Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20190716003715/@comment-27136653-20190807234301

>But things CAN be proven. I even explained how we know that Flowey absorbed the human SOULs.

Since we cannot use the scientific method, we cannot use deduction, we can only use induction. Things can be proven to a degree of credibility, but can never be confirmed, not without some word of authority clearing it all up. In this case, Flowey's arc is pretty darn believable I agree. But other things may not be.

>Occam's Razor states that:"all else being equal, the simplest answer is most likely to be the correct one."

In that case, the simplest explanation to everything is the game's code. So if you prioritize simplicity, you ought to acknowledge the code's canonity, that it is what's driving all the in-game mechanics, which in turn makes them incredibly specific, applying only to the cases described by the various code flags and if-else structures.

So I reckon it's a trade off. Simple explanations give terrible generalizations that wouldn't be counted as "simple" in the real world by any stretch of imagination, and neat generalizations require insane leaps of logic regarding the underlying laws which are giving rise to the mechanics we observe.

>Exactly. And the only objective informative statements are that which we actually observe being true.

There's very few of those though.

>But in a way, all of science is "speculation". What matters is just how much evidence you have to support it, how likely it is, and how few unneccesary entities you have to support it.

Science is partly founded in deduction too. It's usually the step after induction, to seek the final confirmation. Theories are predictive tools for when confirmation is not possible (yet).

>But that's not what he said. It's one thing to say that wavelengths translate into color, but another to say that the filter somehow takes words that a character says, and changes the words they say.

We don't actually need to change anything, we just reinterpret what he meant by that.

>And if he's mistaken, why don't we, Frisk, have the chance to prove him wrong on the matter?

We do and we did. Our ability to bypass Sans despite the standard battle laws not making this possible could be taken as the world's realization that the battle isn't actually rigid and locked in some internal HUD framework, but is actually fluid and atomized. Sans's belief that it was possible could be understood as his personal mistake. While I don't know what led him to think this and we could speculate on that forever, I just know that the world isn't "locked", since exceptions exist.