Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven.
>If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence.
“Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad
> If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence.
Unsurprising that the longest subthread here is one criticizing the premise.
Having debugged code with a logic analyzer, I'm pretty sure the voltage on those CPU pins is real, and really the consequence of the code I think I'm running.
> Doesn’t silent, invisible, intangible also apply to software?
No. Because software is hardware.
> You can’t really tell a particular piece of hardware is running software by a direct physical measurement. You can only infer that indirectly.
You can literally step through code. Have you ever used a debugger or a profiler? You can dump memory, check the registers, read off the disk, etc.
If software was silent, invisible and intangible, you couldn't store it on disk, or copy it to memory. A computer wouldn't work if software was as you describe it.
Won't be surprised if he's one of those that think "radiation" is some kind of harmful beams instead of also what the computer screen emits and we detect it to interact with it.
Software (that is running on hardware) isn't a great example - you'd be better off going with something like prime numbers. They don't really "exist" in the same way a toaster does. Souls also don't exist (citation needed etc) but are a similarly useful (for some people) way of thinking about the world.
Software can make sound, not silent, software can make things appear on the screen, not invisible, software can affect physical objects through device control, not intangible.
Nothing like an invisible dragon you might claim exists without any of the above.
As others are pointing out, this isn't true. You can absolutely infer the software state of a system via physical measurement.
But what's interesting isn't your mistake, it's why the mistake was made. The abstraction stack in software is really, really really thick. You don't normally "measure" your software, you add a log statement or run a debugger, and that's more software. And those debuggers aren't written over hardware, they're software too.
But eventually, you get down to the point where there really is hardware in the way. A debugger that tells you the content of a memory address really is, down the stack, doing a memory read, which is an instruction to hardware to measure the voltages in an array of inverter pairs structured as a level 1 SRAM[1]. Or it's setting a breakpoint or watchpoint, which are CPU features implemented in hardware, etc...
The hardware is always there, but we've done such a good job of hiding it that even practitioners are fooled into thinking it isn't there.
[1] And of course there's a stack there too. But read instructions hit the L1 cache.
Only in the same way that it applies to, say, a tree. You can never observe a tree directly. All you can do is infer it from the nerve signals coming from your retinas and touch receptors.
The point of the dragon in the garage isn't that you can't measure it directly. It's that you can't measure it at all. It has no observable effects at all. Software definitely has observable effects, as do trees and almost everything else that people accept as real.
Imagine you are a pigeon with navigation magnets in your head. And imagine asked by your friends without it "How do you know it is the right direction?", at some point you have to say "I just know it dammit!"
And imagine pigeons haven't yet figured out magnetism. So it ain't possible to explain it by any means known to them.
> That makes Carl Sagan's claim some what Balonish.
His claim wasn't that invisible dragons don't exist. His claim was that you cannot tell the difference between a dragon that doesn't exist and one that is, to use your qualifier, currently undetectable by any means known to humanity. If you cannot tell the difference between existence and non-existence of something, any claims to its existence are vacuous.
Can you really prove that the last second really existed? I don't think so. It is like taking a frame from a movie reel and from that alone trying to prove that the previous frame really exist. You can't, there is always a possibility that it is the very first frame, or is just a photograph.
But does that stop you from claiming its existence (last second's)?
So as I said in another thread. This logic is completely ignoring the sea of subjective experience that we live in.
It is funny, Because these types of arguments arise because there is no real understanding of the nature of reality. And people have different assumptions on how deep the rabbit hole goes. So every one have a different definition of "existence" when they argue about it. I think Carl Sagan also had one, and it is a shame that he didn't make it explicit when he was talking about it.
It appears that he considered something to "exist" if it can interact with this world in a way that human beings can observe.
That is somewhat a narrow point of view. But it suits scientists because it adds to their authority, instead of taking away from it by implying that there could be a realm of existence that they can't reach or reason about. They say "Oh it is useless to muse about that, so don't do it. Limit your imagination to what we say!".
Scene: It's a fine sunny day in the forest; and a rabbit is sitting outside his burrow, tippy-tapping on his lap top. Along comes a fox, out for a walk.
Fox: "What are you working on?" Rabbit: "My thesis." Fox: "Hmmmmm. What is it about?" Rabbit: "Oh, I'm writing about how rabbits eat foxes."
(incredulous pause) Fox: "That's ridiculous! Any fool knows that rabbits don't eat foxes!" Rabbit: "Come with me and I'll show you!"
They both disappear into the rabbit's burrow. After a few minutes, gnawing on a fox bone, the rabbit returns to his lap top and resumes typing.
Soon a wolf comes along and stops to watch the hard working rabbit.
(Tippy-tap, tippy-tap, tippy-tippy-tap).
Wolf: "What's that you are writing?" Rabbit: "I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eat wolves."
(loud guffaws). Wolf: "You don't expect to get such rubbish published, do you?" Rabbit: "No problem. Do you want to see why?"
The rabbit and the wolf go into the burrow, and again the rabbit returns by himself. This time he is patting his stomach. He goes back to his typing.
(Tippy-tap, tippy-tap, tippy-tippy-tap).
Finally a bear comes along and asks, "What are you doing?"
Rabbit: "I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eat bears." Bear: "Well that's absurd!" Rabbit: "Come into my home and I'll show you."
