they aren't eternal outside of you, as long as they are eternal to you.

I would say he draws the generalization from particular instances that people habitually draw generalizations from particular instances. He's just pointing out how we usually call that process, "custom" or "habit". That doesn't mean we can't agree with his observation that this seems to be what people do in general. I don't think he claims that his generalization escapes the problem of induction, though he goes overboard when he says that the principle of custom is "universally acknowledged", but he does say that this principle is just a name we use for the propensity we have to draw inferences from particular instances, he doesn't say this principle is the cause of that propensity.

But even if he were inconsistent on that point and really used induction to conclude that Custom is a universal principle, that wouldn't show that there is no problem of induction, but rather that it's sometimes hard to see the problem, even for Hume!

Obviously I'm not assessing those views from the perspective of someone at the time, otherwise my point wouldn't make any sense. I'm assessing them based on what we now know. The speculation in the opening post is comparable, in a sense. It resembles science, but is off track and weakly supported, if at all. As others have commented, it's based on a fairly common misperception about the meaning of terms and logical implications relating to the observer effect. — S

Well, back then you would have assessed relativity and quantum mechanics based on what we knew then, and you would have said something like "it resembles science, but is off track and weakly supported, if at all". Then it's very possible that ideas that seem to contradict what we know now or that seem absurd now will end up being in the future "what we know". Plenty of times in history people thought they knew better than those before them, and yet some decades or centuries later they were contradicted by other people who thought they knew better, and some decades or centuries later these were contradicted by some other people who thought they knew better, and so on.

Not to say there aren't misconceptions in what the OP said, and surely it doesn't help to use misconceptions in support of a speculative idea, but as a speculative idea I think it is worth exploring, rather than dismissing it right from the start as if we knew better, just because it seems to contradict "what we now know".

A speculative idea sometimes starts as an intuition, we don't really know where it's coming from, it's just floating there, we don't see how we could test it, but maybe if we discuss it and allow it to grow, something that we don't see yet will come out of it. The OP mentioned repeatedly that his mind works best through dialogue, that much of his thought is subconscious and only takes shape through dialogue, that was an invitation to help that idea grow, but instead he was simply met with resistance and with attempts to nip it in the bud. That's why paradigms take time to change, because ideas that contradict the prevalent one are resisted and rejected, instead of being allowed to flourish. A speculative idea is a bit like a flower seed, we have to water it and let it grow if we want to see the flower that it can become.

LSD worked for Steve Jobs. — Noah Te Stroete

Unironically I would give that as the most effective answer to all these questions (especially 9-10), or some other psychedelic like psilocybin. Or rather, attempting to answer these questions oneself while under the influence. I think that would work better than attempting to follow guidelines that were summarized into words. Something to try at least.

To overlook anything but harm to future person at procreational decision would be using child for an agenda. The child did non exist beforehand to even need the XYZ experiences that supposedly make it good for the child to be created in the first place. — schopenhauer1

How about overlooking everything except the suffering the future person might experience, isn't that pushing an agenda?

What is the case however, is ALL harm can be prevented with NO COST to an ACTUAL person. No one would actually exist to be deprived of anything...only the parents imaginary projected vision of loss. — schopenhauer1

Indeed, the parents are actual persons and they would be harmed if they are prevented from having a baby. Note that parents don't see a baby as a toy (most of them anyway), it's not a selfish act, nurturing a baby and raising a child are selfless acts, sacrifices are made so that the child can have the best possible life.

If the parents already thought that their life was unbearable, why would they then proceed to make sacrifices for years and years for another being, why would they move on to have an even more unbearable life just so that another being can have an unbearable life as well? It's rather that they see the beauty in life, they see it as worth it.

I think most antinatalists suffer so much that they would have preferred not to have been born, and they project that feeling onto everyone else, and if others say that they don't have that feeling antinatalists attempt to rationalize it so that it fits into their preconceived world view.

It isn't right that some people suffer unbearably while some others live the good life at their expense, and that's what I see as the kind of problem to solve, rather than preventing people from giving love to their future child and destroying their dreams just so everyone can suffer along with the antinatalists.

So if I hire you to work as a sewage cleaner and make it so that in order to leave you have to cut your own wrists after going through extreme levels of suffering the likes of which you can't imagine and then you're not allowed to take any other job that's fair right?

Suicide isn't easy. If there truely were no obstacles for leaving life/the job I wouldn't be an antinatalist — khaled

I don't agree that it's a suitable analogy, because you don't have to go through extreme levels of suffering in order to leave. You can be fine and leave by jumping off a bridge, or by taking some medication that puts you to sleep and never wakes you up. It's rather that it's usually people who go through extreme levels of suffering who want to leave, those who feel fine usually do not.

1: Idea of consent doesn't apply to people who don't exist yet:
It very much does. Would you say it is ok to genetically modify a baby so that he is constantly in severe suffering? Maybe give birth to him with 9 limbs all of which are broken? After all he didn't object did he? — khaled

That's not ok, but I'm still saying that consent doesn't apply to a being that doesn't exist.

There you're arguing for the idea that it's not ok to create a being who will be in a state of constant severe suffering, that's not the same as arguing for antinatalism, because the vast vast majority of babies aren't born like that.

Maybe you're arguing for the idea that if there is the risk that one baby out of a billion is born like that, then we should stop making babies, but then by the same token we should stop doing anything because there is a risk of causing suffering in anything.

2: Risks wonderful experiences
Agreed. However you have a moral obligation not to risk giving someone negative experiences non consentually while you don't have a moral obligation to risk giving someone positive experiences. Ex: I don't have to donate to charity but I HAVE TO NOT steal money. This is what makes stealing money to donate to charities bad — khaled

Again, you risk giving someone negative experiences non-consensually in anything you do, just by driving your car or talking to someone, so by that logic shouldn't you stop doing anything?

I suppose by "evidential import" he refers to how significant an evidence is.

He's basically saying that when we use a theory to make a prediction, and disseminating that prediction has an influence on whether we end up observing it, then observing that disseminated prediction is not as strong an evidence for the theory than if we observe a prediction whose dissemination had no influence on its subsequent observation.

(a self-fulfilling prophecy is an example of a reflexive prediction, disseminating the prophecy ends up making it happen)

edit: double post

A sample pool of just one is no basis to support such a judgement. — S

I'm not the only one to have claimed that, I do have first-hand experience however. You can use my personal report as a starting point to conduct further inquiry and see whether there is a statistically significant percentage of former materialists who call their former self as narrow-minded, or you can simply dismiss it because you don't like the idea or because you don't care.

There's also a long history of science failures, like flogiston, luminiferous aether, and the geocentric model, as well as a wealth of speculative ideas which failed to even meet the principles behind the scientific method. So what you deliberately characterise negatively with the term "narrow-minded" could actually amount to rightly standing by reasonable principles instead of compromising by lowering the standard. — S

I don't see how that addresses what I said, those "science failures" you mention were widely accepted as facts, as truth in their time, whereas someone who would have discussed ideas of 20th century physics back then would have been seen as fanciful or as a crank. And these "science failures" adhered to the "scientific method" just fine back then.

