Leisurely chatting: Can you tell from "Chao Wen Dao" that Liu Cixin has a Gnostic tendency?

Originally, this was a comment on Si Guyuan 's article ""Chao Wen Dao" and Gnosticism: Liu Cixin's Scientific Concepts , but recently I have rarely written so many words in my spare time, so I thought about it and thought I should sort it out. Being independent is mainly for the sake of chattering.

The original text can actually be divided into two parts: the first part is to demonstrate that Liu Cixin's "Chao Wen Dao" and "Rural Teacher" and other science fiction contain Gnosticism; The "question-answer" model embodied in this novel is to demonstrate the gnostic feelings of these older generation of science fiction art workers (at least Liu Cixin) due to the specific historical environment they are in, and it can even be said that they share a gnostic religion.

As a sweet treat, the original text discusses that from Kuhn's paradigm shift framework and Popper's falsifiability requirements, even if the risk remover in "Chao Wen Dao" gives the answer to the ultimate theory, the earthlings can hardly put it treated as a scientific theory.

From a personal point of view, I have three arguments for the original text (Liu Cixin's Gnosticism, Liu Cixin's Gnostic religion due to the characteristics of the times, and the physical theory of risk-seekers. Earth people cannot be considered science) Partially negative.

The original text believes that the reason why scientists in works such as "Chao Wen Dao" and "Rural Teacher" are Gnostic is divided into two parts:

1. From the perspective of the earth, as long as scientists on earth have obtained the ultimate truth, they can leave the world with peace of mind, which is Snotti-style;
2. From a cosmic point of view, the alien civilization to which the risk remover belongs has given up on everything but the ultimate truth of science, which is also gnostic.

Combining these two points, the original text shows that Liu Cixin's "Chao Wen Dao" is Gnostic. Then, through other works (taking "Rural Teacher" and "Three-Body Problem" as examples) and "Chao Wen Dao" share the model of "scientists pursue the ultimate truth to solve specific problems", to prove that Liu Cixin himself is a Gnostic orientalist.

However, this logical chain actually does not make sense.

Let's talk about Gnosticism first. Although it has been clearly defined in the 2nd century and was also clearly defined by the Moses Conference in April 1966, its connotation is still changing. .

The Council of Moses defined Gnosticism as "the various sects of Gnosticism in the second century involving a consistent set of characteristics that can be summed up as: "The divine spark in man, originating from the divine realm, falls into this destiny The world of birth and death needs to be awakened by the divine counterpart of the self in order to be finally rebuilt. In contrast to other concepts of divine "fallen", this idea is rooted in terms of semantic definition on the notion that the downward movement of the divine, whose periphery (often referred to as the sophia or idea) has to endure into crisis and produce The fate of this world - even if only indirectly - it cannot be resisted, as it is necessary to restore the spirit world - is a dualistic concept in a monistic context, manifesting as a dual movement of fall and reconstruction. "

In fact, when Gnosticism is at its most generalized, you feel that everything in the world is Gnosticism, and it becomes "a shadow that pervades history, and you can dualistic, mystical, regressive, spiritual, anti-material, transcendental, unknowable, anti-traditional, esoteric, mystical, nihilistic, doctrinal or religious Extract the elements of "Gnosticism"." (This passage is quoted from Yao Pobao's Zhihu article "Into Gnosticism ⑤: What is Gnosticism" ) So the "Western Dualism Gnosticism" Author Ioan P. Curiano once made the following exclamations:

"At one time, I believed that Gnosticism was a well-defined phenomenon in the religious history of the late antiquity. . . . However, I soon discovered that I was still too naive after all. Gnostic, catholic writers are Gnostic, Neoplatonists are Gnostic; Reformation is Gnostic, Communism is Gnostic, so is Nazi; Liberalism is Gnostic, existentialism Gnosticism, psychoanalysis, modern life sciences, it's still Gnosticism; what Blake, Yeats, Kafka, Rilke, Prouske, Joyce, Muhill, Hesse, and Thomas ·Man, these people, are all Gnostic. From the very authoritative explanation of the North, I have further learned that science is Gnostic and quick letter is also Gnostic; power, anti-power and lack of power are all Gnostic; Gnostic on the left, Gnostic on the right; Hegel is Gnostic, Marx is Gnostic; Freud is Gnostic, Jung is Gnostic; everything and its The opposites are equally gnostic."

