Alex Tsakiris and Tom Jump Debate Near Death Experience Sceicne |408|

Our allies and co-observers do not bear the knowledge of philosophy of science (skepticism) sufficient to stand up and and say "No - what you are doing is pseudoscience". Hence, one of my reasons for creating The Map of Inference.

TES, every time I read your posts I want to laugh - because you perforate the nonsensical veneer of intellectual competence much favoured by materialists with such verve. Sometimes I scarcely follow the stiletto thrusts of your arguments, but I don't care., Even when I am not certain what a word you have used means, I am still delighted that you have used it - and its meaning flies off to penetrate the blockish mentality of the materialist (which I doubt it will). I await an equally erudite response - which never comes.

I want to gently challenge your notion of pseudoscience and ask you to explain what you mean by it. My objection to materialism is not that it is employed as a starting point -- skepticism is not the only philosophical method - but that it is applied as an a/theology (a set of prerequisite beliefs that must govern all interpretation and to which all conclusions must be obedient).

I struggle to define science beyond a set of determinable methodologies accompanied by a necessity of 'making sense' of data according to beliefs about how the world works. I do not say 'knowledge' of how the world works because I don't think we have that. We have information that must be organised in relation to itself, but without a cosmic context (which can only be guessed at or inferred in rational terms) I do not see that we can call that information knowledge.

Of course on a mundane level where the context is defined there is different story. The master bread baker or the skilled mechanic employ approaches we must call scientific if they produce good bread and functioning cars. But they are not 'scientists' in the manner we are seduced into believing is the only valid meaning of the term - because we have heard the propaganda and manipulation endlessly.

Why is a bloke in lab coat with a PhD in the comparative textures of gnat's bollocks more of 'scientist' than a dedicated gardener or cook?

This is why I wonder what pseudoscience is. If we are talking methodology then it is either scientific or it is not - and nothing pseudo about it - its just crap methodology otherwise. If we are talking interpretation of data into forming knowledge I can imagine that the philosophical method employed to do so can be either strong or weak. But its either a proper philosophical approach or a BS one.

I am not even sure that materialism, per se, constitutes a philosophy. I have read materialistic philosophers with neither pleasure nor profit -because they seem to me to be merely obedient to the a/theology problem - you have assumed truths you cannot violate in inquiry or assertion.

For me then, all beings being equal, science is one of two things - method plus proper philosophy or method plus a/theology. I would agree that materialism is a pseudoscience only because a/theology is a pseudo philosophy. Here I might be considered to be a bit of a pedant. Philosophy is the 'love of wisdom' and this is very different to forming knowledge. If the boundaries of permissible thought are set before the game begins what is to be won save the realisation that the boundaries have no meaning?

You may have detected that I have no regard for materialism. This is not a personal animus. It is an empirical one. My life experiences absolutely, flatly and relentlessly contradict the foundational premises of materialism. It can be true and valid only if I am mad. That is to say I could not employ the precepts of materialism to my life and conclude that I am sane or rational. And since I am manifestly both where does that put materialism?

Pseudoscience or crap science?
 
There is a sense of wonder and resonance of truth in such events that needs no 'scientific' proof, or requires a different state of perception which the materialist do not have.

One of the things we miss in our appreciation of the good science does is that over the past 500 years or so so much been employed in the realisation of entirely material benefit and profit. The ways things are structured these days funding for 'pure research' as opposed to 'applied research' is grossly mismatched. Failing to fund research for 'its own sake' compared to the funding research aimed solely at the generation of 'benefits' (read profits) makes no sense. We need both.

The urgent necessity of humanity is framed in terms of responding to our existential challenges by developing technologies rather than questioning the motivating urges that are relentlessly preyed upon by makers and marketers. We are in that perilous situation whereby what constitutes a viable economy is servicing of wants rather than needs - and to make that economy work there is a whole industry dedicated to the stimulation of wants, and shaping them to respond to what makers and providers care to deliver.

Science, as we understand the term, belongs to that facile community of wanting far more than it adheres to the spirit of real need.

The Enlightenment severed our cultural connection with the divine and made it an optional extra, a matter of opinion. That also severed our connection with the notion of an inherent moral quality to life - so we moved to human laws - though the pesky notion of 'natural justice' persists - seems we cannot do without it. Strange, that.

