Blog:Verum Electum
Empirical? Or Chosen Default?
This is in response to a question regarding the empirical merit of infinist thinking.
There are many questions that cannot currently be addressed empirically. This does not automatically favor one answer over another, despite what many scientists seem to believe.
Until we found evidence for additional galaxies, it was wrong to say the empirical conclusion was that was only one galaxy until others were discovered. Many scientists would disagree with me and would rather decide that their conclusion should be some sort of "empirical default." This tendency to crown an "empirical default" I have termed verum electum from the Latin "Chosen Truth."
Knowing that there is one galaxy, the one we inhabit, is evidence consistent with both the hypothesis that there is only one galaxy and the hypothesis that there are many. Before we had the means to establish that other galaxies existed, the only empirical conclusion we could draw was that our galaxy existed. It was not empirical to say there was only one and this postulate was proven absurdly wrong once our technology was capable enough to actually find out. You can see this same dynamic playing out again with, for example, the one versus many universes debate.
The Oxford paper "Dissolving the Fermi Paradox," for example, argued that when you look strictly at what we know empirically, the only scientifically sound stance is that we are alone in the observable universe. There are many proposed solutions as to why we haven't yet seen evidence for intelligent life beyond the Earth, and neither conclusion should be viewed as empirical or scientific at this early juncture in our civilization's technological journey.
Another such question could be whether one lives more than once. Empirically, you cannot say whether you live once or many times; you can say only that you are alive now. You cannot empirically say that you live for more than a single tentum or that you awaken in the same body between tentums. All you can empirically say is that you are experiencing existence now.
Verum Ex Logica, Latin for "Truth From Logic," is the best option left to us for exploring certain important questions when empiricism is not possible given current technology. This does not make our conclusions empirical but it also does not mean the opposite determination becomes magically empirical just because someone decided it should be.
Direct PDF Link for the Unpublished Book 📖
This book is a work in progress and no attempts have been made to publish it. It was not written for monetary gain, and any donations go toward helping these concepts propagate further across the branching timelines from this point on.