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[SirQuiamus]

But how did the scientists "discover" that equation? Did they just look through a microscope and see all these numbers and letters floating around?

It doesn't matter how simple or "correct" an equation is; it's still a theoretical construct created by the scientists themselves, and it does not magically produce new knowledge out of thin air.

You could be describing General Relativity there just as well as any theory. Special relativity and G.R. were formulated entirely from theoretical contructs, not from any experimental work. Did Einstein look through any microscrope or telescopes? Nope.

How did we discover black holes? Not with a microscope or with a telescope, but by doing calculations based on General Relativity. General Relativity produced many results that we would never have looked for otherwise, due to theoretical constructs. The perturbations from GR are small enough we might have dismissed them as measurement error without the theoretical work. G.R. also predicted expansion of the universe, although Einstein didn't appreciate the importance of that result from his theoretical calculations.

Solving equations does in fact create new knowledge.

Have you ever heard of Underdetermination? It means that there is an indeterminate number of theories that can be employed to make the same successful prediction, and empirical evidence does not tell us exactly which theory is "objectively correct." Even if string theory produces reliable predictions, we simply cannot make the assumption that that particular theory "accurately reflects" the underlying structure of the universe. The way you are presenting it sounds like the researchers directly plugged the universe into their equation, and that the resulting output is therefore derived from the fabric of reality itself. That's just epistemologically unsound.

EDIT:

Solving equations does in fact create new knowledge.

So, you think that "synthetic a priori knowledge" is actually a thing?      

[Sergarr]

It's actually impossible to write a good story (or hell, any story at all) about a character with no meaningful limitations because said character is God with big-G and can do anything meaningful. Including things like rewriting the past to fix any mistakes that said character did. There must be some limitations on a character in order to make a story, no matter how good of a writer you are.

Limitations are what defines literally everything that exists. Without limitations, you can't describe reality, hell, you can't describe anything, because words are limitations, too. Each words has a limited meaning, and each word is meaningful because it's limited in it's meaning.

So that unlimited potential is actually zero potential.

[Eagleon]

You can write a story where the limitations are in the readers. That's basically the reason a lot of scientists start their careers - exploring such an intricate universe is sort of a narrative, and one still being told, especially in fields like cosmology or evolutionary biology.

[Sergarr]

But science is all about knowing limitations of the world and discovering more of them. Incidentally the increasing number of limitations discovered also gives us more freedom in being able to do things.

And what does "limitations are in the readers" even mean.

[Eagleon]

But science is all about knowing limitations of the world and discovering more of them. Incidentally the increasing number of limitations discovered also gives us more freedom in being able to do things.

And what does "limitations are in the readers" even mean.

Exactly that. Your readers are then engaged by their own limitations of understanding - their imaginations fill in the blanks, and you're then guiding their experiences through a narrative, most effectively with an unreliable narrator. The Bible does this, the contradictions it presents actually intrigue religious scholars rather than making them throw their hands up and scoff out monocles, because they don't care that solipsism offends scientismists

Science is that and breaking the limitations involved with previous understanding, so really it's neither. It's just a way to understand a small part of world, which is still literally incomprehensible - you can argue solipsism regardless of how much we learn, so exploring theories that can't be proven to describe anything better than another shouldn't really surprise people. On the other hand, we don't know what sort of thought will be useful, so trying to forcefully impose a standard of immediate relevance on people (scientists or not - science isn't the only thing that's real) is ultimately not as useful as letting people think about this stuff. After all, if they hadn't, you'd have no idea that solipsism exists.

[Sergarr]

you can argue solipsism regardless of how much we learn

Actually, no you can't. When we learn enough about how human brain functions, and figure out that the way it works can never produce something so vast and yet utterly consistent like the universe just by thinking to itself, solipsism is going to go away.

Science is that and breaking the limitations involved with previous understanding, so really it's neither. It's just a way to understand a small part of world, which is still literally incomprehensible

It's literally quite comprehensible, as long as you use the right words. It's comprehensible with a very great degree of precision, actually, which is why we can have this conversation across thousands of miles through a medium that literally depends on things happening on scales of single atoms.

And... is that anti-intellectualism I detect in your words? Oh god please say it's not anti-intellectualism, or else I'm not going to be able to sleep

[Flying Dice]

I hope not, because one of the few lines of thought more poisonous than worship of intellectualism is anti-intellectualism. There's more to the human experience than logic and scientific rigor, but it'd be a hell of a lot worse without those too.

[Eagleon]

you can argue solipsism regardless of how much we learn

Actually, no you can't. When we learn enough about how human brain functions, and figure out that the way it works can never produce something so vast and yet utterly consistent like the universe just by thinking to itself, solipsism is going to go away.

There may be constructed something more powerful than the human brain. Two, perhaps, or 10^500. There, I just revived solipsism.

Science is that and breaking the limitations involved with previous understanding, so really it's neither. It's just a way to understand a small part of world, which is still literally incomprehensible

It's literally quite comprehensible, as long as you use the right words. It's comprehensible with a very great degree of precision, actually, which is why we can have this conversation across thousands of miles through a medium that literally depends on things happening on scales of single atoms.

It's comprehensible so long as you demand that non-falsifiable beliefs leave the arena of all of human thought, which are not necessarily wrong or even useless. I'm not saying that science isn't useful, but scientists can understand this without actually putting their fingers in their ears and saying the lord's prayer whenever something that isn't science is discussed.

