>>13739143You have to come up with abstractions like 2 and 4 that by their very definition are related in such a way as 2+2=4.
>>13739134Yes and no. The whole predictive power things is just the "best" way scientists have agreed on as a metric for how accurate a theory is. If you take the fact that all scientific theories come from induction based on observations, the final conclusion is the only way we could scientifically have a fully accurate, "true" model of the universe is to be able to observe everything - all that's ever been, that is, and ever will be. This is not something we're able to do in practice, but you can see how if a theory managed to capture some future event one could see it as more "true" than a theory that failed to do so. This is why quantum physics seems so frustrating compared to Newtonian physics since with only an understanding of Newtonian physics you can shoot a cannon to hit a target kilometers away pretty accurately every time as long as you have enough information regarding wind speeds at the time and so on, while at the level of tiny things we can only have a probabilistic sense of what we're going to observe when we interact with the sample. Maybe it's a case of not seeing some hidden variables that are beyond our observations, but no one "knows".