I would hope that people aren't choosing philosophical stances based on whether they like[/i[] them. — Terrapin Station

I happen to think that's precisely why they choose them. For instance there's something about physicalism that suits you that you don't find in other philosophies. What is it exactly I don't know, that depends on you. You might say it's truth, but you can't prove physicalism is true, so it's something else.

Sometimes it's simply indoctrination, we grow up being taught a physicalist world view and then that's all we can see, when the fear of authority is deeply ingrained we try to rationalize anything that goes against the authority. It can also be the idea that we can find the laws that govern the world, and we find safety in the idea that we know these laws. Or the idea that by knowing these laws we can become the masters of the world. Focusing on the physical has brought cars and the TV and the computer and people enjoy that, so when people focus on what matters to them in their daily life I suppose they're more likely to pick the philosophy that they see as responsible for having brought these things, even though these technologies could also have been created without adhering to physicalism.

I could just as well say that I think that people who believe in the primacy of consciousness over matter are usually more fanciful. I could do this all day. We could just keep on trading characteristics with negative connotations, but it's not productive. It just shows your prejudice. — S

I used to be a materialist, and I see now how narrow-minded I was, so there's that. I don't know of many people who turned materialists later in life, sure there are examples of people who escaped indoctrination from organized religion and who find more peace of mind in materialism, but then these were more looking to escape certain people rather than a philosophy that doesn't see matter as primary.

Also, the ideas of 20th century physics would have been called fanciful by materialists in the centuries before, and they may be called fanciful again in the next centuries, and maybe what you call fanciful now will be seen as reasonable in the future. Looking at the history and philosophy of science can help shatter some deeply-held beliefs, and lead one to be more open-minded.

I sympathize with your position, but you can't really discuss it with materialists because they disagree with your premises, but then you disagree with theirs so it doesn't lead anywhere. Still I think that people who believe in the primacy of consciousness over matter are usually less narrow-minded. But it's hard to show someone narrow-minded that they are narrow-minded, they have to be willing to let go of their convictions, or at least to tentatively entertain different points of view without reacting strongly right from the beginning against what they don't believe in.

Let me help you a little bit here. It could be that this material world we experience is a creation of our collective subconsciousness, and so that it depends on each and everyone of us, and that it is our will that shapes it, rather than unchanging laws that don't depend on us. If you don't like materialism, nothing forces you to believe in it, only some people try to force you (for various reasons that depend on them) but you don't have to let them take over your mind.

There is a positive aspect to every job and a negative aspect, however I think we can both agree that forcing people to work ANY job against their will is wrong. It doesn't matter how good or bad the job is. I have no right to FORCE you to work it. — khaled

I can leave the job if I don't like it. It's not like people who are brought into being are doomed to eternal torture. If they don't like the experience they can just say fuck it and leave the world. I suppose the only case where people are forced to stay is when they're made to believe that if they kill themselves they will spend eternity in hell, but then you could focus on preventing that.

Also I think the idea of consent doesn't apply to people who don't exist yet. If you say risking suffering on someone against their will is bad, people who don't exist don't have a will so you're not doing anything against their will. Also it's not just risking suffering, it's also risking wonderful experiences.

Antinatalism simply pegs all forms of suffering to being born. It is a KNOWN that life contains various amounts and varieties of suffering and negative experiences. All suffering can be prevented with no a ACTUAL person being deprived. Win/win. — schopenhauer1

Life also contains positive experiences. Some people see their life as a net negative, some other people as a net positive.

If you see negative experiences as what has to be eliminated, why don't you kill everyone? That would be more effective. You may convince a few people not to have children, but there are still billions having children.

However if instead of focusing on negative experiences we focus both on negative and positive experiences, the goal could be instead to reduce negative experiences and increase positive experiences, to make life a net positive for most people. And then life would be a net positive as a whole, and that's better than the absence of life.

People agree on what the standards are for facts, such as using a thermostat to measure temperature. — Marchesk

Yea and people used to agree on many facts that are considered today as fantasies. You're saying that facts are decided through consensus, you're defining facts as what people agree on, so under your definition as soon as someone disagrees with a 'fact' then it stops being a fact. Or more likely you're defining facts as what most people agree on, but then under that definition there are plenty of examples of facts that stopped being facts, and there are probably things most people agree on that you don't agree with.

I'm wondering why coercion is a topic in this discussion for you. Are you feeling coerced by participating in a discussion? — Marchesk

The coercion lies for instance in this:

As the saying goes, you're free to have your own opinions, but not your own facts. Meaning that people are going to call you out if you disagree on facts. — Marchesk

Which, by the above, boils down to: you are not free to disagree with the consensus, and people are going to call you out if you do.

Some views are ridiculous, such as the Earth is flat. It contradicts everything we know. People are free to think that way, but they're going to be criticized for holding an ignorant view. — Marchesk

See that's precisely the kind of talk that angers me, because saying "the Earth is flat" is not inconsistent with observations, all it contradicts is people who have agreed with one another that the Earth isn't flat. Calling it an ignorant view is the ignorant view.

"The Earth is flat" cannot be falsified. Just like "The Earth is round" cannot be falsified. If you think scientific theories can be falsified, check the thread "What is a scientific attitude?". Thinking that falsification is what defines science is again an ignorant view.

That the Earth appears round from space does not imply that it is round, whatever observation you can come up with does not imply that the Earth is round, because we don't have to assume that light travels in straight lines in empty space. The usual 'proofs' that the Earth is round rely on the assumption that light travels in straight lines in space.

In a framework where the Earth is flat, observations are interpreted differently, explanations are different, theories are different, but the predictions we make can be as precise as in a framework where the Earth is round. Gravity would be modeled in a way that is not spherically symmetric. We could come up with a mathematical transformation that maps the two points of view. Switching to the point of view where the Earth is round could be seen as a mathematical change of coordinates that allows to make calculations simpler. Simpler doesn't mean more true. Occam's razor is a practical principle.

Individually, you can get away with it to a point, but society needs to agree on facts so bridges can be built and meetings can take place, and that sort of thing. And if you're doing anything with other people and you decide to not agree on something as basic as temperature, you're going to have problems. — Marchesk

As I said, many people already agree on plenty of things, they build bridges and they meet. Some people don't agree that the Earth is round, which you see as a 'fact', that doesn't mean they run into problems, the only problem they have is with people who ridicule them and insult them because they dare disagree with the consensus. We could believe the Earth is flat and still make airplanes fly and send rockets into space, it's just that people who believe the Earth is flat usually don't care about making airplanes fly or sending rockets into space.

Again, when you feel cold, why don't you just say that it's cold and that people who disagree with you hold a ridiculous and ignorant view? Because you listen to people to some extent, you realize that they don't experience the same things that you do, that there are many people who don't feel the way you do regarding "feeling cold". Now if 99.9% of people felt cold when you do, and 0.01% didn't, would you still say that feeling cold varies from individual to individual, or would you say it's a 'fact' that it's cold and the few who disagree hold a ridiculous and ignorant view or are disabled in some way?

