Quote:
Originally Posted by The Man
Quote:
Originally Posted by apathist
You identify the problem. We don't know how to detect the existence of SE, so all we get is opinion.
So what sort of evidence should we look for now? Hence the thread title. Doesn't it seem strange to you that there is something we know exists and yet we have no way of showing whether it does or not?
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No, it doesn't seem strange to me at all, because there are plenty of other things we know exist but can't explain or have never even observed. We have no idea what dark matter or dark energy are and have never even observed them, but scientists are largely certain that they both exist, because otherwise, large percentages of the universe's mass and the expansion of the universe respectively are completely unaccounted for. Similarly, we know gravity exists, but we're still not certain why (relativity posits that it's a distortion of the spacetime field, but as far as I understand, it's still not understood why mass would distort the spacetime field, and relativity only provides a large-scale explanation that completely breaks down when one attempts to do calculations about small gravitational interactions. It's also hypothesised that gravity is caused by as yet unobserved, massless particles called gravitons). Human perception, in addition to being incredibly imperfect, has yet to come up with satisfactory explanations for a large number of everyday phenomena. |
We can demonstrate that gravity exists. How do we demonstrate that a thing has feelings?