The so-called "scientific method" is, I think, rather poorly understood. For example, let us consider one of the best-known laws of nature, often simply referred to as the Law of Gravity:
Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation: Every object in the universe attracts every other object toward it with a force proportional to the product of their masses, divided by the square of the distance between their centers of mass.
Now here is a series of questions for you, which I often ask audiences when I give lectures on the philosophy of science:
- Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?
- If so, how sure are you that it is true?
- Why do you believe it, with that degree of certainty?
The most common answers to these questions are "yes", "very sure", and "because it has been extensively experimentally verified." Those answers sound reasonable to any child of the Enlightenment -- but I submit, on the contrary, that this set of answers has no objective basis whatsoever. To begin with, let us ask, how many confirming experiments do you think would have been done, to qualify as "extensive experimental verification." I would ask that you, the reader, actually pick a number as a rough, round guess.
Whatever number N you picked, I now challenge you state the rule of inference that allows you to conclude, from N uniform observations, that a given effect is always about from a given alleged cause. If you dust off your stats book and thumb through it, you will find no such rule of inference rule there. What you will find are principles that allow you to conclude from a certain number N of observations that with confidence c, the proportion of positive cases is z, where c < 1 and z < 1. But there is no finite number of observations that would justify, with any nonzero confidence, that any law held universally, without exception (that is, z can never be 1 for any finite number of observations, no matter how small the desired confidence c is, unless c = 0). . And isn't that exactly what laws of nature are supposed to do? For Pete's sake it is called the law of universal gravitation, and it begins with the universal quantifier every (both of which may have seemed pretty innocuous up until now).
Let me repeat myself for clarity: I am not saying that there is no statistical law that would allow you to conclude the law with absolute certainty; absolute certainty is not even on the table. I am saying that there is no statistical law that would justify belief in the law of universal gravitation with even one tenth of one percent of one percent confidence, based on any finite number of observations. My point is that the laws of the physical sciences -- laws like the Ideal gas laws, the laws of gravity, Ohm's law, etc. -- are not based on statistical reasoning and could never be based on statistical reasoning, if they are supposed, with any confidence whatsoever, to hold universally.
So, if the scientific method is not based on the laws of statistics, what is it based on? In fact it is based on the
Principle of Abductive Inference: Given general principle as a hypothesis, if we have tried to experimentally disprove the hypothesis, with no disconfirming experiments, then we may infer that it is likely to be true -- with confidence justified by the ingenuity and diligence that has been exercised in attempting to disprove it.
In layman's terms, if we have tried to find and/or manufacture counterexamples to a hypothesis, extensively and cleverly, and found none, then we should be surprised if we then find a counterexample by accident. That is the essence of the scientific method that underpins most of the corpus of the physical sciences. Note that it is not statistical in nature. The methods of statistics are very different, in that they rest on theorems that justify confidence in those methods, under assumptions corresponding to the premises of the theorems. There is no such theorem for the Principle of Abductive Inference -- nor will there ever be, because, in fact, for reasons I will explain below, it is a miracle that the scientific method works (if it works).
Why would it take a miracle for the scientific method to work? Remember that the confidence with which we are entitled to infer a natural law is a function of the capability and diligence we have exercised in trying to disprove it. Thus, to conclude a general law with some moderate degree of confidence (say, 75%), we must have done due diligence in trying to disprove it, to the degree necessary to justify that level confidence, given the complexity of the system under study. But what in the world entitles us to think that the source code of the universe is so neat and simple, and its human denizens so smart, that we are capable of the diligence that is due?
For an illuminating analogy, consider that software testing is a process of experimentation that is closely analogous to scientific experimentation. In the case of software testing, the hypothesis being tested -- the general law that we are attempting to disconfirm -- is that a given program satisfies its specification for all inputs. Now do you suppose that we could effectively debug Microsoft Office, or gain justified confidence in its correctness with respect to on item of its specification, by letting a weasel crawl around on the keyboard while the software is running, and observing the results? Of course not: the program is far too complex, its behavior too nuanced, and the weasel too dimwitted (no offense to weasels) for that. Now, do you expect the source code of the Universe itself to be simpler and friendlier to the human brain than the source code of MS Office is to the brain of a weasel? That would be a miraculous thing to expect, for the following reason: a priori, if the complexity of that source code could be arbitrarily large. It could be a googleplex lines of spaghetti code -- and that would be a infinitesimally small level of complexity, given the realm of possible complexities -- namely the right-hand side of the number line.