Because that's what you're doing with the other things you call 'fact', when most people agree on something and a few disagree, it's easier to ridicule them, to say that they're ignorant, hallucinating or imagining things, than to take their point of view into account. Whereas when many people disagree you can't impose your point of view as easily.

But apparently you're not even really talking about pain and suffering there, but you're talking about "the excruciating pain of humanity as it flies towards extinction"??? — Terrapin Station

I think fundamentally he is talking about the pain he feels when he thinks about the fate of humanity, which he sees as ending in a bleak way.

I was talking about the exruciating pain of humainty as it flies towards extinction be it due to heat death or more likely internal strife. That outcome is inevitable statistically. You can have it now or your children can have it. — khaled

I disagree that that outcome is inevitable. That's one of the reasons why I fight against the lies put forward by scientists, they make the lives of many people worse.

The heat death of the universe is not an inevitable fact, it's a belief. It's not an inevitable fact because we don't know whether our current laws of physics will keep being valid in the future, we don't know whether they apply everywhere in the universe, and we don't know whether they are accurate enough that they allow to predict the fate of the whole universe.

Regarding internal strife, it might feel like we're going that way, but that's not inevitable either. It might become inevitable if we do nothing to change our course.

It may be your kids, but that does not mean that you have a say in what the ruling elite's indoctrination machine will teach them. The populace gave up that right when they implicitly agreed to compulsory schooling schemes in State-run indoctrination factories, to be paid by extracting the money upfront out of the parents' wallets.

The current type of government naturally emerges out of the population's take on what government is supposed to be. If the population believes that the government should have wide-ranging power to coerce other people, that is exactly what will emerge out of the fray.

By catering to the populace's false belief in scientism, the ruling elite successfully manages to transfer even more authority from the family to themselves. — alcontali

Yes, at last we've found something where I wholeheartedly agree with you :)

Facts aren't opinions, so yes. You haven't really thought out the implications of the radical relativism you're advocating, and how it would make life impossible. — Marchesk

And who says what the facts are? You?

It wouldn't make life impossible, many people agree on plenty of things even when they aren't coerced to do so. I'm not even advocating that people should believe everything is relative, but that it isn't fine to coerce others to agree with us, or to dismiss them as irrelevant if they don't agree with us. In my view it's precisely that coercion that makes life harder for many, not the lack of it.

Then a common criticism is that if everything is relative then to some individuals it might be a good thing to kill people, but that's already the case, some people see it as a good thing to kill others despite the best attempts to impose it as a fact that it's a bad thing. Whereas seeing things as relative doesn't mean I want to go and kill people, I can believe other people have different points of view without believing personally that it's fine to kill people.

Another common criticism is to say that "everything is relative" is self-contradictory, but it's not because "everything is relative" is relative too since in the view of many people not everything is relative.

And again I'm not forcing anyone to agree that everything is relative, but I don't want to be forced to agree that some things are objective for everyone, because in my view that's not the case, and I don't like to see people having their views dismissed or ridiculed simply because they don't agree with the consensus.

Another possible criticism: if some individual wants to coerce others, and I believe it isn't fine to coerce others, then it seems either I let it happen or I coerce him to stop and contradict myself? But there is another way, in my view it's possible to persuade people without coercing them. Otherwise our fear of monsters makes us become the monsters.

So I don't see that view as inconsistent nor how living by that view makes life impossible, on the contrary.

Nobody seriously disagrees over a thermometer. — Marchesk

People who are blind and don't believe what you tell them, and people who can't read a thermometer and can't learn to read one can seriously disagree with you over a thermometer and what it says.

"Nobody seriously disagrees over ..." is the kind of justification people use to impose their world view onto others. If you silence or dismiss all those who disagree, sure you'll only be left with people who agree with you. But you feel justified in silencing or dismissing them, because you are right and they are wrong, right?

Consider the implications for engineering or even meeting people at a certain time and location if we can't agree on facts.

Everything is relative to the individual is insanity. We wouldn't even be able to communicate. — Marchesk

As I said, you believe that feeling cold is relative, does that imply that no one agrees it's cold? No. Plenty of people agree on plenty of things.

You have noticed that not everyone agrees on some things. You can go a step further and notice that there is seemingly nothing everyone agrees on, including that statement. Maybe you could kill everyone who disagrees with you and your buddies, and then you would get a world where there are things everyone agrees on.

Someone can tell you the temperature. — Marchesk

Someone can tell you it's cold or hot too, that doesn't mean you will agree.

When you learn to read it, you will get the same value as the rest of us. — Marchesk

What if I can't learn to read it? What you're saying boils down to: if you learn to agree with us, then you'll agree with us.

Because all humans can feel cold or hot at different times. — Marchesk

No, there are some people who can't feel temperature.

Because we can agree on the thermometer. It gives us an objective standard. — Marchesk

As I mentioned, some people don't agree on the thermometer.

Sure you can do that, if you don't mind everything being relative, and there being no facts anyone agrees on. — Marchesk

You say feeling cold is relative, does that imply no one agrees that it's cold? No. Some people agree with one another.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will be disagreeing with you. — Marchesk

There are some people who agree with me.

the thermometer gives us the same value — Marchesk

the thermometer says it's the same temperature — Marchesk

Actually I would even doubt that. What if I'm blind, or I can't read numbers, or I can't understand how to read a thermometer? You may brush it off as me being disabled or stupid, and say that for any abled and sensible person, the thermometer gives the same value. But then why can't I just say that if you don't feel cold when I feel cold it's because you're disabled or stupid? Why do we have to agree that feeling cold is relative and not that what the thermometer says to us is relative?

I would argue that even what a thermometer says or what we call a horse is relative. And then we don't need to force a subjective-objective divide.

They are trying to do that, but this approach has not succeeded until now. — alcontali

That's not the point. The point is in their view the existence of dark matter particles is a fact, not a hypothesis. What's a hypothesis in their view is what kind of particles dark matter is made of, what are the properties of these particles. You kept saying they see the existence of dark matter as a hypothesis, that's wrong.

And, again, their concluding that dark matter exists from observations they've made is the same as other people concluding that God exists because they believe God created the world.

When scientists say that they can infer from observations that dark matter exists but not that God exists, that's a double standard. They push the existence of dark matter as a fact, and the existence of God as unknowable or false. In other words they push the existence of dark matter as more certain than the existence of God. That's not a conclusion that follows from observations, they are simply pushing their belief as fact.

When scientists say what the universe is made of, they're not providing a world view that is more certain or more probable than others. Yet that world view is taught in schools as if it was fact, as if it was more certain than other world views. Science has become the religion of the modern age.

The term "verify" is common language, and therefore, highly ambiguous. In my opinion, it is not suitable as a technical term. — alcontali

I don't see how it is ambiguous, the common language is the common dictionary definition: make sure or demonstrate that (something) is true. We never make sure that theories are true.