Now we are slowly waking up to the fact that science and reason have failed to anticipate the complex chain of consequences that were once restrained by the native sense that some things are not good to do. Unless taboos could be defended by 'science and reason' they were considered superstition. The fact that they were formulated through deep wisdom and intuition mattered not at all because such sentiments were irrational.

So now, when the unanticipated chickens are coming home, what do we do? We ask the perpetrators to rescue us. Its not quite organising for pedophiles to counsel their victims and offer them therapy - but its pretty close. If we ask people to seek to consume what they need rather than what they want that virtually constitutes an act of treason against the common good. The only way we can lift people out of poverty is to induce others to want more of things they do not need. Really?

Wisdom might have a thought here. But we must remember that Socrates was executed for 'corrupting' the youth of Athens. He wanted them to think for themselves.

In his 2004 book Well and Good, the Australian researcher Richard Eckersley made the disturbing observation that it was almost impossible to live an 'advanced' Western style culture and avoid becoming dependent on the web of commercial transactions. Any idea of living for ourselves has gone. We are all part of the problem.

For me this is where the idea of wisdom comes in - the opportunity for self-knowledge. Its not a head thing. It is the heart that makes wisdom possible, because it opens us up to essential empathic connection. This is why Christianity was predicated upon a notion of love and not knowledge. And it is why the ancient mystery traditions are more about wisdom than science. Don't get me wrong. Science was hardly the ugly sister. You don't get the great Pyramid of Giza, the stupendous constructs of Baalbek, or the myriad other engineering marvels of human attainment, without having science firmly under your control. But they all served a purpose.

The fabulous cathedrals of Europe were masterpieces of the arts of the material world - but in the service of something higher. Now those same arts are employed in the service of commerce. Something has flipped. But whether that flip was misfortune or wisdom is a moot point. We do know, however, that the momentum is for a flip the other way - in favour of wisdom.

The sense that "There is a sense of wonder and resonance of truth in such events" seems to be stronger, even if the sentiment has scant words to give it manifestation. But enough? Can we now restrain our wants and bring them control via self-knowledge? And if we can, are we Socrates?
 
TES, every time I read your posts I want to laugh - because you perforate the nonsensical veneer of intellectual competence much favoured by materialists with such verve. Sometimes I scarcely follow the stiletto thrusts of your arguments, but I don't care., Even when I am not certain what a word you have used means, I am still delighted that you have used it - and its meaning flies off to penetrate the blockish mentality of the materialist (which I doubt it will). I await an equally erudite response - which never comes.

I want to gently challenge your notion of pseudoscience and ask you to explain what you mean by it.

During my years in Intelligence, I reviewed a lot of lies and crap (including inside science). There are differing levels of crap, and my job was to distinguish crap which emanated from simply obtuseness or abstruseness, as separate from crap which was emanating from agency. Bias is innocent, agency is not.

This was critical inside counterintelligence. Because, we were not looking for 'wrongness' or nonsense/meaninglessness per se - rather we were looking for methodical wrongness/patterned mis-sense (see Wittgenstein sinnlos below right green portion of the pyramid). Wittgenstein is an excellent resource wrt this. Two people may die at the hands of wrongness, but thousands can die at the hands of methodical wrongness.

In this same way, I define pseudoscience as not simply 'innocent obtuseness with respect to scientific method' (as a paranormal researcher might commit) but rather, 'mis-crafting the methods of science and useless correctness, such that my a priori argument will always win - while appearing to be impartial all the while (the methodology employed by a fake skeptic)'. Methodical Cynicism. Part of that agency (methodical wrongness) is indeed materialism. We fight not people being stupid, as much as we fight those who enforce their stupidity. So my verve :D you will begin to observe, is reserved for the poseur, and never to a person simply searching or being mistaken (in my opinion).

The key is to distinguish those operating in the right hand pyramid as separate from those operating solely inside the left hand pyramid. The four layers in green in the base of the right hand pyramid are the warning flags of agency. And the six mechanisms in red constitute the tools they employ. If you are bored some night and need to fall asleep, you can find a write up of my views on this (and the six mechanisms) at The Ethical Skeptic: The Tower of Wrong.

My material covering this, is actually used in graduate level intelligence schools now... ;) But it is posed differently - in that vernacular, and not in the vernacular of philosophy.