In this light, if the human brain is better equipped to discover the laws of nature than a weasel is to confidently establish the correctness an item in the spec of MS Office, it would be a stunning coincidence. That is looking at it from the side of the a priori expected complexity of the problem, compared to any finite being's ability to solve it. But there is another side to look from, which is the side of the distribution of intelligence levels of the potential problem-solvers themselves. Obviously, a paramecium, for example, is not equipped to discover the laws of physics. Nor is an octopus, nor a turtle, nor a panther, nor an orangutan. In the spectrum of natural intelligences we know of, it just so happens that there is exactly one kind of creature that just barely has the capacity to uncover the laws of nature. It is as if some cosmic Dungeon Master was optimizing the problem from both sides, by making the source code of the universe just simple enough that the smartest beings within it (that we know of) were just barely capable of solving the puzzle. That is just the goldilocks situation that good DM's try to achieve with their puzzles: not so hard they can't be solved, not so easy that the players can't take pride in solving them
There is a salient counterargument I must respond to. It might be argued that, while it is a priori unlikely that any finite being would be capable of profitably employing the scientific method in a randomly constructed universe, it might be claimed that in hindsight of the scientific method having worked for us in this particular universe, we are now entitled, a posteriori, to embrace the Principle of Abductive Inference as a reliable method. My response is that we have no objective reason whatsoever to believe the scientific method has worked in hindsight -- at least not for the purpose of discovering universal laws of nature! I will grant that we have had pretty good luck with science-based engineering in the tiny little spec of the universe observable to us. I will even grant that this justifies the continued use of engineering for practical purposes with relative confidence -- under the laws of statistics, so long as, say, one anomaly per hundred thousand hours of use is an acceptable risk. But this gives no objective reason whatsoever (again under the laws of statistics) to believe that any of the alleged "laws of nature" we talk about is actually a universal law. That is to say, if you believe, with even one percent confidence, that we ever have, or ever will, uncover a single line of the source code of the universe -- a single law of Nature that holds without exception -- then you, my friend, believe in miracles. There is no reason to expect the scientific method to work, and good reason to expect it not to work -- unless human mind was designed to be able to uncover and understand the laws of nature, by Someone who knew exactly how complex they are.
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Notes -
What on earth gives you that takeaway? It was never on the menu.
You can perform utilitarian calculus, GiveWell certainly adds, subtracts multiplies and divides to figure out what is the most cost effective, hence most moral in their lights, means of saving or extending human life.
In practise, everyone is a consequentialist. Even the denying Deontologists, who frontload it. Otherwise they have no choice but to halt and catch fire whenever two Kantian imperatives conflict, and for all the ill I can speak of them, they're not that dysfunctional.
Buddy. I clearly stated that morality is fundamentally arbitrary/subjective/observer dependent and as far as I can tell, there is no good reason to think that's not the case barring wishful thinking.
There is no "correct problem of evil". That is a malformed question built on faulty assumptions.
If you're a consequentialist, especially one of the more well defined strains of utilitarian, you can very much shut up and multiply from base principles, like "saving human lives is good" and further adjustments like discounting by quality of life. Hence QALYs and DALYs. For the record, I am neither a utilitarian in the Benthamian sense or an EA.
If you're not a consequentialist, well, you actually are, deep down, just to be a functioning human, but there is no right or wrong here that is independent of a predefined frame of reference. In other words, an observer.
If, somehow you're actually an LLM, then you've achieved a working understanding of gestalt human morality simply by being fed an enormous amount of text and then doing multiplication (of matrices). It is obviously doable. A randomly instantiated neural net will predictably achieve it.