And... is that anti-intellectualism I detect in your words? Oh god please say it's not anti-intellectualism, or else I'm not going to be able to sleep

Scientismists was not a typo. Scientism is not science, and rejecting, even fighting against militiant (i.e censorous) scientism is the opposite of anti-intellectualism. It is preserving a standard and a discussion about ethics and philosophy that science may not yet be fully equipped to handle - I see it in a lot of 'science enthusiasts,' who think that science is in the business of telling people not to think about anything but science, even speaking to and about scientists who are arguably in the best position possible to think critically about and around that thin blue vector.

[Sergarr]

you can argue solipsism regardless of how much we learn

Actually, no you can't. When we learn enough about how human brain functions, and figure out that the way it works can never produce something so vast and yet utterly consistent like the universe just by thinking to itself, solipsism is going to go away.

There may be constructed something more powerful than the human brain. Two, perhaps, or 10^500. There, I just revived solipsism.

Ha, but at this point it's not actually solipsism, you see?

Solipsism argues about your own mind being the supreme one, but if it's something else, and something more powerful, then it's not actually solipsism, it's software simulation...

Woah, we somehow have managed to re-rail the discussion! Yay!

[Eagleon]

you can argue solipsism regardless of how much we learn

Actually, no you can't. When we learn enough about how human brain functions, and figure out that the way it works can never produce something so vast and yet utterly consistent like the universe just by thinking to itself, solipsism is going to go away.

There may be constructed something more powerful than the human brain. Two, perhaps, or 10^500. There, I just revived solipsism.

Ha, but at this point it's not actually solipsism, you see?

Solipsism argues about your own mind being the supreme one, but if it's something else, and something more powerful, then it's not actually solipsism, it's software simulation...

Woah, we somehow have managed to re-rail the discussion! Yay!

It's still solipsism. Nothing about it says that we can't have a more powerful mind than we realize, or that our mind has to be completely physically realized in the 'real world' - what we perceive with biology may just be the endpoint of our perspective within a universe that we've created for ourselves using resources we don't know we have and a past that's inaccessible by our realized memories.

It sounds convoluted, but that's the point. You can always have solipsism or something like it. You can always say there's another turtle.

[Sergarr]

It sounds convoluted, but that's the point. You can always have solipsism or something like it. You can always say there's another turtle.

By that metric, you can also always say that universe doesn't actually has any laws at all and all "laws" that we see are just random chaos that just happened to look like it's organized.

Both the "upgraded solipsism" and "laws are a coincidence of chaos" have one common trait - they're both incredibly convoluted, complex, predictively useless, and they get increasingly more convoluted, complex, and predictively useless with each moment that passes on.

That means that we can safely reject them both and be done with it.

[Reelya]

Solipsism at its core only argues that we can't ever be sure of anything's reality except our own mind's existence. Cognito Ergo Sum. The "I must therefore be god" stuff is often refered to as solipsist, but that is only tangentially connected to the basic idea. As is said "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". The lack of certainty about what exists does not imply nothing exists.

Solipsism doesn't really make any specific argument that nothing is outside the mind, just that we can't truly be sure that anything is what it appears to be. It could equally well be us in a real physical world, or we are really disembodied and being fed imagery by a "God" as a series of tests/judgements, or embedded in a "Matrix" type simulation. Solipsism would argue that since we are only aware of what sensory signals our mind is receiving, then what's sending the signals could be anything and as long as the signals are the same you couldn't tell the difference.

The idea of Solipsism is compatible with whatever universe you happen to find yourself in, so long as a concept like "yourself" makes sense. Maybe in a post-individual telepathic world it will become out-dated, but it's valid as long as Cognito Ergo Sum is valid.

[Flying Dice]

Largely irrelevant, but

Cognito Ero Sum

sounds almost like pidgin Latin for "I'm sexy and I know it." 

[Reelya]

first one was a typo

[Eagleon]

It sounds convoluted, but that's the point. You can always have solipsism or something like it. You can always say there's another turtle.

By that metric, you can also always say that universe doesn't actually has any laws at all and all "laws" that we see are just random chaos that just happened to look like it's organized.

Both the "upgraded solipsism" and "laws are a coincidence of chaos" have one common trait - they're both incredibly convoluted, complex, predictively useless, and they get increasingly more convoluted, complex, and predictively useless with each moment that passes on.

That means that we can safely reject them both and be done with it.

Or we can enjoy them both and the stories they create.

I see a major problem with building rejection of any thought into our communication (and I say communication because the problem is much broader than just science) - namely, what if we're right, what if that thought is useful, edit:what if that thought is useful even if we're wrong, and what if that rejection creates a cognitive blind spot that removes our ability to recognize it once we have the resources? This 'useless' is as human a concept as any religious thought, and I think it's toxic to our capacity for both reason and creativity to ignore conflicting logic even when we are obviously capable of recognizing it. Mathematicians work with the mutually exclusive every day, hell, imaginary numbers, whose name was coined by Descartes ('I think therefore I am' Descartes) as scorn for being useless, have applications in circuit design. It's bizarre to have fear built into science when 'irrational' conclusions have already proven themselves to us as actually quite useful.