I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. About science and knowledge and what we can know. The claim could be made that this recent spurt of thought is a result of my being in a philosophy class, but that would be untrue because I’m always thinking about this sort of thing anyhow.
I realized a while ago that pretty much everything we do is based upon the premise that the future will be something like that past. I don’t know if this in our biological wetware or what. That premise is the basis of all science. We say “For every force, there is an equal, opposite force” (Is this really true ? I have an idea now…), but we say this is true because it always has been. That’s really the main reason, when you get down to it. We’ve never seen it not be true. How rational is it to operate in that manner?
Suppose I said:
I’ve never been to France. Things that have not happened in the past will not happen in the future. Therefore, I will never go to France.
You’d think I was crazy if I used that logic on you. But it’s not really any different from me saying:
We have never seen a perpetual motion machine. Things that have not happened in the past will not happen in the future. Therefore, we will never see one.
The more physics-educated amongst you may object that the second law of thermodynamics prevents this from happening. Fine, you jerks:
We have never seen the laws of thermodynamics violated. Things that have not happened in the past will not happen in the future. Therefore, we will never see the laws of thermodynamics violated.
Why does the same line of reasoning make you sound like a jackass in one case, and a reasonable person in the other?
Oh, and by the way. For those keeping score a home (Does anybody read my blog? Who am I kidding? (stray thought: the rules for the placement of parentheses and quotes and such are stupid so I use my own, more sensical rules)), Bruce Schneier, a Really Smart Guy®, apparently shares my opinion on Digital Rights Management: That DRM is a defect, not a feature, and it should be made extinct.