Outside the very narrow context of verificationism — alcontali

That's not a very narrow context, that's a context in which theories evolved for centuries, and even today many scientists still believe they can verify theories.

it means probabilistic sampling for counterexamples, with no pretension that it would constitute full or fail-safe proof. Therefore, "experimentally testing" is a suitable synonym for "verifying" in the context of falsificationism. — alcontali

You're making up your own definitions as you go. In the context of falsificationism, experimentally testing that a theory's prediction matches an observation precisely does not verify the theory in any way, nor does testing where the theory doesn't match observations. If you keep going like this you're gonna end up saying that verification is a suitable synonym for falsification.

Also, even if you test a theory a million times, you can't even say that it is probably true, because you don't know how probable it is that it's not going to suddenly stop working tomorrow.

If you still think that we can know that a theory is probably true you're failing to see the problem with falsificationism. It is precisely because a theory can always be saved from falsification (by invoking unseen phenomena) that we can always explain a given set of observations or experimental tests in terms of many different theories.

Regarding the motion of stars in galaxies, we can say they move that way because of dark matter, or because gravitation is not suitably described by general relativity, or because we have the illusion they move that way because their redshift is not due to their velocity, or because God is choosing to make them move that way, or because we live in a simulation and its programmers want to mess with our observations, or because space is folded in such a way that it makes them seem move that way, or because they are not stars in galaxies but lights in the sky, or because it's an optical illusion, or because we are hallucinating, or because ...

All these theories can be made consistent with observations, so we can't say any of them is probably true. Observations cannot verify these theories and they cannot falsify them either. People simply pick a framework they like and attempt to fit observations into that framework. Saying that one framework is more true than others is a belief, not an inference from observations.

As such, the problem of determining the identity of dark matter has largely shifted to the fields of astroparticle and particle physics. In this talk, I will review the current status of the search for the nature of dark matter

"Dark Matter" means "calculated excess amount of gravitation in current model of universe". This calculated excess "exists" in a sense that you can observe total gravitation and calculate the excess part. — alcontali

No it does not in the mind of most scientists working on that subject, by dark matter they mean matter, as in something made of particles, I mean for god's sake just look at the quote you posted right above, they're talking about identifying dark matter through particle physics, that means matter, why do you keep pushing your own flawed interpretation of what they say?

Wikipedia does not contain original research. It is supposed to only refer to externally-published research. Do you have any reason to believe that they are guilty of original research concerning dark matter? — alcontali

Wikipedia articles are not only made of quotes from externally-published research. People who edit the articles paraphrase what they've read, they add their own interpretation, they decide what information to include and how that information is presented, Wikipedia articles are not neutral reports of original research written by researchers.

Now regarding the article concerning dark matter, it directly contradicts your position: the existence of dark matter is generally accepted by the scientific community. By that they mean the existence of matter, not the mere existence of a "calculated excess amount of gravitation". How long are you gonna keep digging that hole? When they say matter they mean matter.

A controlled science experiment is setup to test whether a variable has a direct causal relationship on another.

Identify your independent and dependent variables. The independent variable is commonly known as the cause, while the dependent variable is the effect. For example, in the statement A causes B, A is the independent variable and B is the dependent. A controlled scientific experiment can only measure one variable at a time. If more than one variable is manipulated, it is impossible to say for certain which caused the end result and the experiment is invalidated. — alcontali

I asked you for a reputable source showing that if the 'input' of a test cannot be chosen freely then that test isn't an experiment (which is what you claimed).

That "sciencing.com" website is a reputable source how? The article you linked was written by an anonymous contributor on a non-reputable website, and then you argue that articles written by practicing physicists on Scientific American and on the NASA website are not reputable sources?

Then that passage you quoted doesn't imply in any way that "if we can't freely choose the input of a test then that test isn't an experiment".

I think I actually made it clear what my possibly original idea is: to only consider theories backed by controlled experiments only, and no longer consider mere predictive modelling, to be science. — alcontali

Yes, which is applying your own criterion defining what is science and what isn't science.

Now, I agree in principle that experiments where all variables except one are controlled give more robust tests than experiments where a bunch of variables change simultaneously, because indeed given enough variables we can always find spurious correlations that wouldn't be there in other situations.

But the fundamental problem with this criterion is that you're never controlling all variables except one, and you cannot know that you're controlling all variables except one, so there is no strictly controlled experiment, and then your criterion is not precise but fuzzy. Who gets to decide whether an experiment is controlled enough to be considered as a "controlled experiment"?

For instance you were claiming that based on this criterion Newton's theory of gravitation would not be scientific because you can't control planets individually, but that the theory according to which mixing vinegar and baking soda gives rise to sodium acetate would be scientific. But by your criterion that latter theory isn't scientific either, because there will always be some variables that weren't controlled in that experiment: the time of day or year, the temperature or pressure surrounding the mix, the molecular composition of the surrounding air, the gravity in the frame of the laboratory, the electric charge of the vinegar or baking soda, the volumes of vinegar and baking soda, the surroundings of the laboratory, the instruments and tests that determined that the ingredients are vinegar and baking soda, ...

Even if you control some of these you can't control them all, you're making assumptions as to what requires control and what does not, what is a possibly dependent variable and what isn't, which in the end amounts to deciding whether a theory is scientific not based on your criterion but based on your own assumptions and beliefs and desires.

I do not believe that anybody else has ever looked into the matter. — alcontali

Plenty of people over the centuries have looked into finding criteria that would distinguish science from non-science, but these criteria always fail in some way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem

The only criterion that seems to always apply is that people do not classify something as science based on a precise objective criterion but based on their own assumptions/beliefs/desires. This implies that 'science' doesn't have a position of authority in itself, it's only people who attempt to confer a position of authority to ideas that suit them by calling them 'scientific'.

The full quote is:

Popper regarded scientific hypotheses to be unverifiable, as well as not "confirmable" under Carnap's thesis. — alcontali

You're misinterpreting that quote, it says two different things. The first thing is that Popper regarded scientific hypotheses as unverifiable. The second thing is that Popper regarded scientific hypotheses as not confirmable (in the sense of confirmation that Carnap introduced).

Types of verification
Ayer distinguishes between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ verification, noting that there is a limit to how conclusively a proposition can be verified. ‘Strong’ (fully conclusive) verification is not possible for any empirical proposition, because the validity of any proposition always depends upon further experience. ‘Weak’ (probable) verification, on the other hand, is possible for any empirical proposition.

To verify under Carnap's thesis means 'strong' verification, which means 'proof' in proof theory, while 'weak' verification means experimental testing. — alcontali

That's again your own flawed interpretation, nowhere it says that "Carnap's thesis" has anything to do with Ayer's 'strong' and 'weak' verifications.

Besides, here is what that Wikipedia article on Ayer's book says: Ayer himself later rejected much of his own work. Fifty years after he wrote his book, he said: 'Logical positivism died a long time ago. I don’t think much of Language, Truth and Logic is true ... it is full of mistakes.'

