IPH: world view

By “scientific” I mean according to the ideal scientific methodology, which is outlined below. Empiricism is the basis of scientific method.

One consequence of this approach to everything is that I have no religious beliefs, and therefore I have no religion. I only have provisional hypotheses about anything & everything. This is fundamental to my whole approach to life and the world around me, so it is worth repeating it immediately: each and every proposition that I entertain about reality is only ever a hypothesis, which I adopt — provisionally. All scientists whose working methodology is truly scientific follow this in their work; I follow it all the time, and in my opinion it is the only coherent, sane way to approach life and the world we live in — as well as the rest of the universe (which we can only learn about, of course, through more completely scientific methods — astronomy and astrophysics).

Another consequence of my approach, albeit via the foregoing, is that I don’t get attached to any proposition so strongly that I cannot easily adjust it, or even discard it altogether, when given new verifiable data or evidence that affects its “viability”^[1]. By “verifiable” I mean a complex of interrelated aspects of the business of making an evaluation of reliability of evidence. See Evaluating hypotheses.

I get a little annoyed when people tell me what I think when I haven’t said so (and when I have done, it is superfluous) because they are always extrapolating or presuming badly.

I get a little annoyed when people attempt sophistry or are just so bad at logical discussion that they deluge fora with non-sequiturs. I refer here especially to letters that sometimes get into the British Mensa magazine letters columns where, every few years, arguments break out which go over the same ground and never make any progress because there is no common ground between the opposing viewpoints -- they are, in my favourite phrase, on a hiding to nothing.

I never get upset about new facts that make a difference to the evaluation of any important proposition in my universe-view; but these really do veryrarely happen. They are of the order of the time when all the world’s top physicists agree that something has gone wrong, as in Hawking’s B.H.of Time 1969 event -- at the time I was at U. of Bristol on the honours physics course, but the professors didn’t tell usand I only realized when I read Hawking why the lecturers were waving their hands in the air so often -- to the point that I lost confidence in nuclear physics and switched to majoring in mathematics.

One of the BM magazine recurrent themes is about "science versus religion" as has been gone through again here this week. Another is the argument "IQ doesn’t test everything" (which was done in a Channel 4 docu last week). A third is "Mensa ought to do something to solve the world’s problems" versus "Mensa doesn’t have any political agenda" and of course the latter has to stand, because those for the former in this seesaw simply have not thought through the thing, and recognized that politics --- mainly world politics --- and economics (i.e. unwillingness to spend money, which is also really politics), is really and truly the obstacle to actually fixing most of the world’s problems, not any lack of technology. Mensa just is not about that (though if we could invent much cheaper ways to do certain things it might help).

The other thing I get a little annoyed about is abuse of good English (as everyone will have guessed). Apart from those, I am a calm, fairly detached, effectively retired, loner who for tax purposes is a self employed abstract artist but often spends most of his time writing posts to this forum when not going for walks and watching movies or Dr Who on TV. (Tonight: The Daleks invade New York in 1930, the Empire State building top antenna is just being put in place, and the Doctor has to save the planet from them yet again --- because they too can travel back through time and keep having another go in a different era ... heh heh ).

I have an evaluation scheme for expressing this to others. Briefly: Belief = religious belief = values of 0 or 1. All other propositions are held as provisional hypotheses which differ from the extremes by a nonsero amount. The actual values are: 0.5 means "evens" = no opinion or consider two (mutually exclusive) alternatives equally likely -- though in fact strictly speaking only where I am absolutely certain one of the two is the case; otherwise the correct assignment os (say) 0.49, 0.49, 0.02 wit the third being the hypothesis (considered remote) that both are wrong.

More about my views on belief, religion and the term “atheism” here.

More about the numerical evaluation scheme here.

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Notes
{1] I put the word “viability” in quotation marks because it is perhaps a slightly unusual usage of that word. Other people would probably usually use the word “credibility” but I do not because, if taken literally, that word means “ability to be believed” and, according to my approach, one uses the word “believe” only in the religious sense to avoid ambiguity (see article on this) and therefore one assigns zero credibility to all propositions because one never believes any proposition in the religious sense. The concept of viability is tied to the idea of life and the capability of living things to survive; it is applied to abstractions but only as a fourth or fifth dictionary definition, and as a sort of metaphor. However the English language apparently lacks an alternative word, one applying specifically to propositions but not carrying these essential etymological ties to the notion of belief which I am trying to avoid.