The Tower of Wrong.png
 
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We fight not people being stupid, as much as we fight those who enforce their stupidity. So my verve :D you will begin to observe, is reserved for the poseur, and never to a person simply searching or being mistaken (in my opinion).

Thank you TES. I get it. Its the intentional fakery, much in the same way there are religious fundamentalists who exhibit none of the virtues of their faith in their personal lives. Its the unethical rather than the incompetent.

I have to confess that I have lumped unethical (as morally incompetent) in with the intellectually incompetent to create common class of incompetence - in which some are twice blessed. But I can see the virtue in retaining a separation.

So I am curious about how you interpret the motivation of the unethical - and let's confine consideration to those malignant materialists who have risen to acclaim on shoddy foundations. Christopher Hitchens was, for example, a singular poseur who's grasp of religion was entirely superficial - and who relished the limelight his particular form of polemic attracted. His fans admired him because he framed their ignorant bias in a way more erudite manner - notwithstanding the reality that he knew bugger all about his subjects beyond a selection of well-rehearsed complaints about the bleeding obvious. This intellectual hero was really no more than a drunken showman.

I spent a few years looking into the claims of materialists and atheists in some depth. The intellectual foundation is threadbare. It quickly falls into metaphysical assumptions that seem to me to reveal a kind of existential angst I have great difficulty getting my head around. What would motivate a person to construct a deep personal commitment to their being no more to reality than dead matter? On the one hand I get the apparent sense of courage it takes to conclude that when one is dead that's it. But does arriving at that conclusion represent existential courage or an existential anaesthetic?

It is perfectly sensible to say that one should not weigh one's present life against the next. But the argument that one should 'live in the now' is hardly an argument for materialism, given the same sense is favoured by many mystical and religious traditions. And from a deep mystical perspective it could be that 'now' is all we have. But that focus does not mean there is nothing beyond it - and this seems to be the materialist's trap - you can't know - you can only guess - so why guess and then insist your guess is right?

The more I think about your notion of the poseur in this context, the more useful I find it. But what drives the poseur? There's an adolescent character to a lot of materialistic thought - rebellious against an interpreted authority. There is a kind of script that lays out the sins of Christianity that is repeated, indeed recited, by materialists as ground for their stance. Its is as if the only basis for their POV is a set of objections to Christianity.

I was entirely sympathetic to those objections. But the remedies were idiotic. I could get the objection to the Christian characterisation of God. But the remedy was not just no God, but also a different understanding of God. Landing on the 'No God' solution as the only right answer is the kind of neurotic pettiness you'd get from a teenager in the grip of the existential drama of puberty.

Some poseurs are just as intellectually incompetent as those they dupe, but many are not. Richard Dawkins is a prime example of a man who supposedly had a high functioning intelligence, but who persisted in talking complete bollocks. He assumed his half-baked encounter with a subject was equal to the knowledge and insight won from life-long dedication to inquiry. Again there is that adolescent character being exhibited.

So what's you take on the poseur?
 
I have to confess that I have lumped unethical (as morally incompetent) in with the intellectually incompetent to create common class of incompetence - in which some are twice blessed. But I can see the virtue in retaining a separation.
nice

So I am curious about how you interpret the motivation of the unethical

I'm curious about this as well. and it seems to me that we can never really know the answer... yet, it might be the most important question.
 
So I am curious about how you interpret the motivation of the unethical / Some poseurs are just as intellectually incompetent as those they dupe, but many are not. / So what's you take on the poseur?
I'm curious about this as well. and it seems to me that we can never really know the answer... yet, it might be the most important question.

It is the most important question, yes. Mind you, what follows is my speculation - and does not rise to the level of science, theory nor scientific hypothesis. It is a gut hunch... it must be critiqued hard and is full of flaw. Nonetheless, here is that suspicion. It is a triangulating inductive inference if you will...

Yes, of those we 'oppose', there are certainly the hapless who just think as they are told (the pretend asleep); and as well there are those who understand the method which spins their thinking and execute it loyally, but bear no understanding as to why they do it (apparatchiks or useless idiots). These two constituents constitute 99.9% of the control-minded among us. Agency exists and functions whether or not the participants know they are wallowing in it. And that principle is a useful artifice.

