Does that ‘uniformity’ apply to the distribution of material in the universe? How about the distribution of material and life on earth? They may be ‘random’ but they are not uniform! (Unlike my perception of Brownian motion.)
Depends on the circumstances. But for where an ontological statement is not being made, it is an ontological statement to say how it should model.
We see a non-random distribution of matter in our solar system. The mechanism we ascribe to that non-random distribution is gravity.
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In what way is it an ontological statement? We can use the classic experiments on random mutations as an example. It was observed that the same number of mutations for antibiotic resistance occurred in the absence of antibiotic as it did in the presence of antibiotics. There was no statistical difference between the two groups. From that, we conclude that the potential benefit of the mutation had no discernable impact on how often the mutation occurred. How is that ontological in nature?
If you can’t speak to the circumstances or prior conditions, how can you come up with a model of what outcome there should be?
EM noise as an undirected outcome is something I am better able to consider.
What if you can speak to the circumstances or prior conditions?
Then this would be an ontological statement… that is correct, isn’t it?
That’s what I am asking you.
“It is an ontological statement to say what a random outcome should look like.”–heymike3
I am asking why that is the case. I don’t see why getting a 50/50 outcome from 1 million coin flips is an ontological statement. Can you explain?
It’s when you say you should get a 50/50 outcome, even generally speaking, because to be exactly 50/50 would be an incredible coincidence for 1 million flips… I wonder if you could get that 1 time out of 1 million attempts.
More like what would an undirected outcome look like:
Uniform, chaotic, or both?
But what makes it an ontological statement?
By saying what the outcome should be
Then science is as ontological as saying 1 million flips of a coin should give close to a 50/50 distribution. I can live with that.
I feel stupid asking this, but what happens when the outcome trends uniformly in one direction or the other? Does that mean you are getting better at flipping a coin?
You could certainly entertain the hypothesis that there is a bias in your flipping method. There are many hypotheses that could be tested. That’s science.
You would also have to couch your results statistics. What is the probability that you would see a departure from a perfect 50/50 distribution given the number of trials? This is where a normal distribution comes into play.
All standard statistical stuff.
Added in edit:
I happened to find a great website that does a great job describing the distribution of coin flips. Thought it might be useful to people reading this post later on:
In other words you can come up with a novel testable prediction for an explainable phenomenon.
I’m also reminded that you cannot make predictions about an unexplainable phenomenon
More to the point, you could come up with experiments.
Then you are saying that we can’t do science. If something is unexplained then you are saying that we can’t produce hypotheses to test potential explanations. That seems kind of ridiculous given that scientists do this very thing every day.
Sure you can; for instance, I predict that phenomenon X, which is currently unexplainable, will be completely explained in 10 years.
You can’t do science if the phenomenon is unexplainable due to it not having a cause. The phenomenon may be currently unexplainable, but is not by itself unexplainable, so there are two senses that a phenomenon is unexplainable.
First, how do you determine if something does not have a cause?
If it has a cause then science can take something that is unexplainable and potentially find an explanation, correct?