My title for this thread is somewhat "tongue in cheek" paradoxical. But it is meant to discuss things that happen that don't presently have an explanation.
Many things have explanations, but are the 'explanations' just speculative shots in the dark?
As I've said repeatedly, I'm inclined to perceive everything that happens as mysterious and only imperfectly explained, if explained at all.
Think of phenomena that science hasn't gotten around to explaining yet.
Right. Or for that matter, the question of what science
is and what it is doing when it (supposedly and with lots of fanfare)
explains something. What
are 'explanations'? What is being accomplished when somebody 'explains' something? How is whatever it is being done?
Or what is the relationship between 'evidence', 'truth' and 'reality'? What's up with 'belief' and 'knowledge'? We hear a lot about those kind of things here on this board, and I think that we all intuit that they are vitally connected to each other somehow. But can anyone really 'explain' their relationship?
Or linguistic meaning and reference. I say 'dog' and it's a sound I make with my mouth. Or I write 'dog' and it's some ink squiggles on a piece of paper. And there's that furry animal over there wagging its tail. So how does the sound (a Frenchman or a Spaniard would make different sounds) or the squiggles (same)
connect to the actual physical animal?
Those kind of as-yet unanswered questions (which have immediate implications (what is 'implication'?) in
all of our thinking) are the primary 'everyday anomalies' to my way of thinking: Voids, gaps, holes, lacunas. They can be multiplied endlessly simply by asking 'Why?' to anything that initially seems obvious to us. It appears that when we get down to it, we don't really fully understand (what is 'understand'?) very much of
anything. (And that will have implications down below.)
Below are two examples of a soap bubble suspended motionlessly in midair. In the video you can hear the comments about the occurence. The suggestion of a "glitch in the matrix" is mentioned at some point. I must confess this has me stumped. What is a plausible cause for this phenomena? Any thoughts?
I guess that kind of 'anomaly' occurs when something violates our expectations. The soap bubble to you, UFO's or cryptids (in the unknown animal species sense) to our so-called "skeptics". Something happening that seems to violate (A) what we expect to happen or (B) falls outside our beliefs about what
can happen. In other words, an (A) anomaly violates our expectations but nevertheless can be assumed to be entirely consistent with our broader "understanding" of "reality". The (B) anomaly would seem to violate our more fundamental metaphysical beliefs about what is and isn't "fundamentally real".
I think that anomalies in the first (A) sense obviously can and often do happen. What we expect to happen often isn't what actually happens. (Just ask any engineer.) This needn't suggest anything about whether these sort of anomalies (unexpected events) can be "scientifically explained" (whatever that means) or whether they contradict anything more fundamental.
Anomalies in the much stronger (B) sense may or may not happen. Seen one way, some "skeptics" reaction to them just seems to reduce to 'If X is impossible, then X doesn't happen in reality' (which looks like it might be circular depending on how the words are defined). But the initial premise (X is impossible) would be a strong metaphysical belief that will be hard to justify.
People try to escape that problem by reinterpreting (B) probabilistically. So science describes what has been perceived in the past to happen, so by induction we can expect the future to behave the same way. Hence something that violates the perceived order of nature (prior experience identified with the beliefs of science) will arguably be improbable by its nature. It won't exactly be
impossible, so the possibility of it happening remains. But it will be so
unlikely that it can safely be dismissed in favor of explanations that seem more probable. (It's Hume's argument against belief in miracles, repurposed.)
The smarter "skeptics" seem to favor this more probabilistic version, and I don't think that they are wrong. It's a good argument in my opinion. The problem I see is assigning the prior probability, the likelihood that what we humans today imagine to be the "order of nature" will hold inviolate into the future. I'm not convinced that any of us have any way of knowing that. It's more of an intuition.
So what should we do?
I agree with the "skeptics" that we should favor explanatory accounts that are consistent with prior experience. With "the order of nature" (as it is perceived to be right now) and with "science" (whatever that is). That means that it's (arguably) more reasonable to initially favor "mundane" explanations.
But equally, this argument acknowledges that we can't reasonably exclude the possibility that something new and unexpected is happening, something that violates "the order of nature" (as currently understood). So the issue becomes one of weighting the probabilities.
Is the prior probability of anomalous occurances really so low that any report of one can/should be dismissed with a reflexive sneer, with dismissal ("woo!") and with insults ("troll!")? Or is the likelihood high enough that reports should be received with a curious mind, open to the possibility of learning something new?
After all, if we can use induction (itself problematic) to justify setting a high prior probability for our faith in what we currently imagine to be the order of nature, we can also use induction to set it low (the "pessimistic induction" that notes that all past science has been incomplete if not totally false from the perspective of later science. Is today's science any different?).
So to
finally address your bubbles, I don't know what is happening there. That being said, I'm inclined to favor a mundane explanation that's consistent with physics as currently understood. I don't know what that explanation would be, but it's where I would look first. But not with a mind closed to other possibilities.