But there are also those in this play, I believe, who understand the why of what they do - who craft the policy. And here is the reason why I postulate this. My cat when I was a teenager was a very sensitive white longhair, with one green eye and one blue eye. These were not normal cats - they picked up on everything. This cat would sit by me in my bedroom when I watched TV (Mannix, Jeopardy, In Search Of, etc.) and she loved to be near me. Every fifth night or so, off and on, she would appear to sense something in the room with us. She would watch it, and hiss, and swipe her paw in the air - as if she was defending me. She would fixate on a spot in the room, which would move about, about human in height. Until she would become so terrified she would run out of the room, or insanely climb the walls and furniture and flee into the closet and hide, looking out to see if the 'thing' was gone. It was her fear which gave rise to my suspicion that something invisible, was indeed there.

Later in life I wrote a poem called The Eagle The Ape The Horse and The Lion

If your fear is the eagle, teach its young that there is no such thing as flying
If you fear the ape, imbue guilt into his love for the tree
If you fear the horse, establish the common sense that honor can be sought only in following
If your fear is the lion, cause it to believe that another more powerful lion is hiding in the grass:
And when you observe the condition of the eagle, the ape, the horse and the lion, know that someone is afraid.

It is clear to me that someone is afraid, both of us as humanity - our nature and/or abilities, and of some unseen virtual presence - which threatens it greatly. It seeks to exploit us in some desperate need/circumstance it possesses. It hides, it seeks control, it is reposed inside its fortress of last resort - a trapped animal. It is hissing and pawing at a virtual spot in our broad cosmology. And it will do anything, and kill anyone, and everyone - in order to protect itself. It is older than us, and it bears enmity towards us with a deep passion. Yet, it has become addicted drunkard to mutiplicity in suffering and blood, especially of that which is innocent.

A conflict which we cannot observe - which is based upon the artifice that one cannot awaken one who has been taught to pretend to be asleep.

It thrives upon religion and the artifice of human existential fear. It used to employ Abrahamism/Polytheism/Hell to accomplish this goal. But we are getting smarter - and something else had to be crafted to take the place of those religions - something which afforded them continuation of the shroud inside which they currently cloak themselves.

A New Religion - one which serves to completely neutralize any hint to their existence. A method of holding a hostage captive, without the hostage even being aware of such circumstance. Regarding all the while, their circumstance to be merely accidental. Absolutely brilliant in its offing - the blood of the innocent shed on epochal scale.

But just like an invisible toxic-radioactive alpha particle leaves a trail in an ionized gas cloud chamber... even so, their terror of SOMETHING, is what signals their presence. With each 'Pac-Man' below, the empty portion of the pie chart represents whole domains of observation they seek to obfuscate (see The Tree of Knowledge Obfuscation). While the filled portion represents each trajectory inside their assay of imperious doctrines. In this, we find intelligence through heteroduction - in other words what they point AWAY from, is more important (informative and probative) than what they actually point 'towards' (teach).

sol nihilism triangulation.png
 
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My cat when I was a teenager was a very sensitive white longhair, with one green eye and one blue eye. These were not normal cats - they picked up on everything. This cat would sit by me in my bedroom when I watched TV (Mannix, Jeopardy, In Search Of, etc.) and she loved to be near me. Every fifth night or so, off and on, she would appear to sense something in the room with us. She would watch it, and hiss, and swipe her paw in the air - as if she was defending me. She would fixate on a spot in the room, which would move about, about human in height. Until she would become so terrified she would run out of the room, or insanely climb the walls and furniture and flee into the closet and hide, looking out to see if the 'thing' was gone. It was her fear which gave rise to my suspicion that something invisible, was indeed there.
Some cats fear humans that they do not know - running out of the house, or hiding - even if they are perfectly harmless. I don't think you can jump to the conclusion that what your cat reacted to, was malevolent.

Were there any midges flying at the time - cats love chasing almost invisibly tiny insects!

Also, quite a few spirit/ghost accounts include fearful cats or dogs, even when the ghost in question seems to belong to a harmless, confused spirit.

David
 
Some cats fear humans that they do not know - running out of the house, or hiding - even if they are perfectly harmless. I don't think you can jump to the conclusion that what your cat reacted to, was malevolent.

No, that was not my point. :) I was not asserting that whatever the cat was afraid of, was malevolent - rather I was using second order analogy, example of fear as a litmus in exposing something real(?) which cannot be seen by those not equipped to see it. No evil to evil analogy was intended - per the last sentence of that paragraph.
 