In 1936, Carnap sought a switch from verification to confirmation. Carnap's confirmability criterion (confirmationism) would not require conclusive verification (thus accommodating for universal generalizations) but allow for partial testability to establish "degrees of confirmation" on a probabilistic basis. Carnap never succeeded in formalizing his thesis despite employing abundant logical and mathematical tools for this purpose. In all of Carnap's formulations, a universal law's degree of confirmation is zero.

In the context of verificationism, it is needed to clarify if "to verify" is meant as "strong" or "weak". — alcontali

No, look at what that very quote says. Even if you were to associate Carnap's confirmation criterion with Ayer's weak verification (probable verification), the quote says: In all of Carnap's formulations, a universal law's degree of confirmation is zero, and that degrees of confirmation are established on a probabilistic basis, which implies that a universal law is not even verified in the 'weak' sense. In the 'strong' sense we can't say that a universal law is conclusively verified, and in the 'weak' sense we can't even say that it is probably verified.

Verificationism has been replaced a long time ago by falsificationism:

Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery proposed falsificationism as a criterion under which scientific hypothesis would be tenable. Falsificationism would allow hypotheses expressed as universal generalizations, such as "all swans are white", to be provisionally true until falsified by evidence, in contrast to verificationism under which they would be disqualified immediately as meaningless. — alcontali

Popper introduced the criterion of falsification because he believed that theories cannot be verified in any way (neither in the 'strong' nor 'weak' sense), because of the problem of induction.

Falsificationism is still trendy in scientific circles but it is flawed just like verificationism, as Feyerabend and Lakatos explained. An observation can never be said to falsify a theory, because it is always possible to save the theory from falsification, by assuming that there is an additional phenomenon that is responsible for the difference between observation and theory.

As an example, again, observations that didn't fit the predictions of the theory of general relativity didn't falsify that theory, because an invisible matter was invoked to make up for the difference, and it's always possible to do that. If an observation doesn't match the theory, invoke some invisible phenomenon, and the theory is not falsified. Which makes the criterion of falsification flawed just like the others.

What's science and what isn't science isn't decided by some precise criterion, it is decided by people based on their assumptions/beliefs/desires, to promote the ideas they like and dismiss the ones they don't like.

There are a lot of misconceptions in what you say, I attempted to explain them to you in the other thread but you don't seem to listen.

Predictive modelling is what science is about, making accurate predictions from past observations. If you exclude predictive modelling from science you remove pretty much everything from science.

Pt = F(Pt-1, Pt-2, Pt-3, ... , Pt-k) is not nonsensical in itself, the only reason you seem to find it nonsensical is that it doesn't work when applied to the price of a stock. I explained in the other thread why it doesn't work: the current price does not only depend on the past prices, it depends on what people do and decide to do, so if you only focus on past prices you have a poor model. I also explained why even if it works for a while it stops working eventually: because if everyone uses it, deep pockets have an incentive to move the market so that it stops working.

Regarding Karl Popper, you misinterpret what he said, the risk he was referring to is what he saw as a necessary aspect of scientific theories, in his view if a theory doesn't have that risk, if it cannot be falsified, then it isn't scientific. He said that theories cannot be verified.

You seem to imply that there are theories that are verified and cannot be falsified, and that they are the ones that should be called scientific, well a theory cannot be verified, because even if you conduct N experimental tests and in each of them observations match the theory's prediction, you cannot know that the theory will keep matching during the (N+1)th test. What you call "demonstrating causality" is predictive modelling just as well, it is assuming that the apparent causality will keep being valid in the future.

There are accurate models and there are inaccurate models, that's the important distinction. Saying that some models are not "science" just because you don't like them is what scientists do already, calling 'scientific' the models they like and 'unscientific' the ones they don't.

Technical analysis is a tool used by the very wealthy to take money from everyone else: it doesn't tell them where the price is going to go, it tells them when many people are going to buy or sell, and they can use that information against them. To a great extent they don't have to predict where the price is going to go, they decide where the price is going to go because they have the money to move the market one way or the other, they just have to decide what way is the most effective to suck money out of everyone else.

The journalist whom you referred to is not a scientist.

He is just some kind of sycophant.

Furthermore, there was no reason to believe that these people had ever authored any original experimental test report. Therefore, on what grounds do you call them scientists? — alcontali

Seriously? The Scientific American article was written by physicists Rhett Herman and Shane L. Larson, they both have numerous published papers in reputable scientific research journals.

The NASA page was written by Marc Rayman, mission director at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, chief engineer for NASA's Dawn mission, who has authored numerous scientific publications, go tell him he isn't a scientist?

You prefer to read scientific papers directly? Here, three papers I've found in under one minute, written by scientists:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3942 : From astronomical observations, we know that dark matter exists
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10630 : In our view, the presence of dark matter in and around galaxies is a well-established fact
https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01840 : Over the past few decades, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter

Go tell them that Wikipedia is a more reputable source.

Still, that does not make any difference because you cannot freely choose the input to feed into the test. Without that ability, the test is not "experimental". Other people will not be able to reproduce the test either. — alcontali

This is wrong on so many levels. An experiment is the testing of a hypothesis. What reputable source do you have to show that if the 'input' of the test cannot be chosen freely then it isn't an experiment?

The model: gravitational acceleration = theoretical_function ( mass, distance ), can be tested for various masses and various distances, so even in that predictive model the input can be chosen freely. It can be reproduced by other people too.

And I argued extensively how the criterion of reproducibility is not applied consistently by scientists, but you're just ignoring that.

What you are doing is applying your own definition and own criteria of what science is and what it isn't, and scientists mostly disagree with your criteria. Which is just more evidence of what I've been saying all along, that people decide for themselves what they call science and what they call non-science. But don't believe that your own personal criteria have universal validity.

I cannot guarantee that their scientific research efforts will yield a successful experiment. I never did — alcontali

What you also didn't do is understand what I was saying, which is that even if their experiments are 'successful', they would not prove the existence of dark matter.

The scientific method can possibly handle the issue of invisible matter -- not sure -- but it cannot handle evidence of God, simply because God has no physical incarnation. That is an epistemic issue that you keep ignoring. — alcontali

No, what you keep ignoring is that for people who believe that God created the world, evidence of the world is evidence of God.

Yes, the scientific method can verify scientific theories by experimentally testing them. Popper never said that scientific theories cannot be verified. — alcontali

Yes he did, you just didn't understand him if you even read him. Why do you keep pretending you know what you are talking about? Here is an excerpt from your favorite reputable source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism
Popper regarded scientific hypotheses to be unverifiable
Popper, who had long claimed to have killed verificationism

It seems like you're not making the effort to attempt to understand what I repeatedly try to explain as clearly as possible, so I'm not sure there is much point in continuing the discussion.

