Science is an open system. Everything is open to being "wrong"/"updated". There is nothing that grounds the system. You must be always open that your prediction of unobserved things will be wrong. To actually believe that science will one day solve the great mystery of the universe is scientism.
Is there any stronger tool for rational truth seeking than the scientific method?
Observe. Hypothesize with falsifiable statements. Form experiments that could disprove the falsifiable statements. Observe. Publicly make falsifiable statements to peers capable and incentivized to disprove them.
How can this fail to lead us to truth that is as close to objective as possible? What greater method exists?
Anyone that has actually utilized the scientific method truthfully to solve a problem or to verify truth ought to be able to identify several limitations or even identify it's more obvious flaws.
It is merely a formula - a method to determine, what is to be determined, why and to what end ALL is Science - the method alone is nothing, method cannot be without data and a hypothesis cannot be without someone to make it and the knowledge required to make a hypothesis. Without logic and reason the method, data, hypothesis and results would be nothing. Without society to allow for and direct progress there would be nothing to hypothesize.
Science is the sum of all of that. The method is a tool - not even the most effective necessarily. The method with make a light bulb - if allowed 200+ tries. Other tools allow for more direct results.
Tesla who transformed Edison's power delivery system into something infinitely more useable and that was only the beginning of his demonstrating mastery of a whole new thing - much of his inventions couldn't come of the scientific method. The method could be used to verify his brilliance but wasn't the source of it.
Tbh, it's literally just predefined, recorded, trial and error - that's it. Just guess, try and repeat - according to the rules so it can be replicated by anyone, super simple really.
It's like a brute force password hack - not the sharpest tool in the shed, but an effective one.
This is a little bit out there from a rationalist point of view, but I think there are domains in which not all of the requisite concepts for the scientific method actually exist. An example that comes to mind is the nature of conscious experience - having spoken to a lot of meditators, for instance, I'm convinced that there really are commonalities to it that you can experience yourself by sitting down and paying attention. But I don't think there's anything to really falsify here, because there's nothing to measure!
You can't tell someone "here's this totally objective way you can pick apart your conscious experience into a bunch of statistics, and when you do change X I predict you'll see the statistics vary like Y". You can kinda just point their brain in a direction and hope that they experience it for themselves.
Another example, I think, is domains that are under optimisation pressure or control of some kind (like an ecosystem, or much more simply a thermometer). There was a post on HN a few days ago about causality, and how the standard statistical methodologies for determining causality kinda break down when you start measuring systems like this. Correlation is not causation, but in these systems causation no longer necessitates correlation either! Perhaps a different kind of epistemology would be useful here too.
Anyway, not sure this is making sense. Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
Reality/nature/the world grounds science. Whether it can all be figured out depends on whether that information is contained within the universe. Are you prepared to say an advanced civilization millions of years old doesn't know the "great mystery" of the universe? It's a little premature.
To date, but I doubt this is a law of nature. What prevents the next big discovery from being the final piece that grounds the system making everything else fall into place?
This is a semantic debate, but "science" is the process of finding those rules. If we find an "ultimate" rule, we're still using science. (Assuming science is capable of finding that ground truth rule.)
I assumed "open system" here meant there is no ultimate rule, implying science can continue indefinitely. This aligns with our experience so far, and it does feel right to me, but I don't think we have evidence either way.
I completely agree that the scientific process is our best/only tool for meaningfully advancing our understanding of the world.