No, that was not my point. :) I was not asserting that whatever the cat was afraid of, was malevolent - rather I was using second order analogy, example of fear as a litmus in exposing something real(?) which cannot be seen by those not equipped to see it. No evil to evil analogy was intended - per the last sentence of that paragraph.
OK - I agree that the fact that animals fear these phenomena is very suggestive - because they don't read ghost books or watch paranormal horror movies!

David
 
Falsifiability is an ignoratio elenchi construct in this context, yes.

It is a diversion, crafted from three valid principles of science, posed in an amateurish framework of rhetoric.

1. The task of science is to falsify the null hypothesis​
2. Popper demarcation resides along the dividing lines of deduction and induction (see below).​
3. Hempel's Paradox - one cannot inductively prove an absence (modus absens)​

The matter is the bootstrap strength of the form (vertical) of inference employed, along with the modus context (horizontal) in which it is employed. Most official pseudo-science, including imperious doctrines of absence (what we fight), is passed off as 'consensus' because of our lack of understanding of how inference works.

We are fooled by inference bedazzlement. That is, unless you prepare in advance - then you can spot a pretender posing agency, very quickly.

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Do you have a blog post or a book about that chart?

If you really want to test it ask Dean Radin. He has a fair amount of cross disciplinary science knowledge. Easier said then done, of course.
 
Do you have a blog post or a book about that chart?

Yes, you can find the blog post here: The Ethical Skeptic: The Map of Inference

It in itself really merits an entire book. So anything I have to say on the matter will be woefully short of what is needed. But to my perception, we are so far into ignorance as a planet, I am hitting on each of the couple hundred critical issues of philosophy in as ordered and comprehensive a manner as possible.
 
Yes, you can find the blog post here: The Ethical Skeptic: The Map of Inference

It in itself really merits an entire book. So anything I have to say on the matter will be woefully short of what is needed. But to my perception, we are so far into ignorance as a planet, I am hitting on each of the couple hundred critical issues of philosophy in as ordered and comprehensive a manner as possible.
Radin stated he wanted to write a synthesis of his life work. Not his exact words but close enough. Words cannot convey meaning without the right culture. But without trying to put it into words a great deal of knowledge is lost.

Thanks for the link.
 
Well, I know something, consciousness does not start at conception. Because I have a 24-year-old son that was frozen as an embryo for 5 years... and he lives. So there is that. He had to be somewhere.

Also, you could have many lives, it would be no more remarkable than being born in the first place. I'm kind of thinking consciousness is not local... in that I mean, we are meat bags walking around and I think we are getting some kind of input from outside this... this place.

And to the "atheist"... they taught us in college there was no such thing. BECAUSE, you would then actually be saying you KNOW there is nothing else. You don't know this, nobody knows this. At best we are agnostics. I'm going w/the guy that says we know maybe 1% because we are barely out of the trees frankly. We've been lied to all our lives with our media, education even our parents (who meant well I'm sure). But, we were not told real truths. I'm not sure I want to know the truth anymore. I've been finding out a lot of truths lately and I'm not real happy with a lot man is doing.
 
I'm going w/the guy that says we know maybe 1% because we are barely out of the trees frankly.
Welcome to the forum!

Yes - your approach is exactly right, because a conclusion that is taken to be definite because it is 99% certain to be true, and seems plausible, can then get used (maybe years later) to prove something rather less plausible, which is then used to prove something that seems unbelievable except to people who assume it is science!

The problem is that people don't keep long chains of reasoning in their heads, so they go on making implausible deductions based on what they think are rock-solid foundations.

David
 
It is clear to me that someone is afraid, both of us as humanity - our nature and/or abilities, and of some unseen virtual presence - which threatens it greatly. It seeks to exploit us in some desperate need/circumstance it possesses. It hides, it seeks control, it is reposed inside its fortress of last resort - a trapped animal. It is hissing and pawing at a virtual spot in our broad cosmology. And it will do anything, and kill anyone, and everyone - in order to protect itself. It is older than us, and it bears enmity towards us with a deep passion. Yet, it has become addicted drunkard to mutiplicity in suffering and blood, especially of that which is innocent.

