I responded to Yazata's post, above, in the UFO thread.
Posting the same message to multiple threads is a bad idea, and we generally discourage it. I'm not sure why we needed a repeat here.
But if we're doing that, well, here's my response again:
I think that speculation is something that both sides in this little war are doing. Both sides are hypothesizing about various sighting reports. (Hypothesizing isn't necessarily bad, it's a basic part of the stereotypical 'scientific method'.)
The problem seems to revolve around the nature of the speculations.
No. We're beyond that.
The problem is that your side of this little war keeps telling lies about what my side of this war claims (and/or believes).
As you rightly say, there is nothing wrong with tossing hypotheses around. Some hypotheses will not be supported by evidence; others might have more or less supporting evidence. This sort of thing is completely standard in scientific investigations - indeed, in careful investigations of
any kind.
Let's be clear: you are
completely free to speculate that the bluish light somebody reported seeing in the sky was an Angelic Being from God's Heaven, or a super-advanced aquatic alien spaceship from the planet Zog, or a luminous ghost remnant from the wreck of the Mary Celeste, or the planet Venus.
If you have evidence that points convincingly towards the conclusion that the light was, in fact, a luminous ghost remnant from the Mary Celeste, that's fantastic. (When I say "convincingly", I'm referring, of course, not just to what happens to convince
you, but what will convince the average disinterested scientist, say.)
If you lack good evidence for the existence of Celestine ghosts in general, or, more specifically, you lack good evidence that connects the particular blue light in question to ghosts from the Mary Celeste, then your hypothesis will remain a weak possibility at best. On the other hand, there is a lot of good evidence for the existence of the planet Venus, along with a lot of good evidence that the planet Venus often appears as a bright bluish light in the sky. So, long before we even
start to examine the particular circumstances of this particular sighting of a bluish light in the sky, the probability that the light will turn out to be the planet Venus is already
much more likely than that it will turn out to be ghosts from the Mary Celeste. Nothing in this
guarantees that it will turn out to be Venus, or that it
won't turn out to be ghosts from the Mary Celeste, of course. The only thing that will guarantee is if we are able to definitively
rule out one or both of those possibilities. Maybe Venus was not in the right position in the sky when the blue light was seen; in that case we would know it
can't be Venus.
It's interesting to think about what might prove that the bluish light was
not a ghost from the Mary Celeste, too.
Can we falsify that hypothesis, in a similar way to how we could potentially falsify the possibility that it was the planet Venus?
If we
can't ever prove that the thing
was not a ghost from the Mary Celeste, that probably means that the Celestine ghost hypothesis
is not scientific. The scientist says "Hey, I checked the star chart, and the planet Venus was in exactly the right place in the sky to correspond to the sighting of that bluish light! Sure looks like Venus to me." But then the ghost hunter says "It could just as well have been a ghost from the Mary Celeste hiding the planet Venus and appearing in the place normally occupied by the planet in the sky. Ghosts are tricksy that way!" Who's to say the ghost hunter is wrong, then? I mean, after all, we can't ever know
anything for sure. Right? (Descartes be damned.)
I guess that explaining something consists of reducing the unknown to the known.
In science it often amounts to coming up with a useful predictive model to describe the observed and repeatable phenomenon at hand.
UFO enthusiasts typically demand that UFOs be unpredictable and unrepeatable. It's almost as if they are designed to confound standard investigative methods. Funny, that.
So explanations will only seem to work when they redescribe some event in terms of the stock of concepts that are already accepted by the one doing the explaining or by those expected to accept the explanation.
As you admit just after this sentence, that's not true. There are many counter-examples from the history of science in which new concepts were required before a phenomenon was considered to be understood.
Space aliens seems to be a concept that some people are unwilling to accept, hence it can't play any role in explanations that they are willing to accept.
Maybe so. But you
know that none of
those people are talking to you here, in this thread, on sciforums. Because we have told you that we're all willing to accept the existence of space aliens. All we require is some convincing evidence for them.
We don't know what the UAPs are. (True.)
By definition. The "U" still stands for "unidentified". The ones that have been identified are no longer unidentified, obviously. We know what they are, because we identified them.
The stock of concepts that we currently accept as valid explanatory principles may or may not be sufficient to explain the more problematic reports. (True.)
There has not yet been a single case in which the stock of concepts we currently accept as valid has been proven insufficient for explaining problematic reports. (True.)
In some of the cases we lack sufficient information to make that leap either way based on anything more than what we already believe. (Certainly arguable and I think it's true.)
Hence "U" is for "unidentified".
I have no objection to hypothesizing about space aliens as long as the hypothesis is acknowledged to be entirely speculative at this point: If space aliens (or their artifacts like robots) are visiting the solar system, then they might be responsible for some of the some of the sightings. (Seems entirely plausible to me.)
None of the skeptics here have ever objected to this claim. As you know.
That "If" in bold type is doing a LOT of heavy lifting, there, though. Don't you agree? Especially because, so far, there are precisely
zero items of independent evidence that show that even a single "space alien" exists. If your aim is to prove that a UFO is a space alien, you can't just assume that the UFO is a space alien and rely on that assumption as evidence for the existence of space aliens. That's completely circular. What's needed is some
independent evidence for space aliens
.
But I'm more doubtful about arguing in the other direction: The argument that the observed sightings should be accepted as evidence that space aliens are visiting the solar system. In retrospect from the vantage point of a hypothetical future in which we discover the space aliens, it might prove from that perspective to have been true now. But I don't think that we should make that kind of leap today, given our current state of knowledge and knowing what we currently know. (Scientific discovery is a boostrap process.)
Is this you returning to the fold of sensible skepticism, then? I hope so.
So my belief is that the most rational position to take today is agnostic.
The rational position to take on
every question whose answer is currently unknown is agnostic. Welcome to the skeptics' society!
The observed reports seem to be consistent with an unknown number of possible explanations, ranging from the mundane and uninteresting to many possible explanations that we haven't even thought of yet.
Ghost fragments from the wreck of the Mary Celeste remain an open possibility, you mean.
Seems unlikely, though, doesn't it?
Space aliens is just one hypothetical possibility, and probably not the most likely one.
What's the most likely one, in your opinion?
The only thing we can say with real truth and justification is "I don't know".
Saying "I don't know" has never been the problematic feature of your posts on this topic.
Wilfully and knowingly seeking to misrepresent your opponents' position is the main issue of contention, for me anyway.
