[Bored chemist]

My answer here is that no one knows what a world which had taken a different path, a non-technological path, would be like.

Sure; we don't know.
But, if you get sick, do you go to the doctor?

A non-technological world could have many features, these of far greater benefit to humanity than what technology makes available.

We have a fair idea of what happens to people without technology.
Sickness, hunger and an early death
That's why we use tech.

[Janus]

Being able to design and manipulate matter on the atomic level, will be a huge tech revolution.  It could lead anywhere.  Cheap abundant elemental resources.  Atomic printer.  Imagine that.  A replicator.

So, you are saying that without science we would not be enjoying e.g. technology, and all the benefits technology provides?

My answer here is that no one knows what a world which had taken a different path, a non-technological path, would be like.  A non-technological world could have many features, these of far greater benefit to humanity than what technology makes available.   A technological world could, in fact, have resulted in a very poor, restricted world, even a harmful world, compared to whatever other possibilities are available to us.   We simply do not know.  And since we do not know, then I do not think we can make such claims about technology. 

I've got a pretty good idea what such a non-technological world would be like:  The vast majority of the population's main efforts would be aimed at just surviving and supplying the needs of a small minority that lived in relative luxury.
People who pine for " simpler way of life" seldom have had to live one.
Look, I talk from experience. I grew up on a farm, a farm. It was an 80 acre "subsistence" farm. Meaning it only produced what our family used.  Even then, my Dad had  to hold a full time job(In the Iron mines) to fully provide for us.  Now, if it hadn't been for technology in the form of a tractor, mechanical bailer, etc., he would have never been able to do both. Running the farm alone would have been a full time job.  My older brother would have likely never went to high school because my parents would probably pulled him from school once he got old enough to be a significant help working the farm (this is exactly what happened to my father; his parents pulled him out school after the 8th grade in order to help with their farm.)
Later, when I was in high school my parents had sold the farm and moved to a smaller (still rural) piece of land.  They also chose to heat the house by wood stove (cheaper than oil, even though the house was equiped with an oil furnace.  This in turn meant that I spent a good part of my "free time" helping Dad make firewood. I didn't get to spend my summers or even weekends, running around, hanging out with friends etc.  If we had to do this without gas powered chain saws for felling trees and sawing up the felled trees, and had to rely on just hand powered means, the demands on my time would have increased even more (most likely I wouldn't have been able to even participate in sports at school either).   And this was just to heat our house in what was a fairly moderate climate.

Besides that, we have a great deal of evidence what life in a low-technological* society is like, as humanity has spent the majority of its history in this state.

For a truly non-technological society, you would have to go all the way back before the first person shaped a rock to use as a tool; as anything deliberately fashioned to do a job is "technology", regardless of how primitive it is.

[alancalverd]

Jimmy Doherty (Jimmy's Farm, Jamie Oliver, etc) made the point very simply, standing in a market in Uganda. He said "80% of the Ugandan population work on the land, but there isn't enough food for everyone. Less than 2% of the UK population work on the land, and the shops are full."

The Ugandan climate is like ours but better - more predictable rainfall and a bit warmer, with much less seasonal variance in daylight and temperature.

The difference is technology.

[Janus]

Jimmy Doherty (Jimmy's Farm, Jamie Oliver, etc) made the point very simply, standing in a market in Uganda. He said "80% of the Ugandan population work on the land, but there isn't enough food for everyone. Less than 2% of the UK population work on the land, and the shops are full."

The Ugandan climate is like ours but better - more predictable rainfall and a bit warmer, with much less seasonal variance in daylight and temperature.

The difference is technology.

A significant contribution to the ending of the period commonly referred to as the "Dark Ages" was the development for the metal plow; with which, a single farmer could cultivate much more land than he could with a wooden plow.

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

Observe, hypothesise, test. It all begins with personal experience - the observation. It takes a person to make a hypothesis. It needs a person to do and evaluate the test. It is all about personal experience!

Scientific experiments are nothing to do with personal experience.  Yes, I agree it is an experience, a personal experience for each individual, to carry out a scientific experiment.  But the crucial thing for science is that every other person must be able to repeat that experiment and, as it were, get an identical experience.    So, there is nothing personal about it at all.  Science, indeed, rules out the personal in favour of the communal. 

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

But they can't both be false- there are lupins or there aren't.So your idea that "if a statement is not proved right, it must be false " can't be right.

Yes, you are correct.   

(You may have noticed that I did modify my position and talk about Not Proven rather than true or false, but to take this a little further, it is immaterial.  For if any scientific theory IS true, it is purely by chance and there is no way of knowing.  But further, if you apply a little statistics to the situation, you will find that in the very large, complex world we live in, the odds against hitting the jackpot i.e. the odds against coming up with a true theory are very, very considerably worse than the odds of winning at roulette. Therefore we can assume that by far the majority of scientific theories are false. )

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

Let me give you another level of truth: "Good enough for all practical purposes".

