Posted: May 09, 2019 5:35 am
laklak wrote:Yeah it might exist. Nanobot aliens could exist. Might even be running around in your brain now and you wouldn't know it. Could be, eh? God could exist. Dragons could exist. Just because nobody has ever actually seen them doesn't mean they couldn't exist, right?
That's what Bertrand Russel's flying teapot is (tangetially) about. Also, Henderson's spaghetti monster, Sagan's dragon in the garage and the pink unicorn. You can't disprove the existence of any of them. They are unfalsifiable hypotheses. Of course you can't prove their existence either, and the onus is on the advocate of their existence to provide proof. Good luck to them.
My favourite story in regard to this stuff is John Wisdom's story of the invisible gardener.
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. "But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves. At last the Skeptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"