You see, Gnostic has been generalized to a situation where if you want something to be Gnostic, you can almost always find an angle to prove it is Gnostic.

So what is the difference between such a Gnostic and a Fenostic?

So, if we don’t want the whole world to be Gnostic and all thought to be Gnostic, we must limit Gnostic to a reasonable range. For example, a true Snotian idea should have the following These elements:

1. True knowledge, or Gnosis, or "Noth";
2. A dualistic universe, that is, the supreme upper bound created by the true god Bydos and the flawed lower bound created by the creator Demogo;
3. Man is God, but the wisdom "Sophia" in the human body flows out of the body, causing the fall of man;
4. The overall narrative is that people complete themselves and cease to be ignorant by acquiring North, thereby leaving the lower realm and coming to the upper realm.

If we only compare some of these elements with other theories or ideas, we can easily find that this "pseudo-Gnosticism" can be applied to many, many things, such as if we only focus on the pursuit of truth (ie. Satisfying elements 1 and 4), then almost all narratives that believe that there is an ultimate truth and that people want to pursue this ultimate truth can be identified as "Gnostic"; and if you focus on dualistic narratives, then Persia and Iran are Almost all religions of the source are also gnostic; if you focus on the blind and arrogant characteristics of the world creator Demuge, you can even say that Cthulhu is also gnostic; focus on North itself, The Stoics are also Gnostic.

This is the source of the pan-Gnostic phenomenon that Curiano is skeptical about: we cannot just extract some elements of the Gnostic narrative and classify all phenomena that have these elements as gnostic, which The result of this practice is that everything in the world is attributed to the Gnostics.

Therefore, we might be able to say that Evangelion is gnostic, which is not a big problem - Yahweh is Bydos, Adam is Demuse, and after Sophia is missing, AT is formed Force field, the human completion plan is to regain North to leave the world, and everyone enters the most complete state at the beginning.

However, are the alien civilizations and earth scientists in "Chao Wen Dao" also gnostic?

Of course, we can call the ultimate law of nature "North", although the true Gnostic North is definitely not the natural law of the physical world, but the ultimate truth of the metaphysical world. The difference between the two is like although Both are infinity, but one is an uncountable infinity and the other is a countable infinity. Or it can be said that to regard the ultimate law of nature as North is the same as equating Hegel's reason in "existence is rational" with the "reason" in ordinary people's daily life, which is called unreasonable. . The ultimate law of nature is Rutgers may be more reliable. Of course, if you insist on throwing the Nos in the first element from the colorless world to the desire world (this practice itself is very consistent with the setting of the world created by Demue), then we can say that we are satisfied with reluctance.

But what about the dualistic world setting? The characteristics of the universe in Chao Wen Dao do not possess this duality, and we can't actually see any Gnostic duality, that is, truth and falsehood, light and darkness, The opposition between the world and the nether, the opposition between the perfect Bydos and the flawed Demuge. In short, the universe of "Chao Wen Dao" does not have the "demogorism" that indicates that the universe in which civilization is located is inherently defective, so the second element of Gnosticism is not satisfied.

The only similarity between the "Chao Wen Dao" universe and Gnosticism lies in the existence of a "last round universe" that has learned the ultimate truth and a "current round universe" that has not yet developed the ultimate truth. From the perspective of Gnosticism, it does not constitute the relationship between the upper bound and the lower bound, because even if the civilization of the last round of cosmos really mastered North, it can only prove that the civilization has left the last round of cosmos and went to " The Perfect, Supreme Upper Realm", the universe itself in the last round was still the imperfect and flawed universe created by Brother Demu.

Therefore, this means that the universe setting of "Chao Wen Dao" itself cannot be considered to satisfy Gnosticism.

Moreover, this also extends to another point: we cannot say that the civilization in "Chao Wen Dao" is a "person" that satisfies Gnosticism, because even if the ultimate truth is North, there is no upper bound and Baidos, so If the universe itself is not created by the Nether and Demue, then even if "people" regain Sophia and leave the world, where can they leave? Death does not mean entering the world of Bydos - at least this setting itself does not exist in the world view setting of "Chao Wen Dao". If you want to set it yourself, it can only be said that your thinking is Gnostic, there is no way to prove that the original setting was Gnostic.