Because you're still saying stuff like:
That does not sound like something I can just multiply to get. If so, you could also just multiply, and we'd get the same thing. Because that's the bit about empiricism. You know, the linked article that you linked.
Whereas, again, this:
is option 2. That's not "fundamentally arbitrary/subjective/observer dependent". It's a different option.
And this is a really weird option 3. So, yeah, I think you've again given me all three options. They're going to give me different answers. Which option is the right one? What does an empiricist as anti-epistemologist do with three different empirical answers to the same question?
There is no right or wrong option. To restate my point, that is a fundamentally confused question unless you begin with an axiomatic moral framing.
You cannot acquire morality from first principles. You can execute it on it when you have somehow acquired them, including, yes, basic and complicated mathematics.
Ok, so let me see if I'm understanding you correctly. You reject the possibility of objective morality, but I think you might also be rejecting moral error theory. I think this means that you land somewhere in the land of meta-ethical moral relativism. Of course, I think this also rejects the core underpinning of the project of consequentialism/utilitarianism as being an objective basis for morality. Is this about right?
Then, I think the next move in the relativist frame is to say that individuals simply adopt whatever axioms they choose to adopt. So, like, if someone adopted the axiom that Ponzi schemes are good or the axiom that Llama-7b is the best arbiter of their morality or the axiom that if there were a way to give ALL to two-year olds, it would be good to do so... then, that's just totally and completely fine. That's their axiom, and all that can be done is carrying out that axiom with basic and complicated mathematics. Is that about right?
Then, lets suppose that you and someone else have adopted different axioms. They adopted the axiom that it is good to give ALL to two-year olds (if such a thing were technologically possible), while you adopt the axiom that it is bad. Presumably, you would say that they have no objective grounds on which to claim that your axiomatic system is wrong, and likewise, you would have no objective grounds on which to claim that their axiomatic system is wrong. You would both just go about using basic and complicated mathematics to satisfy your respective axioms, you'd both just shut up and multiply, and no other statements can be made about the situation. Is that about right?
Seems about right to me. That roughly sums up the philosophy/meta-ethics I adhere to and endorse.
If I had to elaborate, I would say that I see no reason to let moral nihilism/relativism prevent me (or anyone else) from being a moral chauvinist, in other words preferring their own ethical code and seeking to promulgate it above others.
Ok, great. Wanted to make sure I was understanding you and not strawmanning.
In your elaboration, you observe that you see no reason why anyone couldn't be a moral chauvinist. Do you see any reason why the next conclusion is anything other than that the only thing is power politics? That once one realizes that there is nothing to be done other than power politics to promote their own preferred code and to promulgate it above others, then you might as well just cancel, deplatform, shame, struggle session, brainwash, and intimidate people to be inculcated with your view? That if that isn't producing the desired results, power politics may be continued by other means, in the Clausewitzian sense, all the way to total war and genocide? Simply disposing of those who oppose your chauvinistic views may, indeed, promulgate your views above others.
I don't want to engage in power politics. I wish to live and let live as far as feasible, with my libertarian ideals. I have no desire to go on genocidal rampages or pogroms, and thankfully, neither do most other people, but if they did I claim no special moral high ground.
As you can see, there's nothing inconsistent about that. And for those who disagree, well the Tree of Liberty isn't going to water itself.
So again, just power politics, all the way to power politics by other means? This seems to be your conclusion, and you seem perfectly happy to use a euphemism for it. Why not simply speak plainly and affirm it directly?
Again with you and your accursed demands to speak plainly.
It is plain and obvious from the entirety of my comment, that I am content, nay, happy, to live and let live, or let die. It doesn't get plainer than that. If someone wishes to impose unbearable restrictions on me by force, then yes, I am willing to take up arms against it in extremis. But what people do with themselves is their business, and while I consider myself at liberty to pass judgement and comment when I disagree, and I'm not taking up arms first or engaging in any reasonable definition of "power politics" to achieve that. As long as the people I disagree with extend me the same courtesy, then we can stay civil about it.
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