I gave examples where scientists say that dark matter exists, you keep saying that they treat it as a hypothesis. I explained why we can test predictive models (you know you can check whether it's sunny and compare that with what the weatherman said right?), you keep saying that we can't. I explained why experiments won't prove the existence of dark matter, even if they detect what they're trying to detect, you keep saying that they would. I explained why I don't mind that they research dark matter, I explained what bothers me with the scientific attitude, you keep implying that I said they should stop looking. I explained that some people see evidence of God in life or in the universe, that they see evidence of divine creation in what they see, just like some other people see evidence of invisible matter in the motion of stars, you keep ignoring it. I explained that theories cannot be verified, even Popper said that, you keep implying that the "scientific method" can verify theories. You're not replying to what I said, you're replying to your own mistaken idea of what I said. So unless you want to go back and think some more about what I am talking about, it's best to leave it at that, because we're just talking past each other.

In experimental testing, you must be able to strictly control the inputs:

outputs = theoretical_function ( inputs )

When you feed the inputs into the experiment, it will act like a function that maps it on the outputs. Good examples can be found in chemistry experiments.

sodium acetate = f ( vinegar, baking soda)

You strictly control the inputs, i.e. vinegar and baking soda, and then the experimental function will map them onto sodium acetate. Chemistry, with its formula system, allows for rigorously calculating input and output quantities along with energy absorbed or produced.

Without complete input control, you do not have a legitimate experiment, and therefore, you would not be doing science.

Predictive modelling does not require input control. We do not control the forces that generate the weather, but the weather forecast will still model and predict future weather reports. This is not science, because they are not in control of the inputs that go into the weather process in order to output any particular weather. It is merely predictive modelling. No matter how accurate the predictions may be, I do not wish to include it in the scientific method. — alcontali

Honestly I don't think this is a valid distinction. Here you are basically saying that fundamental physics isn't science.

A theory is basically: predictions = theoretical_function ( past observations )

When you carry out an experiment to test a theory, you test whether the predictions of the theory match what you observe.

In your example you have: quantity of sodium acetate created = theoretical_function ( quantities of vinegar and baking soda that are mixed )

That's a predictive model all the same. In Newton's gravitation you have: gravitational acceleration = theoretical_function ( mass, distance). You can't really control the mass of a planet but you can check whether that function works for various masses and distances. Which is what you are doing in your example, you check whether the function works for various quantities of vinegar and baking soda. I honestly don't see why you make a difference.

If it is allowed in, the stock-market charlatans will call their predictions also science. — alcontali

As I said, the difference in the stock market is that you don't have: stock price = theoretical_function ( past prices ). Well maybe such a function exists, but it depends on what people do and that's too complex, you can't predict everything that everyone is going to do, we don't have such a function. And if we did, and many people used it, then it would stop working because not everyone can win, if everyone is betting that it's gonna go up then deep pockets can crash the price and make people panic sell to buy back lower, if there are winners there has to be losers at some point. Technical analysis doesn't work because deep pockets know people use it and they use it against them, they want people to believe it works so they can steal their money.

The fact that we don't have a theoretical function that works well for the stock market or for predicting the weather precisely because there are too many variables involved, does not imply that there aren't theoretical functions that work well for some other things. A theoretical function is a predictive model, and your example with sodium acetate is a predictive model too: "if such quantity of vinegar is mixed with such quantity of baking soda then we get such quantity of sodium acetate". Another example is "if the Moon and the Sun are in such and such position then we get such and such tides at such and such location".

They observe more gravitation in the universe than can be accounted for by the existing total quantity of matter (that they can observe). A lot of things could go wrong in this hypothesis, if only, the accounting of total quantity of matter.

So, now they are looking for something that they believe should cause the excess amount of gravitation that they observe, code-named "dark matter", which is something matter-like, because it causes gravity -- as the standard model believes that matter causes gravity -- but not matter itself, because that would be visible, which it isn't.

What is your problem with these people conducting experiments to figure out where the catch is? Let them try to figure it out, no? — alcontali

They infer from observations that stars in galaxies move at a different velocity than their theoretical model predicts. That doesn't imply in any way that there is a lot of dark matter everywhere that we can't see. All that says is that observations don't match the predictions of the theory. Maybe there is a lot of invisible matter out there, or maybe the theory is simply not accurate?

I don't mind that they believe their theory is correct and that they're looking for invisible matter, my problem with these people is that they say again and again that a theory is 'unscientific' if it is not falsifiable, and they use the label 'unscientific' to dismiss and ridicule people, and what are they doing here? They're treating their 'scientific' theory as unfalsifiable! If the theory doesn't match observations, it's not that the theory is falsified, it's that there is invisible matter everywhere! If we can't find that matter after dozens of experiments and billions spent then we need to make more experiments! By their own criterion their theory is unscientific, yet they treat it as scientific. The double standard is my problem with these people, and the way they treat other theories they don't like and the people who believe in them or research them.

Abrahamic religions are adamant that God, creator of the universe, has no physical incarnation, and without which, observations are obviously pointless. Hence, whatever physical phenomenon anybody discovers anywhere, Abrahamic religion is adamant that it will not be a physical incarnation of God, because God is not a physical object or a physical being.

Scientific experiments are exclusively about physical inputs that produce physical outputs. How do you reconcile that with the rule that God does not have a physical incarnation? How could the scientific method ever be able to reach the answer to this question? — alcontali

You misunderstood me again. Some people believe that there cannot be life or even a universe without God, so to them, evidence of life or of the universe is evidence of God. My point is that this is no less scientific than saying that some particular observation is evidence of dark matter. In both cases, an observation is interpreted as evidence, in a way that suits the beliefs of the person doing the interpretation.

My problem then again, is when scientists say there is evidence of dark matter but not of God. What they are doing in saying that is pushing their own interpretation, as if it was any more valid than the interpretation of people who see God in life or in the universe. They push their interpretation as if it was objective, as if it couldn't be questioned, because it is Science and people ought to believe in Science, and if people don't believe in Science then they believe in fairy tales and it is fair to ridicule them. What they are doing is pushing their beliefs and trying to impose them onto the world.

That amounts to predictive modelling.

In some cases, I will accept it as serious, but in many cases, I will not. Again, the problem is that you can also do that kind of predictive modelling with the stock market. It is obvious that not all predictive modelling is unserious, but the safe approach is to refuse to grant it scientific status; a status which should be limited to experimental testing only. — alcontali

How do you differentiate predictive modelling from experimental testing?

In the stock market technical analysis doesn't take into account the fact that those who move the markets adapt their strategy to take money from others, so if there is a predictive model that works and many people start using it then the big pockets can take money from these people by moving the market against them and then obviously the predictive model stops working. When we deal with celestial bodies presumably we don't have planet movers who act deliberately to make our models stop working after a while.

Can you give an example of what you consider as experimental testing? And how do you differentiate it from comparing observations with what some theory predicts?

The one is serious predictive modelling with a real risk associated -- in terms of Karl Popper's article -- while the other is not. In my opinion, neither is science. I consider Karl Popper's definition for science, which includes predictive modelling, to be simply too permissive. — alcontali

I think you might have misinterpreted Karl Popper there. In the quote you mentioned earlier, he wasn't saying that a predictive model is risky in the sense that it is not as serious or as certain as something else, but in the sense that a model that makes a prediction that can be checked experimentally is at risk of being falsified, in case the observation doesn't match the theory's prediction. Popper saw that risk as a good thing, he saw it as a necessary part of scientific theories.

