You're saying we can't understand the world through science?
Physical laws like the laws of thermodynamics are methods for predicting the future that we obtain by inferring them from what we've observed in the past.
You can argue that particular domains (like the global economy) are nearly impossible to predict with much accuracy because we are unable to observe many of the driving variables and the underlying causal structure is too complicated for us to comprehend the laws of the system's behavior. But to say that, in general, the universe does not allow forecasting the future seems really weird.
> You're saying we can't understand the world through science?
We're having a hard enough time as it is understanding the physical, inanimate world, when it comes to applying "science" to human endeavors the results are much less certain, approaching crystal-ball-reasoning. People did try in the past to do just that, i.e. to make scientific "sense" about what happened in the past with us, humans, with the hidden aim of trying to predict what will happen in the future. Karl Popper had a really good book explaining why that was a terrible idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poverty_of_Historicism):
> The book is a treatise on scientific method in the social sciences.[2] Popper defines historicism as: “an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim…”.[3] “The belief… that it is the task of the social sciences to lay bare the law of evolution of society in order to foretell its future… might be described as the central Historicist doctrine.”.[4]
> Popper’s criticisms of the poverty of the idea of historical prediction can broadly be split into three areas: fundamental problems with the idea itself, common inconsistencies in the arguments of historicists, and the negative practical effects of implementing Historicist ideas.
> iii) Individual human action or reaction can never be predicted with certainty, therefore neither can the future: “the human factor is the ultimately uncertain and wayward element in social life and in all social institutions. Indeed this is the element which ultimately cannot be completely controlled by institutions (as Spinoza first saw); for every attempt at controlling it completely must lead to tyranny; which means, to the omnipotence of the human factor – the whims of a few men, or even one.”.
And, to put it more generally, we do know that the Sun will probably die in the next 4-5 billion years, that is science based on induction, i.e. we saw that other stars similar to the Sun have lived that long in the past and so we expect the Sun to have the same lifespan. But this is not prediction nor forecasting the future, is really a very good guess. Science itself is a really nice and educated guess. The problem is that we're much better at guessing what will happen to the Sun, let's say, compared to what will happen to the stock exchange in the next 10 years or to who the president of Rwanda will be in 15 to 20 years.
> Only through previous observation can it be predicted, inductively, what will actually happen with the balls. In general, it is not necessary that causal relation in the future resemble causal relations in the past, as it is always conceivable otherwise
You're saying we can't understand the world through science?
Physical laws like the laws of thermodynamics are methods for predicting the future that we obtain by inferring them from what we've observed in the past.
You can argue that particular domains (like the global economy) are nearly impossible to predict with much accuracy because we are unable to observe many of the driving variables and the underlying causal structure is too complicated for us to comprehend the laws of the system's behavior. But to say that, in general, the universe does not allow forecasting the future seems really weird.