Therefore, the third element of the Gnosticism of man is not satisfied in Chao Wen Dao, that is, other works by Liu Cixin.

Finally, let’s look at the most crucial fourth element of the purpose of the overall narrative—Gnosticism believes that the divine essence and ultimate destination of man is to regain the North, in order to escape from ignorance and the world and return to the upper realm.

We have demonstrated this point before, and there is no relevant setting in works such as "Chao Wen Dao". Further explanation is needed here: not only does this request not exist in the setting, but it also contradicts the basic motivation behind the behavior of the scientist in the story.

In "Chao Wen Dao", is the goal of scientists standing on the altar of truth in order to make their essence supplemented by the ultimate truth and go to the upper realm? Or, simply ask: is the goal of a scientist to go to heaven?

No, it's not.

The essential motivation for the scientists in "Chao Wen Dao" to go to death is the yearning for the truth itself, rather than the yearning for the heaven to which they can go after obtaining the truth.

This difference in motivation determines that the nature and destination of the scientists in "Chao Wen Dao" are not the upper bound where Baidos is located. In fact, according to Liu Cixin's consistent setting for scientists, if scientists are asked to choose between "getting the ultimate truth and then going to heaven" and "getting the answers to the scientific questions you care about most and then never going to heaven", Liu Cixin will of scientists will choose the latter without hesitation, because even if the so-called paradise of the former really exists, even if scientists stand at its door to know its existence unmistakably, and the truth that scientists want to pursue (not necessarily North) In comparison, it's not worth mentioning at all - this is the background of Liu Cixin's scientists.

Therefore, the nature and destiny of man in Gnosticism is not only inconsistent with, but also can be said to be contrary to, the nature and destiny of scientists described by Liu Cixin (as well as a large number of other creators of science fiction works at home and abroad).

Therefore, we can now see that although the elements of Gnosticism appear in works such as "Chao Wen Dao" at first glance, it can be said that it has nothing to do with the real elements of Gnosticism—— The fact that the ultimate truth in science is the Gnostic North is reluctant.

In this case, it is very, very reluctant to say that "Chao Wen Dao" embodies Gnosticism, just because scientists want to pursue the ultimate truth and are willing to give up their lives for this, then say it is Gnostic? Then I can still say that this is Theravada Buddhism, Stoic, Hegelian.

If we want to discuss whether Chao Wen Dao is Gnostic on the premise of generalizing Gnostic to everything in the world, then the question itself is meaningless.

Therefore, we can say that it has been demonstrated theoretically: "Chao Wen Dao" has basically nothing to do with Gnosticism.

Well, even if we forcibly agree that "Chao Wen Dao" is Gnosticism, can we conclude from this that Liu Cixin or even the older generation of sci-fi creators such as him and He Xi are due to their special historical environment And is there a collective Gnostic religion?

also can not.

The original argument for this thesis is based on the following:

All of these people's works share the "question-answer" mode and the "ingenuity" mode (in fact, I think this can be called the "intellectual level mechanical seance" mode), and "Chao Wen Dao" is North Therefore, all these works can be considered to share a gnostic religious character, and the origin of this mass incident lies in the Chen Jingrun (the argument is "Dong Dynasty") in Xu Chi's reportage "Goldbach Conjecture". In Hearing Dao, the mathematician asked whether Goldbach's conjecture was finally proved).

This logical chain seems to be very clear, but in fact it is not tenable at all.

First of all, even if "Chao Wen Dao" is gnostic, can it be deduced that other novels are also gnostic by sharing the "question-answer" mode and the "ingenuity" mode?

"Chao Wen Dao" has at least the previous round of universes and the current round of universes. Although they do not constitute the upper bound and the lower bound, at least there is such a seemingly "dual" structure. But what's in "The Village Teacher"? Apart from sharing the "question-answer" mode with Chao Wen Dao, its commonality with Gnosticism is a zero.

So, logically, the original text actually does this:

Arguing that "A has property X" and "the intersection of B and A is not null", and then claims to have proved "B has property X".

Such an argument is completely invalid.

Unless, the "question-answer" model turns out to be Gnostic.

