(Jun 26, 2019 04:17 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: Belief can only be maintained temporarily as it rests on shaky grounds. I must tell you that it is possible to logically deduce what is beyond appearances in an absolute manner.
Deductive reasoning is from general to particular.[*] If instead of the everyday world the process is transpiring within the context of a formal system or "doctrine game" with its own formal language, then whatever specific elements(s) it narrows down to in the results are simply residents of that abstract game. The axioms and properties of the latter are preset (invented), so if the process is performed correctly than it has outputted something truthful about that formal system, but not about what is the case outside it either in terms of appearances or beyond such.
If applied instead to the empirical world, deductive arguments merely "claim" certainty, since they often circularly appeal back to premises (and their authors or source institutions) which the rhetorician may have preferentially selected. Or they fall out of a flawed authority or the arbitrary historical development of our own ordinary language, if it is the "authority". (Another way to put that is that ordinary language has favored what is practical or useful in its evolution rather than being concerned about absolute truth idealism.)
Inductive reasoning: from particular to general.[*] If there are premises or general facts and principles that have been extracted and drawn from concrete items of the empirical world and applied back to it to that everyday environment (deduction), then the former may have potential biases, shortcomings, or outright errors in those umbrellas concepts. That's because the reasoners are motivated beforehand -- they or the enterprise they're members of have self-interests which can affect how they interpret observational affairs and what they theoretically infer from them. (Without instruments, their senses are limited, too).
Which is to say, different individuals slash teams engaging in induction may output rival ideas, principles and different broad "understandings" of what's going on. Science can cull those down, but it can't do anything for culling out multiple competing inferences about a metaphysical level, which can't be tested. The latter lacks phenomenal objects that can be publicly observed so as warrant some sustained belief in them (private hallucinations or revelations asserted to be such are not overt).
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[*] Setting aside secondary deviations which try to hijack or over-complicate the meaning to generate confusion and impasse.
(Jun 26, 2019 04:59 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Entangled life forms? Experiments are getting weird but will they eventually get there? Does boundary between micro & macro exist?
https://www.livescience.com/64085-quantum-bacteria.html
(excerpt) "But scientists don't agree on where the boundary between the ordinary and the quantum world lies — or if it even exists at all. Chiara Marletto, a physicist at the University of Oxford and a co-author on the recent paper, which was published Oct. 10 in The Journal of Physics Communications, said that there's no reason to expect that there's a limit on the size of quantum effects."
Decoherence seems to hold that pervasive reach view, which Philip Ball apparently championed in his book "Beyond Weird". Maybe slightly clearer here (?) than SEP or Wikipedia, as to what these characters are trying to do, if skipping down to "The 'decoherence program' of H. Dieter Zeh, Erich Joos, Wojciech Zurek, John Wheeler, Max Tegmark, and others has multiple aims...": http://www.informationphilosopher.com/qu...coherence/