Thread: Problem of Induction

Originally Posted by Xei

The stickier problem is time, I guess partly because we can't see much of it. How long can we say that Saturn has been around for; and hence, how long will it be before we have no logical basis for saying that it won't spontaneously disappear? What does such an argument look like?

The spirit of science has only ever rightly been in degrees of certainty, so there's nothing really new being proposed. However, personally, the two things I lean toward being most certain are the unity of nature and hence, it's conservation, so the chance of Saturn spontaneously disappearing is a little on the extreme side, although not absolutely impossible in principle I suppose, we would just seek a new logical structure to encompass it.

Perhaps a more likely example might be that we can't expect the proportions in our equations of gravity to stay constant between Saturn and the Sun. Maybe it is possible that the strength of universal or even local gravity can be dynamical over time according to some unknown and so far unnoticed mechanism and one day it may make the gravity between Saturn and the Sun too weak for Saturn to orbit it, or make it possible for us to walk comfortably on the moon like we do on earth. Can we expect this never to happen just because our current equations for gravity have produced consistent patterns for our solar system so far? It may seem like the continuation of the familiar pattern could be said to be more likely than such a change based on past experience, but how sure can we be about how likely it's hypothetical dynamical nature will emerge in this point in time, tomorrow may be coming into an era where the change becomes more frequent or accelerates.