Why only mention the "question-answer" model here and not the "snapshot" model? Because the original text proposes that "The Village Teacher" is also gnostic, but "The Village Teacher" can barely be said to be in the "question-answer" mode, but it cannot be related to the "ingenuity" mode at all.

So, is the "question-answer" model gnostic? Or to be more precise, is the scientific model of "searching" in the category of "major crisis - finding a solution - finally solving the crisis" gnostic?

Obviously not.

First of all, it needs to be clear that the search mode is not exclusive to Liu Cixin and He Xi, nor is it exclusive to the older generation of sci-fi creators in China, but a narrative paradigm that may be used by authors in almost all regions of the world, and it is related to whether they are Having read Xu Chi's reportage, there is no necessary connection.

For example, in "Interstellar", the daughter who obtained the data through the future father in the wormhole to decipher the ultimate equation, is like this, the difference is that the original invisible source of knowledge is replaced by a tangible father. In fact, this process can be said to be a very standard search mode.

In "Stargate", the role of the scientist male protagonist is to crack the code. Although he is not involved in natural science, the mode is the same, that is, the search mode. And the way to find the password is also very "ingenious": I saw the starry sky photo on the newspaper that the doorman was reading, so I suddenly became enlightened. You said that he was seduced by a machine, no problem, so the problem was solved.

Even in the "Base" series, the quest mode and the "ingenuity" mode are very common. In the prequels, Seldon went for the question and finally got the answer he wanted. And isn't the inspiration brought by his granddaughter's spiritual power also an alternative expression of inspiration? We can even regard the last Daniel as the embodiment of Rutgers and North, because, anyway, the people in the two bases can't think of the answer, but they can feel the problem and want to know the answer all the time, so there is no solution. When Daniel was really stunned, the story came to an end.

If this mode is further loosened, there will be more such examples.

For example, in "Independence Day", the white male protagonist who is also a scientist suddenly thought of spreading the virus from within to defeat the alien fleet, which is also a weakened version of this process-the question he was asked was how to break the alien fleet. The energy shield of the fleet, and the answer comes from a word from my father: Be careful of catching a cold. You see, what a standard pursuit plus "smart".

This standard is reminiscent of every episode of "Detective Conan": the beginning is a question, the ending is an answer, and the solution is the standard touch-and-click brainstorm.

Therefore, I would not think that this model reflects Liu Cixin's or He Xi's understanding of science and scientists as Gnosticism.

In fact, relax this model, you can call it "ancient Greek heroic epic narrative" - with a mission, accepting the challenge of fate, going through all kinds of hardships, and finally grasping it when your life is on the line chance to win the final.

Yes, if we don't limit our sight to the so-called scientific field, but from a broader perspective, the so-called "Gnosticist narrative" here is the standard structure of ancient Greek heroic epics.

The difference is only that heroes rely on flesh and force to defeat monsters in the physical world and obtain endless treasures and glory; while in this type of sci-fi work, scientists rely on spirit and wisdom to defeat monsters in the invisible world and achieve glory - as for what can Can't save the world, this depends on the author's personal hobbies.

Isn't the so-called "question" and "answer" the tower guarded by the dragon in the eyes of the hero, and the magic weapon for how to defeat the dragon?

So, if the mode of quest is Gnostic, can I say that all ancient Greek heroic epics are Gnostic? What is wrong with Gnostic in myths and fairy tales?

Again, this is an overgeneralization of Gnosticism.

And if the "question-answer" mode of inquiry cannot be proved to be unique to Gnosticism, then how can other science fictions that share the "question-answer" mode with Chao Wen Dao? Is it Gnosticism? Are they Gnostic simply because they contain some sort of "ultimate truth" in the field of science? According to what she said, Indrassie was also a Gnostic.

The Gnostic is also too lenient.

Derived from this, in fact, the core question becomes: if a science fiction author decides to put a scientist in his work, how to reflect the role of the scientist?

If you ask scientists to compete with spies, the identity of "scientists" will become a dispensable decoration, and it will not have more weight than arranging a fitness trainer in a novel.

Therefore, if a scientist is to appear in a work, his/her role must be to solve the so-called "scientific problems", or to create some "scientific problems".

