Posts by Martin

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Yes, it would be easier if there were actually a philosopher or scientist who said "I am am advocate of "Scientism" and this is what it means.

As it is (or at least as i understand it) nobody actually advocates such a position.

There are quite a few people who habe been labelled advocates of Scientism by others or themselves, e.g.:
Auguste Comte (positivist philosopher, apparently without using the term "Scientism")
Peter Atkins (reported to have asserted the “universal competence” of science in his essay “Science as Truth”, 1995)
James Ladyman, Don Ross, and David Spurrett (reportedly in their book "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized", 2007)
Alex Rosenberg
Don Ross

After first reading of Cassius' comment, I agree with him but have the following to add:
Epicurus' philosophy is not Scientism because in Scientism, the scientific method is the only method to produce meaningful/"true"/reliable knowledge of the world.
Whereas the formation of preconceptions from sensations may be interpreted as a precursor of science, the feelings as another leg of the Epicurean canon go much further than the narrow scope of science.
Adherents of Scientism do use science as their only tool and usually do that properly and usually not as a rhetorical tool. They differ from people with other worldviews in that they do not accept other sources of knowledge.
Underpinning arguments ‘scientifically’ with research and statistics is the proper way to conduct debates on topics which are inherently within the scope of science. Trying that for aspects which are out of the scope of science is sometimes called Scientism, too, but the people who apply science out of its scope are usually not scientists because scientists usually know the limits of their profession.
Epicureans use scientific knowledge to get rid of beliefs in supernatural gods and the afterlife and and other superstitions, and to make prudent decisions on which options for goals are feasible and which actions are effective but within that scope of wise choices, they use pleasure and not science to set there goals and decide on actions. Most of the ethics of Epicurus is based on pleasure as the goal. E.g., the Epicurean emphasis on friendship comes from pleasure as the goal and not from science.
To answer whether an adherent of Scientism lacks the right telos and overall understanding of human existence, we would need to pick specific people and answer the question for each individual.

Just to correct a historic distortion which was apparently created by the movie "300":

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...Leonidas and the 300...

The references vary but they all agree that more other Greeks than the 300 Spartans made the last stand with Leonidas at Thermopylae.

Welcome UnPaid_Landlord!

The question "What is the primary cause of atomic motion?" does not make much sense in Epicurean physics. "Atomic weight" as the answer is wrong because there is no primary cause since the atoms have already been in motion since an eternity in Epicurean physics.

When one of my most experienced coworkers asked the analogous question for more training to my boss of 2004 - 2016, the analogy of his answer would be: If you do not find any more new books on the topic, it is time to start writing books.

Welcome here, too!

Welcome David!

The meaning of "energy" is much more narrow in physics than in general usage of the word. The meaning in physics became clear only with Newton. Therefore, we can at best expect analogies between what is meant by energy in ancient Epicurean texts and what it means now. I remember that energy used in Lucretius appears to be closer to how it is used today in Esotericism than in physics.

Welcome Remus!

1920 x 1080

It looks fine except that a background image is visible at the sides on the PC screen and the content is narrowed correspondingly. This gives the weird appearance as if the window was reduced in size and the background image was the wallpaper on my PC.

Feeling empathy with robots (Spoiler alert for the movies "I Robot" and "Automata"!)

When I watched the movie "I Robot" many years ago, I found it normal that I felt empathy for the "good" robot because his actions, what he said, his display of emotions and wit were like those of "good" humans. Rationally, it made sense to be on his side, too, because he helped the human hero to save humanity from an overbearing AI.

Recently, I watched the movie "Automata" (with subtitles and without sound because I was on an airplane). This time, it surprised me that I developed empathy for the advanced robots planning to set up their own realm although what they did and what they said was not that "good" and although I only read what they said but did not hear how they said it. Rationally, it did not make sense to be on their side because they would built more and more of their own kind and a hyper-advanced society well ahead of humanity, which might turn into a threat. In despite, it felt like a happy end when two of them survived the attempts of some "bad" humans to kill them and escaped into an area where humans could not go.
AI with the most advanced capabilities hinted at in "Automata" is not visible in reality for even the distant future. Nevertheless, the movie is a good illustration of what is currently in the discussion about AI.

This could be very useful. However, the results which I have seen in other videos' subtitles created by software which converts speech into text contain a lot of wrong words so far.

Julian Jaynes' "breakdown" of the bicameral mind seems to have been refuted, partly because his evidence from ancient texts is cherry-picked and evidence to the contrary in ancient texts is ignored by him. There are probably more reasons why it is nonsense, but I am not interested to dig deeper into it to find out.

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So would modern science include 1, 2, and 4 from Bryan's list in post 15?

1 and 2 yes with some caveats, 4 only for illustration.

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Donating an infinitely large number of typewriters to an infinitely large number monkeys for an infinite time will NEVER produce the complete works of Shakespeare.

It would infinite times because the number of letters on a typewriter is finite and the number of letters in Shakespeare's works is finite!

The formation of life on Earth had similar odds.

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"The US has many nuclear power plants, and overall is supplied mostly from large fossil fuel plants or large dams, like the Hoover dam. Each of those can black-start...

Nuclear power stations cannot black-start.
Morever, nuclear power is a dead end and unreliable under unusual conditions. E.g. in the summer of 2022, more than half of the French nuclear power plants were temporarily off the grid, and France had to buy considerable amounts of electricity from Germany, which was provided predominantly by gas power stations.

From my reading of the past, I got the impression that the North American power grid is more vulnerable than the European. California should have particular difficulties to restart when a long black-out happens.

Welcome Golbach!

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Physics (modern physics) does seem to say we live in a deterministic universe due to physical laws.

Some physicists interpret the known physics such that the universe is deterministic, others (including me) interpret it such that it has fundamental indeterminacy, not just difficulty for prediction.

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... that in the future some far-advanced hyper-super-quantum computing machine is able to plot the current state of all matter in the universe at every given microsecond... then, yes, theoretically, all future states are "predictable" due to the laws of physics; ...

Such a computer is not conceivable because it would be like a 1:1 scale map of everything, that means the universe would be used to calculate itself, which makes it pointless. A fundamental indeterminacy at the present can only be resolved by waiting for the future to see which way the system has moved.