The word 'Unidentified' in 'UFO' seems to be very observer-specific, things that particular observers couldn't identify to their own satisfaction at the time, given the information that they had available.
Actually, "unidentified" is the label that tends to cling to cases where
many observers are not able to quickly make a positive identification of what was seen/reported.
"Unidentified", of course, is different from "unidentifiable", as Yazata correctly pointed out:
'Unidentified' shouldn't be confused with 'unidentifiable'. There need be no implication that the observation couldn't be identified if more information became available.
But then he goes on...
But that being said, I'm skeptical about the assumption that all observations are identifiable in principle, only provided that enough information becomes available. I said something like that earlier in the thread and JamesR predictably jumped on it.
I haven't checked back to what I might have written way back in this thread that is now approaching the 7000th post.
We humans like to categorise and label things. With sufficient data, most things turn out to be things that we have already catalogued and labelled in the past. On the rare occasion when we discover something that is new to science, that thing is typically given an immediate label. Its defining characteristics are noted, so that we can easily identify other things that fall within the same, new, class of now-known things. We are organisers of knowledge, by our nature.
We even already have categories for things that have not yet been confirmed to exist. Alien spaceships is one of those. That is, despite nobody ever having confirmed the existence of any actual alien spaceship, we human beings nevertheless have some
expectations of certain features of an alien spaceship that we expect we will observe, if we ever find one in practice. For instance, we expect that alien spaceships will be able to operate in space, while keeping any occupants safe and healthy. We expect that alien spaceships will have some means of propulsion and guidance, and so on, and so forth. In fact, this is why we can say with confidence that there has never yet been a confirmed instance of an actual alien spaceship (as "defined" by this set of expectations of the class).
There are literally thousands upon thousands of scientific discoveries in which previously unobserved entities have been catalogued and given names. At the same time, characteristics have been carefully recorded, so that we can recognise other instances of the same class in future.
In light of this, it doesn't make a lot of sense to posit the existence of observations that are "unidentifiable in principle", as Yazata does. Either an observation is a result of something already known, or it is a result of something new to science. There is no other alternative. In the case of things already known, we "merely" have to go through the list of established characteristics to identify the thing. In the case of truly new things, our job is merely to label, categorise, catalogue and describe the characteristics, after which the new thing becomes "known" and we can presumably identify other things that fit into the "new" class of known things.
There are two caveats to this. The first is one that has already been conceded: that insufficient access to suitable data might make the identification of a thing ambiguous or impossible in practice (though not in principle, which is a different matter). The second is that giving something a label obviously does not mean that we immediately know
everything about it. Lots of new things require many repeated and careful observations to properly characterise them. Typically, broad categories tend to get expanded upon, becoming more specific after further study of more instances of the more general class. But this, again, reduces to a problem of having access to sufficient data, so really it is just an expansion of the first issue.
It is worth noting - again - that we already have labels for things like "ghosts", "alien spaceships", "telekinetic mind powers", "zombies" and much more, even though no actual examples of any object in any of these categories have yet been confirmed to exist. In principle, it will be possible for us to identify a zombie, if we ever come across one.
Perhaps Yazata can enlighten us as to what an "in-principle unidentifiable" thing might be like. I'm struggling to envisage such a thing.
It's like the line about "alternative medicine" that goes like this: alternative medicine is medicine that has either not been proved to work, or that has been proved not to work. As soon as an alternative medicine has been proved to work, the "alternative" label is no longer needed; it's just "medicine" from then on.
Similarly, once a "UFO" is confirmed to be something - a weather balloon or an alien spaceship, say - then the label "UFO" is no longer needed for that thing, because we then have a much better descriptor available.
But it seems to me that identifying/explaining (are those the same thing?) something might exceed the cognitive powers of the being trying to produce the explanation. We just accept that all other animal species besides ourselves are in that position. But if that's true for other animals, what justifies the assumption that human beings are uniquely positioned cognitively to identify/explain/provide an account for everything in reality? There seems to me to be a bit of hubris in making that assumption.
Identifying and explaining are two different things. Identifying merely means recognising that the thing is a recognisable instance of a previously-established class of things. A dog can no doubt identify a jet aircraft. Explaining it is another matter.
It is conceivable, I suppose, that if we were ever to be shown an actual example of an alien spaceship, then explaining how its propulsion system works
might be beyond the intellectual capacity of any human being. To me, that seems less likely than human beings merely having some catching up to do on the relevant technological or scientific principles involved in the system's operation, before we come to understand it. But to
identify the propulsion system, after we had seen enough examples of it, strikes me as much more tractable problem. Most people don't understand how their laptop computer actually works, but they are nevertheless more than capable of recognising a laptop computer when they see one, quite apart from being able to use that computer productively to carry out numerous tasks. Identifying a laptop is easy. Explaining it is difficult.
Bear in mind that, with UFOs, identification seems like the easy problem, in principle. But we haven't even got to first base on that. Makes you wonder, does it not?
One side seemingly has the self-appointed mission of reducing everything to "the mundane", which seems to effectively be the claim that the conceptual categories that we use for everyday life (or perhaps the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary science some might insist) are sufficient to explain everything that anyone observes in the sky or anywhere else.
At this point in this thread, this mistake can no longer be put down to mere ignorance on Yazata's part. No, this is a deliberate, calculated attempt to mischaracterise the position espoused by every skeptic in this thread.
The only remaining question is: what motivates Yazata to keep pushing this lie? The hint probably lies in what he wrote next:
And the "ufo nuts" (of the more stereotypical sort, none of whom seem to be present in this thread which is seemingly directed at battling a straw-man) seem to want to reduce many/most UFO sightings to alien visitations and often to spaceships of some sort. (The defects of that view are even more obvious. Though it should perhaps be pointed out that spaceships and alien visitations don't in themselves contradict science.)
My impression is that Yazata thinks that his own view on the mysterious nature of UFOs is more sophisticated than that of the run-of-the-mill "alien spaceships" enthusiast.
I think that, really, Yazata is a "UFO nut" himself, insofar as he wants to believe that mysterious things exist that are inaccessible to human understanding, even in principle, and that the category "UFO" is likely to include some of those things. This kind of wishful thinking is not fundamentally different than Magical Realist's fervent wish that an unknown superhuman species with advanced technology lives at the bottom of Earth's oceans.
The problem is not in the wishing. The problem lies in wanting your wish to be real to such an extent that you're willing to ignore actual evidence to the contrary, to distort actual evidence to make it better conform to the wish, and to fail to accept the possibility that your wish might not turn out to be true (i.e. to fail to keep an open mind and follow the data wherever it leads). Secondary symptoms are things like failing to acknowledge reasonable counter-arguments to one's wish, telling knowing lies about the counterarguments, failing to engage with real counterarguments (instead responding only to straw man versions), and other kinds of self-protective behaviour (to shield one's precious wish from undesired real-world impacts).