What is the role of the X-Files male protagonist in "Super Speed Evolution"? Is it to watch him show his ass? no. He exists to solve that problem: how to kill alien life. If the solution to alien invasion is not a scientific problem but only a weapon problem, then we will hardly see aliens in the works. For example, Uncle Cruise in "War of the Worlds" is not a scientist, because there is no need for it. , he only needs to be responsible for hardening (hiding) the aliens, and he does not need to think about how to use scientific means to kill the aliens (so apart from being mentioned in the narration, there is no scientist in the whole work).

Likewise, in "I Am Legend," the role of the female scientist on TV news at the beginning was to create scientific problems: I created a great virus. And the role of the male scientist is to solve the problem: I found the antidote. If these two scientific questions are not needed, have we seen scientists in "Zombieland"?

Since the appearance of the identity of "scientist" in science fiction works is to elicit scientific problems-whether he/she creates scientific problems, or he/she solves scientific problems-then in order to show the bullshit of this stuff, the author It can be said that there are only a handful of proposals that show this scientist's awesomeness in a range that is understandable by ordinary readers/audiences with no scientific literacy. However, the thunder-splitting mechanical serenity is the simplest and most common one, because no matter how ordinary readers/viewers without scientific literacy will always recognize in their mediocre life: this kind of thinking suddenly Thinking of a super awesome IDEA person, he is really an awesome person.

The reason for this is actually very simple: Bodhidharma faced the wall for nine years and attained enlightenment. For ordinary people, was the moment when he attained enlightenment attractive, or was it the nine years in front of the wall that were attractive? People's cognition of affairs is often focused on a certain point, and nine years are like one day, which obviously cannot be used as a memory point.

Therefore, the common trope of "a brainstorm" does not, in my opinion, account for any problems with the author's attitude towards science and scientists. It is just a very common storyline.

That is to say, neither the "question-answer" mode of inquiry nor the "intellectual séance" mode is a characteristic of Gnosticism. The presence of these narrative modes does not imply that the text implies Gnosticism, and the absence of Gnosticism does not necessarily mean that the text of the story does not contain both types of narrative modes.

At this point, we can basically draw the result: the second argument of the original text is that Liu Cixin's (and possibly others) novels that share the "question-answer" model reflect the Gnosticism of Liu Cixin (and possibly others) Religiousness is untenable.

Of course, this is not to say that Liu Cixin's creation was not influenced by Xu Chi's "Goldbach Conjecture" and other texts. In fact, almost all the scientists in Liu Cixin's novels share such a characteristic, and this characteristic does have a very high degree of coincidence with the portrait of Chen Jingrun in "Goldbach Conjecture".

The characters created by the older generation of domestic sci-fi staff such as Liu Cixin have almost a common feature, that is, except for the protagonist and a few important supporting roles, other characters are almost just symbolic and flat props, and there are hardly any characters. The arc, start and end hardly change. This is not to mention science fiction, even in recent TV commercials and even TV dramas. As long as scientists need to appear, they are basically foreigners in white coats. Of course, the last few years have been much better, no longer chickens. Wotou doesn't have to be a foreigner, and even the standard white coat has been taken off, but the characters are still very recognizable, and they have a "sluggish feeling full of pedantic sourness", such as "City Without Owners" Mr. Liu played by Lining Li (this is just AI, not pure mathematics or theoretical physics).

Therefore, in Liu Cixin's novels, scientists appear as pure researchers who are completely immersed in the ocean of science, which is almost in fairy tales. In his universe, he doesn't need to be more vivid and more vivid, it is enough to push the plot forward. In the age when Liu Cixin was growing up, the image of a scientist in the public eye was just so pure.

But this has nothing to do with so-called "Gnostic religion."

Finally, let's talk about Kuhn's paradigm shift theory.

Paradigm shift theory, in my opinion, is an afterthought.

Or, it can be said as follows: Paradigm shift is an observational description of the similar phase transition process exhibited by group ideas in the rheological process, which describes the interaction between ideas and the medium (that is, people) in which they exist. dependencies, but it does not indicate how the directionality between the paradigms before and after the shift is formed.

For example, are all people who believe that the earth is round dead, and everyone who believes that the earth revolves around the sun (within the gravitational field of the sun in the co-moving coordinate system of the solar system) is dead, and science will again move to The era of flat earth theory and geocentric theory? No. Even if these people are dead, people can still realize through observation data: oh, the earth is round, it revolves around the sun.

