Quote Originally Posted by Singu View Post
Predictions isn't actually the main point, because you'd first need to know what to predict, or even what it is that you're supposed to be looking for.

Imagine that there's a computer that could magically predict anything, as long as you input what to predict. That would be the ideal Instrumentalist machine. But what are you supposed to be predicting...? If you want to predict whether a spaceship will liftoff or explode in mid-air, then you'd have to first build that spaceship, then test whether it will liftoff or explode. And in order to build a spaceship, it requires knowledge, which is not just knowledge about predicting things. And even if it does indeed predict that it will explode in mid-air, how would we build a spaceship that won't explode? We wouldn't know how without understanding how a spaceship works.

So what this magical computer is actually doing is that it's just replacing human experiments with perfect hypothetical experiments. It still requires the creativity and the imagination of human beings to come up with new theories to understand how things work, which will be done by understanding how reality actually is and using theories to uniquely solve problems. And if you can understand how things work, then you will automatically be able to predict things. So understanding comes first, then predictions later.

Instrumentalism is about using theories as an "instrument" to predict things. It says that its content doesn't matter, perhaps other than as some "useful fiction". Logical Positivism is an even stronger form of Instrumentalism that says that any statements that are not about predicting observations are meaningless. But then what is Logical Positivism itself...? It considers itself to be meaningless.
Human ingenuity should serve humanity, not the other way round. If you expect us to funnel all our creative energies into finding higher-order truths that will not directly benefit us in any way except """"contextualizing"""" our surroundings, I don't know what to tell you, you'll just end up endorsing a secular papacy.

In fact, I'd say the only great existential contribution the past couple centuries' scientific achievements yielded to us, was the fact that the universe acted in many ways like the simple engines humans created, and that a grand anthropic design is not in fact necessary for explaining many phenomena we'd offloaded to some vague intelligent creator in the past. But I'd also argue that this is a null position to take, and the only reason we've thought differently is the social inertia of having gone all these generations in this weird arbitrary framework that's the product of ancient religions.



When you're at risk of falling to predatory animals all the time, you want to focus your intellectual energies into making better tools to fight them, not into understanding the grand design. And even when you're not, you want to focus your intellectual energies into getting a surplus out of your farms, so you don't starve if a drought comes, not understanding the grand design. If this wasn't the reasoning of our ancestors, we wouldn't have made it past the stone age. The achievements that give our society strength now cause us to forget how fragile and vulnerable we still are to unanticipated natural phenomena we have no idea how to handle.

And I can see religion's social utility as a great unifier, but many past religions are redundant or obsolete now. Our spiritual sensibilities have become alienated from our desire to maintain our own society's infrastructures and truly take care of our own. And frankly, I don't see the masses flocking around a secular church of philosophy, all eagerly clamoring to understand the great mystery enough so that this institution can have unifying social utility. Our closest thing to a secular religion with high social participation is secular humanism, but this doesn't really have much of an epistemological stance, only the doctrine of valuing net human life over all else with no respect to other mechanisms of the world.

So I don't frankly see the point of trying to understand truth for truth's sake alone anymore. If you focus too much on the "why"s when issues of "how" are bubbling up, your lack of a "how" will make you unable to handle the issues that can destroy you, and all your society's abilities to handle the "why"s in the first place.