Simon
Originally posted by simonm
Well, I think they are reluctant to associate themselves with "wacky" notions like parellel universes and such. They don't want to get labelled as crackpots as career reputations are very important to them.
Scientists cannot hold together the large quantity of information in one consistant piece, mostly because they are specialized on different areas, and likewise science is specialized and not uniform, this is an instrumentalistic course of action, because you need to conform to problems with solutions that are specifically modelled for the situations, drawing parallels to an objective universe is just instinctive ethetical thinking and as you said driven by exploration instinct and need of reputation. What's the use of the notation of paralel universes? Obviously you can't gain market on technology based on paralel universes, so there's no reason why research should perform in that direction even if it was possible to model your future trough technology. You see that everything comes from our needs, and that science is nothing but a instrumentalistic notation, that we need to develope the transaction of information to satisfy our needs.
You seem to be hovering between two differeing perspectives. One minute you confess that we can only ever approximate reality and another minute you say that we shouldn't even bother to do that.
I didn't confess anything, I was elaborating realist view on what they could do with reality, that is approximate it, not define it. My argument is the same as before that the scientists are only approximating to their observations, which is a source purely information, and is not nessesarily connected to reality.
In addition, whilst many scientists tend to an instrumentalist point of view, I doubt if there are any true instrumentalists amoung them. Few scientists want to detach themselves from notions of an underlying reality as, at the end of the day, that is the drive and motivation behind most scientists: They want to reveal the true nature of reality, not just find useful models that allow them to predict results.
It doesn't matter what most scientists think, if QM falsificates their beleifs then it is according to Popper's notation of science not real.
Once again you are driven to the extreme of insisting that something is either right or completely wrong. In life, problems (and their solutions) are never like that.
That's my point, in life you don't need to have a "real" definition for everything, you only need the approximative models.