SCENE: Inside the rabbit's burrow. In one corner, there is a pile of fox bones. In another corner is a pile of wolf bones. On the other side of the room a huge lion is belching and picking his teeth.
MORAL: It doesn't matter what you choose for a thesis topic. It doesn't matter what you use for your data. It doesn't even matter if your topic makes sense. What matters is who you have for a thesis advisor.
I think you missed his point. In that exercise, the justifications for the dragons existence are always shifting.
“Oh, it doesn’t show up on thermal? That’s because it doesn’t emit heat. It has special fire”
“Oh, when you spray flour in the air nothing sticks to the dragon? Well that’s because it is also incorporeal”
Skeptics keep asking questions. That’s the point. If you are never satisfied with any answer, you have no reason to believe the claim. There is literally nothing there to believe in.
His point is that skepticism and wonder go hand in hand. One without the other is dangerous. What a fascinating claim, an invisible dragon! It should not be dismissed outright as obvious quackery, but let’s see how much scrutiny it can take
We start with an invisible dragon and the more we look into it we now have to explain fire without heat, bodies without form, etc. gee, it seems that for this to be true our entire understanding of the world is wrong…or is the simple answer that someone is trying to trick us would answer this better.
Then the skeptic starts asking why someone would want to trick us…
Yes. The beauty is that once you get the means you can adjust your view. But you can't go just "trust me bro, it's there, you can't ever verify it, but I know it's there." It might be there... But why do you believe it to be so?
Do you actually live your life with the idea that there might be a dragon in your garage that is undetectable by any means currently known to humanity? And maybe an elephant in the neighbor's, and a unicorn down the street?
>Not sure why this comment got downvoted, but after all this is HN: very pro-tech while at the same time anti-science. Computers do everything so knowledge doesn't matter.
Whether there's any particular method right now, next week or next year for such "detection" isn't relevant in this context for several reasons:
1. Sagan's example was a metaphor for an unfalsifiable hypothesis;
2. Dragons (okay, kimodo dragons do, but that's orthogonal to the discussion) don't actually exist;
3. Even if dragons with the properties posited by Sagan actually do exist, Evidence must be provided to confirm the "garage dragon" hypothesis or it's irrelevant. If it cannot be detected, it may as well not exist.
While it's true that "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," not being able to verify the non-existence of something doesn't confirm its existence.
I suggest you use the rest of the tools provided in Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" (helpfully linked above) to help you get the point.
I'd also point out that the guidelines[0] say:
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good,
and it makes boring reading.
>It IS relevant to me and to most scientists. And you sound like someone who stops giving up at the first obstacle.
QFT posits that the graviton (as a particle-like excitation in a "gravity field") exists.
We do not currently (although there are some potential future experiments that might be able to confirm the existence of the graviton) have the means to detect gravitons.
Does the graviton exist? I don't know and neither do you. And we won't, unless and until we have the ability to detect gravitons. While we have a theoretical basis for gravitons, we have no experimental or observational evidence. Does that mean we should stop looking? No.
How about dark matter. What exactly is dark matter? We have a bunch of evidence that something that doesn't interact via the photon (the particle-like excitation of the EM field), but does interact gravitationally with itself and other fermions and bosons.
We don't know what that "dark matter" might be, but we continue looking for it, as there is both theoretical and observational evidence of its existence.
As for the "garage dragon," there is no theoretical, experimental or observational evidence for it.
There is also none of that for my claim of the absolute existence of a gremlin living inside your skull chowing down on your brain. But we should definitely saw open your skull to prove it, right? I'm partial to circular saws, but we can go with a chainsaw if you like.
>you sound like someone who stops giving up at the first obstacle.
It's not clear what ad-hominem attack you're making against me here as the words, as strung together don't make sense, but who I am or what I will or won't do is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Are you unable to make a better argument and so attack me personally instead?
>> I'd also point out that the guidelines[0] say:
>I had already removed it by the time you commented, so that's on you.
Did you? Thanks for finally following the site guidelines. Perhaps next time you won't need to be reminded.
A parking lot dragon? This sounds familiar. [Assuming not a Dragon of Eden, nor one who farts nerve gas] I believe it is a parable about cause and effect; consistency of the world's state.
A parking garage, poured in modern times from reinforced concrete, might have been found to be structurally unstable during a renovation. If this turned out to be rooted in a massive [dragon, dinosaur, etc] skeleton being embedded in the concrete (As it was being poured?) surely this would be a contradiction, if people (workers, onlookers) witnessed the garage's construction.
There would be evidence from the reinforcement efforts; materials sourced to reinforce it due to structural flaws introduced by the skeleton; wear on the truck tires carrying them, memories in brains etc. If suddenly the skeleton were to have vanished, would there be logical consistency problems with the world state? Quite a thing to ponder!
I would like to clarify that this is purely a thought experiment. It is not possible that any group of people, no matter how secluded, could either A: Will such a reptile into existence while maintaining cosmological consistency, nor B: Remove it from our cosmos after evidence over its existence has propagated.
Government has lots of coercive tools at it's disposable. For example, search warrants and incarceration.
If you refuse to hand over your keys, government can easily nullify you or your relatives ability to make use of them and make your life really bad in the meantime.
Keepjng money from government is yet another crypto myth that doesn't hold up very well in many cases.
Would Steve Jobs have applied to Y Combinator?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4078419
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