Therefore, there is a directionality between the two sets of paradigms, or it can be said that the discrete space composed of all paradigms of natural science is not isotropic. This is where Kuhn's so-called "incommensurability between paradigms" comes from. Paradigm shift theory can describe the phenomenon of the current paradigm jumping from paradigm A to paradigm B, and can even describe the entire process in detail, as well as the possible countercurrent in the middle, but it cannot explain why there is a polarization from A to B - the theory tells Our old paradigm will accumulate more and more phenomena that cannot be explained by theory, so we have transferred from the old paradigm to the new paradigm, but this statement itself is nothing but the observation and summary of the phenomenon.

After all, it is almost impossible for human beings to master the real and ultimate laws of nature, so any human theory under any paradigm will inevitably have unexplainable phenomena, and as long as we do enough experiments, we can always accumulate to transcendence A case of the number of unexplainable phenomena in a paradigm, does that mean that the current paradigm needs to be abandoned?

In fact, the Copernicus theory of seismology faced many more problems that could not be explained by the theory itself at the beginning than the already mature geocentric theory, and its explanatory power was not as good as the geocentric theory (after all, dozens of epicycles have averaged Wheels are not for nothing), but it still set off a scientific revolution-according to the paradigm shift point of view, the Earthquake theory should theoretically be the old paradigm that was left by the paradigm shift. In fact, Kuhn himself said: "The theory of the revolution of the celestial sphere is the text that triggered the revolution, but not itself a revolutionary text. What matters is not what it says, but what it enables later people to say." Nietzsche's theory itself did not trigger what Kuhn called a paradigm shift, but he pointed out that one can demonstrate reality through mathematical methods, so that mathematics is no longer just the language of positive science, it has metaphysical properties. Therefore, it is clear that the reason why Copernicus's theory triggers Kuhn's so-called paradigm shift is not because geocentric theory has accumulated enough phenomena that cannot be explained by itself, nor because there are fewer phenomena that cannot be explained by geocentric theory, but because it It aroused the thinking of others. After these thoughts were accumulated, people began to gradually doubt the validity of the geocentric theory. Finally, the combination of mathematics and astronomical observations completely overturned the geocentric theory.

Of course, this does not mean that the paradigm shift has no explanatory power for natural science problems. For example, in the process from naive set theory to ZFC, it can be said that there is a clear polarization direction, because naive set theory has core difficulties that cannot be justified. But after leaving the naive set theory, do people choose ZFC or the new basic set theory? Or hierarchical set theory, NBG set theory, Tarski-Grothendieck set theory? Here, between all these ZFCs and their replacements, there is no clear directional polarization, at least not yet. So why ZFC is the mainstream at this time and not something else can be described in the framework of paradigm shift.

This actually means that one thing is clear: the paradigm shift theory cannot be used to describe whether the intrusive alien physical theory will be accepted in the human world. The framework of the paradigm actually describes to a greater extent a kind of aggregation or group behavior formed by the acceptance of the theory by the crowd, but it cannot tell you that if two categories that have not been touched again collide, What happens, especially when people do not have the ability to do large-scale experimental verification, and there are cases where its physical explanation is unclear, is an exotic theory necessarily rejected by the current paradigm? Not necessarily.

Now, back to the original text, is the theory of aliens really unscientific to us? The answer is not necessarily true.

The key here is what Copernicus told us: mathematics is no longer just a language for describing science, it is a metaphysical reality in itself.

Therefore, if there is a possibility of "translation" between the mathematical system chosen by the aliens and the human mathematical system, then mathematics can be used to communicate - for most physical theories, we don't actually need to know a certain It doesn't matter what the "physical explanation" of a field is, whether it is called an electron or an elbow, as long as the mathematical formula describing the electron is intelligible/translatable, then in principle we can all understand it physically.

In fact, there have been many times in the history of the development of human's own scientific theories. People first got the mathematical formula, and then slowly excavated the connotation behind it, and the connotation excavated by different people in different times may be different. .

Therefore, if it is an abstract formal language given by mathematics, the physical explanation that humans use to understand theories is the everyday language based on this formal language. There may not be a one-to-one correspondence between the two, but there is absolutely no Contact for a dime is not enough.