If you say that there are theories with no such risk associated, then such theories would be absolutely certain, they would be verified, do you have examples of that? Popper himself said that theories cannot be verified, only falsified (but as it turns out he was wrong on that, strictly speaking theories cannot be falsified either).

I was going to read the article, until I saw its title: "Is dark matter theory or fact?"
Sorry. I am not reading that. Opposing "theory" (bad) to "fact" (good) can only be an exercise in stupidity. — alcontali

Yea I didn't say it was a good article, but it shows that scientists believe dark matter exists, they mostly don't treat it as a hypothesis.

Give them time to design an experiment for their conjecture. In the meanwhile, their hypothesis should be considered to be merely an interesting research topic. — alcontali

They don't treat it as a hypothesis but as something that exists.

I have had a look at the Axion Dark Matter Experiment.

The experiment (written as "eXperiment" in the project's documentation) is designed to detect the very weak conversion of dark matter axions into microwave photons in the presence of a strong magnetic field. If the hypothesis is correct, an apparatus consisting of an 8 tesla magnet and a cryogenically cooled high-Q tunable microwave cavity should stimulate the conversion of axions into photons.

The hypothesis is certainly interesting, and most likely an ambitious research topic, undoubtedly worth exploring, but none of the wording suggests that the experiment would be conclusive at this point. — alcontali

They have never detected it and still they say that it exists, that's the thing. If you look for instance at the article for the Large Underground Xenon Experiment:

Despite the wealth of (gravitational) evidence supporting the existence of non-baryonic dark matter in the Universe, dark matter particles in our galaxy have never been directly detected in an experiment.
The detector was decommissioned in 2016.

Would you want them to use something like an axion haloscope to that effect? The fact that they do not believe that searching for God with an axion haloscope is a suitable approach, does not necessarily mean that "they want to believe in a material universe without God". — alcontali

You misinterpreted me. I didn't say they should look for God with an "axion haloscope", I didn't say that they should carry out the same experiments to detect dark matter than they would to detect God.

I say that their whole premise that what they would detect in their experiments is objectively "dark matter" is flawed. They might detect something at some point. It does not follow that what they would detect is "dark matter". Their reasoning is that "if we make this observation in that experiment, then dark matter exists". I say that this is pure belief. And that similarly, they could design some other experiment and say "if we make this observation in that experiment, then God exists". In both cases they would interpret some observation as evidence of the existence of something. That interpretation is their own, they are the ones who impose it on what they see.

I say they want to believe in a material universe without God, because they are looking to interpret observations as evidence for the existence of matter, not as evidence for the existence of God.

Why do they believe some observation would be evidence of the existence of dark matter? Because they assume that dark matter exists and that it has such and such properties which would manifest in such and such ways. They could equally assume that God exists and that he has such and such properties which would manifest in such and such ways.

They are choosing to assume the existence of dark matter, not the existence of God, which to me is a sign that they believe in a material universe without God. Sure some scientists believe in God, but they separate him from science, and in science they replace him with Matter, the invisible Matter which is everywhere and shapes the universe.

In his seminal publication, Science as Falsification, Karl Popper explicitly allows for predictive models in science — alcontali

In my first post I explained how a scientific theory can be not falsifiable if scientists decide not to falsify it, no matter the apparent evidence against it. We have a bunch of scientific theories that are not falsifiable, yet scientists go on and claim that other theories are 'unscientific' because they are not falsifiable. Double standard again.

Even if Eddington's observations could not be doubted, even if there was no possible errors in his measurements, even if his measurements didn't match what the theory predicted, scientists could have still saved Einstein's theory by assuming whatever is needed to save it, for instance that there is dust around the Sun or some undetected thing responsible for the difference between observation and theory. If scientists so decide, whatever theory they like can never be falsified.

You still need to write your experimental test report in such a way that another person can repeat your experiment and verify that he obtains the same results. Seriously, there is no experiment if you do not produce a reproducible experimental test report. — alcontali

I don't agree with that, life is a continuous experiment, people didn't need to write reproducible experimental test reports to come up with tools that allowed them to hunt more easily or to start agriculture, they didn't need test reports to make experiments and create technology.

Even reproducibility is not mentioned in the definition of "scientific method" you quoted. Scientists often talk about the need of an experiment to be reproducible, the funny thing is a lot of experimental results in sciences are reported and taken at face value without ever being reproduced, then a long time later someone decides to try it too and they realize they don't get the same result, but in many cases the experiment doesn't get repeated and scientists assume that they would get the same result if they repeated it.

Also there are some so-called scientific experiments that cannot be reproduced. Think of the large hadron collider, the thousands of people who have worked on it, the numerous models and computer programs and assumptions involved, and as a result the gigantic number of variables needed to describe precisely that experiment, how could that whole experiment ever be precisely reproduced? Then think of the OPERA experiment and their supposed detection of faster-than-light particles, it took them a whole year to realize that they got this result because of a fiber optic cable that was attached improperly, think of all the possible sources of errors in the much more complex large hadron collider and the impossibility of reproducing it precisely, yet scientists call it a scientific experiment.

Also there is an irreducible lack of reproducibility in that by the time an experiment is done again, the universe has changed, nothing forces us to assume that there is such a thing as eternal laws of nature that are valid everywhere forever. The requirement of reproducibility leads to discard a lot of personal and collective reports, to dismiss them as if they never happened, to do so is to wear blinders and focus on a part of the whole, then when they say that their theories describe the whole it's such a hypocrisy.

And consider there are things that are scientifically accepted even though many people do not experience them, for instance tinnitus. The only reason it is accepted is that there are too many people who report having it, if there were only a few it would be much easier to dismiss it as a fantasy.

Scientists are totally inconsistent in the way they label theories as 'scientific' or 'unscientific', they apply the rules they want when it suits them and not when it doesn't, they call 'scientific' the theories they want to keep and 'unscientific' the ones they want to eliminate. Reproducibility and falsifiability are red herrings, they are not what determines why a theory is labeled 'scientific', scientists are the ones who decide that based on their own desires and prejudices. Then they call the 'unscientific' ones fantasies and other derogatory terms (crackpottery, pseudoscience, fairy tales, wrong, ridiculous, bullshit), and scoff at those who want to believe in them or entertain them.

Claims that historical events really took place are not justified by the scientific method, but by the historical method, which revolves around corroborating witness depositions. There is absolutely no expectation that a third party should be able to reproduce the same event/observation (like in the scientific method):

When was the source, written or unwritten, produced (date)?
Where was it produced (localization)?
By whom was it produced (authorship)?
From what pre-existing material was it produced (analysis)?
In what original form was it produced (integrity)?
What is the evidential value of its contents (credibility)?

