Philosophy of Science

I’ve probably written this before, but I feel the need to write it again.

Science is founded on the assumption that the world is both systematic and predictable. An experiment that isn’t reproducible is a failure. The only phenomena that the scientific method can address are those which fit in with the systematic and predictability presupposition. Many regular systems exist and can be described elegantly with mathematics, which is what has made science so popular and successful.

But just because the scientific method can’t tell us about unpredictability doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Chaos theory shows us that even in simple deterministic systems with a positive feedback loop, even the tiniest variation in initial conditions will be magnified until it dominates the system, making it unpredictable in a practical sense. Weather is like this, and that’s why long-term weather forecasting is a fool’s game. We can only make short-term predictions because it takes time for the variations to be magnified.

Many people seem to adopt the view that all of the world is regular and predictable because that’s all science can really tell us about. This is a comforting notion but unfortunately it requires ignoring a lot of data. Scientists call this data “noise”.

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