Therefore, after the aliens gave scientific theories, must the people on earth be unable to understand them? The answer to this question is, of course, not necessarily understandable, but not necessarily incomprehensible.

At least this question cannot be answered with the theoretical framework of paradigm shift alone.

So, aside from Kuhn, is Popper's falsifiability enough to prove that even if humans memorize the ultimate theory of aliens by rote, they still can't call the latter "science"?

The answer is not that simple.

Not to mention that Popper's "falsifiability" theory is not as rock-solid as it was back then in the field of philosophy of science, and some people have begun to question it. This is a very special case: those who know the answers given by aliens are dead; those who are not dead do not know the answers given by aliens.

What does this mean? This means that even if an alien tells a person who asked the question "what is TOE like" that "the idea of XXXXX's paper on ARXIV is correct", the answer itself is in a state of "unverifiable" because it can The person doing the verification doesn't know the answer and the person who knows the answer has no time to verify.

Therefore, the original text uses this "unverifiability" to demonstrate that the theory given by aliens is "unfalsifiable", and then uses Popper's theory to demonstrate that the theory of aliens cannot be regarded as a scientific theory.

Note again that the logic chain goes like this:

Special story setting -> Alien theory is unverifiable -> Alien theory is unfalsifiable -> Alien theory is not a scientific theory

Found a problem?

The problem lies in the road from unverifiable to unfalsifiable. It actually equates "unverifiable under certain circumstances" with "theory is inherently unfalsifiable". In the words of modal logic Saying that the former is "incidentally unverifiable" and the latter is "necessarily unfalsifiable", it is not so obvious and straightforward to equate these two - in fact, it is impossible to do at all.

Popper's theory never discusses whether a theory can be verified in all situations, nor does it discuss whether a theory must be falsified in order to say that the theory is scientific, but whether there is a situation, Once this happens, the theory has been falsified.

That is to say, Popper's falsifiability refers to whether the state that can deny the theory is included in the category of the theory .

For example, "there is a God whose actions cannot be verified in practice" is unscientific, because this God, by definition, has ruled out any verification of his existence: you want Verification, according to the definition, must not be able to verify the result, and since the result cannot be verified, then naturally its existence cannot be falsified. So if someone tells you that there is a God, and at the same time God uses his supreme power to erase the shadow of his existence from the results of all acts of verifying his existence, then this statement is at least not scientific, although it can be is theological.

Here, the end point is: we're talking about whether the theory itself implies falsifiability, not whether the theory can actually be tested in a given context.

For example, is the theory of supersymmetry actually science?

The existence of supersymmetry needs to be discovered at extremely high energies, so before the level of human science and technology develops to that day, can we say that supersymmetry theories are all unscientific?

Obviously can't say that.

However, if a supersymmetry theory says: you can't see the trace of supersymmetry even under the energy conditions that any laboratory can do, but in theory supersymmetry can always exist in the energy region of higher energy scale, so supersymmetry Symmetry must exist. Then such a supersymmetry, like the aforementioned God, is unscientific.

In recent years, the debate on the philosophy of physics within theoretical physics caused by whether superstring/M-theory is mathematics or physics has given more in-depth thinking on this issue, and the reality of mathematics is expected to be reflected in the "falsifiability" , but this is a sidenote, we do not press the table here.

So, going back to "Chao Wen Dao", the theory of aliens was not verifiable in the specific environment at that time. Does it mean that the theory of aliens is not falsifiable?

Obviously not.

You must analyze the alien's theory to determine whether it is falsifiable. In the words of modal logic, the theory must have "inevitable falsifiability". And if there is no verifiability in a specific environment, it is just "accidental unverifiability", and as we have already analyzed, "accidental unverifiability" does not necessarily lead to "necessary unverifiability" , so this means that even starting from Popper's theory, whether the theory of aliens in "Chao Wen Dao" is a science cannot get an inevitable negative answer.

So far, we can say that, whether from Kuhn's paradigm shift theory or from Popper's theory of falsifiability, we cannot reach the conclusion that the theory given by the risk remover must not be regarded as a scientific theory by the earthlings.

Whether it is a scientific theory or not, you still have to take the risk remover's theory and analyze it in detail. The theoretical framework of the philosophy of science is simply unable to give an a priori answer to this question.

Therefore, it can be said that the three arguments in the original text, we can say, are basically untenable.