The justification and validation of historical witness reports are dealt with using a very specific, epistemic method: the historical method. I do not see how anybody could confuse this method with the scientific method, which is applied in other circumstances and has other requirements. — alcontali

To determine when and where the source was produced, by whom, from what, in what form, you have to make observations and hypotheses, and test these hypotheses by comparing them with other observations, I don't see how the requirements are different. The historical event is not what is demanded to be reproduced, but rather the observational and thought process that leads to saying that the event really took place. But then again even the requirement of reproducibility is not applied consistently at all by scientists.

No, because you must put the planets by yourself in a particular position and measure the quantified impact on your life. Next, someone else must put the planets by himself in a particular position and see if he gets another impact.

You first need to find a way to painstakingly move the planets in any arbitrary position of your choice, before scientific theories could be feasible. — alcontali

I don't agree with that, Newton and Einstein didn't need to move the planets in any arbitrary position of their choice to build a theory of how planets influence one another. People can agree on where celestial bodies are in the sky, scientists already do. Scientists model the influence of the Moon and Sun on the tides here on Earth, in what way are they moving the Moon and the Sun?

Why would a theory that models the influence of celestial bodies on Earth tides be scientific, and not a theory that models the influence of celestial bodies on people's lives?

At this stage, dark matter is merely a conjecture. It is not a theory backed by experimental testing. — alcontali

Many scientists say it exists.

Example from Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-dark-matter-theory-or/ : "Dark matter is known to exist through the gravitational effect it exerts on visible matter in the universe."

Example from the NASA website https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/dark-matter.html : "there is more than 50 times more dark matter than bright matter in the universe" , "what exactly is the dark matter made of?"

No, it is just a hypothesis. It is something that they would like to test experimentally, but they haven't figured out how yet. — alcontali

Actually they have done many experiments, and they have failed to detect it. But they don't say the theory is falsified, no no, they say it does exist and they need to make some other experiment to detect it. They could keep going like this forever, and still say it exists, and never falsify it, and still call it science. See the hypocrisy?

What both questions have in common, is that you would need to design an experimental test setup in order to turn them into scientific theories. Since there is nothing to test, nor any test to repeat by someone else, in order to validate that they get the same results as in your test, there is no legitimate scientific activity possible in either realm. — alcontali

But precisely they have designed experiments and performed them, look how many there are! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Experiments_for_dark_matter_search

And again they could do the very same thing with God: say what we should observe in such or such experiment if God exists, and carry out the experiment. But they don't, because double standard, they want to believe in a material universe without God, so they frame their research and theories and reasonings in that way, and that way they're sure to always find matter and never God.

Chemistry makes extensive use of the subatomic structure of electrons, and atom nucleus in terms of protons and neutrons. It is ancient stuff that dates back to the 19th century. It is considered solid stuff at the chemical scale. — alcontali

Electrons have no subatomic structure in chemistry, they are already subatomic. Anyway have you ever seen an electron? Has anyone ever observed an electron? No? Then what makes you think the question of their existence is scientific?

The closer you get to the Planck scale, the less solid the theories, which are often merely conjectures. However, that does not mean that all subatomic theories are just fantasies that have never been tested experimentally. — alcontali

Here we start getting into why that kind of talk about "the scientific method" angers me, because people associate what is labeled 'unscientific' with fantasies, with irrelevant stories we should not believe or rely on, whereas supposedly we should believe what is labeled as 'scientific'. The whole problem is hypotheses/theories/practices are often labeled 'unscientific', and thus as 'fantasies', not because they don't follow "the scientific method" but simply because scientists don't like them.

Propose an experiment that you will carry out and that other people will be able to repeat. If it is possible to do that, then the question is within reach of the scientific method. Otherwise, it isn't. For example, you cannot propose an experiment to figure out in a laboratory in what year Napoleon's Battle of Waterloo took place. That question is simply not within reach of the scientific method. — alcontali

Why do you keep talking about a laboratory, the whole universe is a laboratory, astrophysicists and cosmologists don't physically put planets and stars into a box here on Earth to study them, geologists do not put mountains into a laboratory to observe them, observations happen everywhere, they are an essential part of the so-called scientific method. Any act is an experiment, if you jump and you observe that you fall back to the ground that's an experiment.

How would you figure out what year the battle of Waterloo took place if not through observations and hypotheses?

If it can be tested experimentally, then it is science. Can you give an example of a theory that can be tested experimentally and that is not considered science? — alcontali

What does it mean to test experimentally? It simply means that you do something and expect some result, and compare the result with what you expected.

You can have the theory that the position of planets in the sky has a specific influence on your life that depends on when you were born. You can test experimentally whether what you observe matches what the theory predicts. Is that theory considered science?

I did not say that. I just don't see what laboratory-based, experimental test would say anything worthwhile on the matter. — alcontali

Do you consider like scientists that experiments say anything worthwhile about the existence of dark matter? If you do then that's a double standard, because the situation is parallel with that regarding the existence of God.

Again, scientists decide what they should observe if dark matter exists, and then they carry out experiments to decide about the existence of dark matter. We can just as well decide what we should observe if some God exists, then carry out experiments to decide about the existence of God.

Then when they say that dark matter exists, that it really is out there, but that God doesn't exist or that experiments can't say anything about its existence, that's really quite hypocritical. What it boils down to is they are pushing their belief of what exists and what doesn't, of how the world is and how it isn't, of what we should believe and what we shouldn't, they're simply pushing their world view onto others.

To say that the existence of dark matter is a scientific question but not the existence of God is hypocritical. Either both of them are scientific questions, or neither. But what I say here also applies to the existence of subatomic particles, to the questions of what we are made of, of what we are, of what the universe will be like in the distant future. Scientists do not discover the answers to these questions, they decide them, and then push them as "scientific truth", in other words as what people ought to believe. That's the problem.

Can you link to any particular publication in order to clarify what it is about? — alcontali

You're saying the existence of God is not a scientific question, based on some criteria, I'm saying that by the same criteria the existence of subatomic particles is not a scientific question, yet as you must know they are fundamental constituents in theories of fundamental physics, so there is a double standard in saying one is scientific and the other isn't.

The scientific method is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century. It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. These are principles of the scientific method, as distinguished from a definitive series of steps applicable to all scientific enterprises. — alcontali

Great, a copy-paste from Wikipedia where some dude has written a definition for "the scientific method". The question isn't whether people out there have given a definition for "the scientific method", the question is whether all that we call science follows "the scientific method", and all that we call non-science doesn't follow "the scientific method", whether "the scientific method" characterizes what we call science. I say there is no such thing as "the scientific method" in the sense that it doesn't characterize what we call science, because it also characterizes some of what we call non-science.

With this definition of "the scientific method", you can very well consider the existence of God as a scientific question, by "formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on careful observations; experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings".

You're saying we can't observe God, well we can't observe subatomic particles or dark matter either. However some people interpret some observations as evidence for subatomic particles or dark matter, and some other people interpret some observations as evidence of God.

That would make for boring art though, and there is already plenty of that around. I see philosophy as stories we tell each other, and I thought that was an interesting story.