I have already suggested that some of you scientists are failing through a lack of knowledge of philosophy.  In this case I would suggest that you take time to learn something of “American Pragmatism” and how it compares to “British Empiricism” and “Continental Platonism”.  And I would just say here that the very fact that the various countries have opted for different approaches to dealing with life is evidence that the jury is out on all these methods. 

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

Okay, so you don't like that science can only give us theories and not absolute truth. That being said, what do you suggest we replace science with? What system do you propose that can give us the whole truth on issues that science can only give us approximations of?

There are many options that have been explored by philosophers but the only one that has been really pursued, as far as I am aware, is the scientific method.   You might therefore wish to, at the very least, try out some of the other methods to see if they are any better.  However, that said, the reason philosophers cannot come up with answers or truths any more than scientists can is because both scientists and philosophers adopt the same basic flaw: a hostile attitude.  And I think it is this flaw that is responsible for both their failures. That is, you are out to shoot things down, to criticize, to compete and only whatever can survive the very hostile conditions is accepted. 

I suggest that the very opposite approach would be the correct way to deal with the world.  That is, accept everything uncritically.  Believe everyone.  Your job then would be e.g. to wonder why, say, somebody tells you that they have seen flowers falling out of the sky on numerous occasions.  You have never experienced this.  You might one day even be standing next to this person when they claim to be seeing flowers falling out of the sky.  But you do not call that person a liar.  You ask the question: How can somebody be perceiving flowers falling out of the sky and I am right beside them and yet these flowers do not form part of my perception?

[Bored chemist]

I suggest that the very opposite approach would be the correct way to deal with the world.  That is, accept everything uncritically.  Believe everyone. 

Would you  like to buy London bridge?
Also, I have a Nigerian prince you might want to talk to.

[alancalverd]

A significant contribution to the ending of the period commonly referred to as the "Dark Ages" was the development for the metal plow; with which, a single farmer could cultivate much more land than he could with a wooden plow.

The Egyptians, Greeks and Chinese has iron-shod ploughs long before the Romans destroyed western civilisation.

[alancalverd]

But the crucial thing for science is that every other person must be able to repeat that experiment and, as it were, get an identical experience.

In principle, yes. In practice, no. The whole point of writing scientific textbooks, compiling engineering data, or taking rock samples from the moon, is to avoid the need for others to waste time repeating a single, well-done experiment.

the odds against coming up with a true theory are very, very considerably worse than the odds of winning at roulette. Therefore we can assume that by far the majority of scientific theories are false.

Written like a true philosopher. (a) nobody ever claims that a scientific hypothesis is "true", only that it has so far stood up to scrutiny. (b) scientific hypotheses are inspired by observation, which shortens the odds quite a bit, then usually refined by reductio ad absurdam or some parallel process to suggest a definitive experiment.  And we do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants, who show us where or where not to look (admittedly some intellectual pygmies have exerted considerable influence from time to time, to the shame of all who found their hypotheses politically convenient) . Theories that are not founded on observation and are not testable, are not considered to be scientific. And as I have said before, the residue of explanatory and predictive hypotheses that have not been disproved by experiment, is called knowledge.

The Bohr model of the atom is a theory that does not stand up to scrutiny but does explain some experimental findings (that the atom is mostly empty and occupies a space much bigger than the nucleus) and provides a useful pointer to a more robust model.

various countries have opted for different approaches to dealing with life

You wouldn't get away with a statement like that in a scientific meeting. You might state specifically that European law has different axioms from most laws written in English, or that European social mores and school  curricula have been dominated by Catholicism, which is unlike Anglicanism or protestant fundamentalism;  but vague and meaningless generalities about "countries" and "life" belong in the septic tank of philosophy.

both scientists and philosophers adopt the same basic flaw: a hostile attitude

Wrong. Scientists are mutually hostile to bullshit. Philosophers thrive on bullshit and are hostile to each other.

[Kryptid]

I suggest that the very opposite approach would be the correct way to deal with the world.  That is, accept everything uncritically.  Believe everyone.  Your job then would be e.g. to wonder why, say, somebody tells you that they have seen flowers falling out of the sky on numerous occasions.  You have never experienced this.  You might one day even be standing next to this person when they claim to be seeing flowers falling out of the sky.  But you do not call that person a liar.  You ask the question: How can somebody be perceiving flowers falling out of the sky and I am right beside them and yet these flowers do not form part of my perception?

Please explain how this methodology would allow you to arrive at absolute truth.

[evan_au]

the odds against coming up with a true theory are very, very considerably worse than the odds of winning at roulette. Therefore we can assume that by far the majority of scientific theories are false.

I agree with you - just have a look at the "New Theories" section of this forum!

However, like the roulette wheel, we have a way of weeding out the good ones from the bad ones - the Prediction test.
- If you can reliably predict the outcome, you win
- If you can't predict the outcome, you go bankrupt
- And then you apply some statistical criteria to ensure that you know how likely you are to get the same answer by chance
- In medicine and psychology, to publish a result, they often require a "P-Value" of 0.05 or better, which means that there is less than 5% chance that these results could be obtained by chance.
- In nuclear physics, they apply a much more stringent test of "5 sigma".
- But the test of a good theory is that it keeps on predicting the outcome, in test after test

There seems to be no end of the theories to test, and some of them are winners; but in the casino, the house always wins, and the gamblers go home empty-handed (on average).