This is an evocative and powerful expression of an idea. I am going to have to go off to a quiet place to give it the reflection I suspect it deserves.
If I wind it back I have the notion of existential trauma - perhaps the very idea of connection and belonging is too extreme. I do think there is a fear in us, born of injury that comes from abuse and neglect - even if they are not intentional visitations - how do we dare trust that a sense of a greater spiritual reality will not simply dissolve us or punish us?

I grew as a disobedient child to a deeply religious father whom used to seek to induce compliance with the warning that God would be angry with me. I had forgotten that, but I was dogged by a sense of wrongness about me that I could not put my finger on. On the first anniversary of my mother's death she visited me with a birthday gift (my birthday was the next day) and she told me the story . That triggered a flood of memory and I promptly wrote a short story called 'The Boy and the Angry God'. I was a changed man the next day.

How does the materialist trust that the metaphysical is at once benign and at once confronting? What creates malignant character but injury that distorts and impairs character? But in which life time? And how frequently is the injury visited upon the spirit?

So I do imagine that there may be those who are on the extreme end of malignancy - who do fear even the normal - which, in seeming to be unattainable, becomes the object of enmity. And the religious, or spiritual, expressing a deeper sense of connection, is loathed with a deeper passion. So when these seem to be irrational they seem to attack the desperate last refuge of order created by the intellect. That's a folly of course.

It is, as you say, fear,
 
For me this is where the idea of wisdom comes in - the opportunity for self-knowledge.
Yes, wisdom is under-represented and downright sidelined in conventional scientific practice and theory, I suppose because it is subjective and cannot be proved. It has no automatic correlate with age or even necessarily experience as there is wisdom in children. But like the term 'nitwit' which means to be wise about nits, to know all about them, it comes from 'knowing'.

I heard of a condition manifest in the event of individuals relating their experience during the African post-apartheid reconciliation process, whereby their truth was vindicated by the observance of a certain state, manner, way of speaking so that what was said was known to be true. It is not something one could verify by scientific analysis or logical deduction, which I agree has its place and uses but does not serve in matters of the heart.

(Re Socrates, encouraging thinking for ourselves might lead to validating the thoughts of materialist 'outsiders'!)

Self-knowledge is a great outcome of wisdom as leads to self-control, but what will serve a need to verify events and experience outside self-reflection? How can we apply a shared wisdom to affirm what cannot be proved, but 'only' known?
 
I think you should include a glossary of terms - such as Modus Tollens -in that article ideally using some sort of popup if you mouse over the expression. Most of us don't think in academic logic terms!

David

The definition of each mode is right above it in the table. For instance modus tollens means 'inferring to the negation'. The definition of each form is expressed in the crow diagrams down the left side. So a person 'abductively inferring to the negation' or assuming transference strength to 'abductively infer to the absence' - is a person/argument attempting to pull deception.

But I like that scroll over idea. I will check ;;/? - I am not sure if Wordpress offers that, but then again, I have never looked. Many times I will provide the link to the word or term or phrase right there in the text. But in the least case one can always look at the Glossary. It is available at a link on every page at the site.
 
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The definition of each mode is right above it in the table. For instance modus tollens means 'inferring to the negation'. The definition of each form is expressed in the crow diagrams down the left side. So a person 'abductively inferring to the negation' or assuming transference strength to 'abductively infer to the absence' - is a person/argument attempting to pull deception.

But I like that scroll over idea. I will check ;;/? - I am not sure if Wordpress offers that, but then again, I have never looked. Many times I will provide the link to the word or term or phrase right there in the text. But in the least case one can always look at the Glossary. It is available at a link on every page at the site.
I set down to read it properly, and needed GOOGLE to explain Tollens before I even got to the table!

It is a very dense post - at least for me.

David
 
Further to a couple of posts I made earlier, here's a Scientific American article that expresses some of my own incredulity about modern cosmology and points to its "big problems". Here's a tidbit:

After spending many years researching the foundations of cosmological physics from a philosophy of science perspective, I have not been surprised to hear some scientists openly talking about a crisis in cosmology. In the big “inflation debate” in Scientific American a few years ago, a key piece of the big bang paradigm was criticized by one of the theory's original proponents for having become indefensible as a scientific theory.
Why? Because inflation theory relies on ad hoc contrivances to accommodate almost any data, and because its proposed physical field is not based on anything with empirical justification. This is probably because a crucial function of inflation is to bridge the transition from an unknowable big bang to a physics we can recognize today. So, is it science or a convenient invention?
 
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