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

Besides that, we have a great deal of evidence what life in a low-technological* society is like, as humanity has spent the majority of its history in this state.

I can appreciate the difficulties you experienced on the farm.  I too have lived with hardly any technology.  However...….

The song I have quoted below describes our use of technology.

http://www.wordsforlife.org.uk/songs/there-was-old-lady

“There was an old lady
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don't know why she swallowed a fly - perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wriggled and wiggled and tiggled inside her;
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly - Perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady who swallowed a bird;
How absurd to swallow a bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly - Perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady who swallowed a cat;
Fancy that to swallow a cat!
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly - Perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady that swallowed a dog;………………………
…………………………..”

In the song, the old woman attempts to catch the fly by employing ever more extreme solutions i.e. swallowing bigger and bigger animals.  Finally, she resorts to swallowing a horse.  The outcome?  She died, of course.

People use technology to try to solve a problem.  The technology they use to solve that problem creates even more problems.  These additional problems are then tackled with even more technology resulting in a third set of new problems.  In other words, the more technology is employed to solve problems the more problems it actually creates.  Thus the use of technology creates a vicious circle: one set of problems is superseded by an even bigger set of problems which in its turn is replaced by an even bigger set of problems until the whole technological edifice is so riddled with problems that it  teeters on the brink of collapse. 

That is what is happening now.  For example, the more my local library uses technology, the more problems I experience as a user of that service.  Airline computers have made the headlines recently e.g. when BA’s computers went down for something like 3 days.  The banks have problems with computer security, as do web based companies e.g. yahoo.  (And these are only the problems we know about.)  Technology is becoming more and more unreliable and breaks down more frequently.  I noticed this in particular when I was in hospital.  The nurses spent more of their time attending to the extremely temperamental technology which left them precious little time to attend to their patients, i.e. the nurses were nursing the technology rather than the patients.

We are building a society that is ever more dependent on technology, including the internet.  This is clearly unsustainable.  When the tipping point comes, the whole lot is going to come down.  I do not think that tipping point is very far away. 

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

Jimmy Doherty (Jimmy's Farm, Jamie Oliver, etc) made the point very simply, standing in a market in Uganda. He said "80% of the Ugandan population work on the land, but there isn't enough food for everyone. Less than 2% of the UK population work on the land, and the shops are full."

Our prehistoric human ancestors managed without technology.  The birds in my garden manage without technology. 

In fact, one of the problems created by our use of technology is world over-population.  So, I suggest that it is technology that has created the problem whereby Ugandans do not have enough food. 

In the UK, although we have enough food, I think that is misleading.  Why do we have enough food?  I suggest it is due to the (mis-)use of technology i.e. we are forcing the land into over production to feed an over populated country.  That cannot be sustainable.  It is yet another problem caused by technology that is going to have to be solved before too long – and hopefully not by “swallowing a horse”.  (I refer to an earlier post referencing our mis-use of technology, using The Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly” as an analogy to describe what is really going on.)

[Bored chemist]

Our prehistoric human ancestors managed without technology.

"Managed"- only just, and with huge mortality.

So, I suggest that it is technology that has created the problem whereby Ugandans do not have enough food. 

No
https://borgenproject.org/top-10-facts-about-hunger-in-uganda/

[alancalverd]

There is indeed a problem with looking for technological solutions to trivial problems, and the Boeing 737MAX exemplifies one - using a computer to correct a quirk that can be solved by proper training or redesign to eliminate it altogether. Long ago we used to say "to err is human, but to really screw things up, you need a computer..."  The dumbest autopilot can get you into trouble even when it's working properly. I think there is an underlying problem in education: kids are taught that computers know everything and are ultimately in charge, but it ain't so: technology is a tool to be used when you want it.

But that isn't the case in agriculture. A friend has a collection of interesting  sheds on his farm, where guys maintain and rebuild beautiful old warplanes, but the prize exhibit is a 1939  Ford Ferguson tractor, the weapon that won WWII.

There's the difference. Using machines to replace muscle power is undeniably the key to a good life, but using machines to replace brain power isn't.  Garden birds may survive a generation without technology, but crows and thrushes use simple tools and Australian hawks use fire to drive their prey out from cover. 

[Bored chemist]

1939  Ford Ferguson tractor, the weapon that won WWII.

The Germans had tractors too.
What they didn't have was magnetron radars.

[syhprum]

They did have cavity magnetrons somewhat later in the war after they found them in downed aircraft and Siemens built copies.
Like many war winning technological marvels that each side developed they had little effect on the outcome of the war. 

[Kryptid]

I'm still waiting for the answer to this question:

Please explain how this methodology would allow you to arrive at absolute truth.