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Originally Posted by Ivan Viehoff
I was asserting that IF I have good reason to believe that it MUST exist, then it exists even though I haven't exhibited (ie found) it.
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What is a good reason to believe something must exist? And what is the "it" in your last statement, other than "that which exists"? Unless you can offer a different meaning for that word, you are saying that "that which exists does so even if I haven't found it". I can't disagree with that, but it certainly doesn't tell us anything about the prospects for unification.
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mountain stream run again with the same boundary conditions would behave the same way, obeying the Navier Stokes law.
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When we say something "obeys" an equation, we are using imprecise colorful language that we can normally get away with, but not when we are trying to look deeply into what science is. Mountain streams don't "obey" anything, that is a personalization-- they just are. It is we who decide what they "obey", when we decide how we will treat them and what we will consider to be "suitably law abiding" behavior. And when the behavior does not obey our laws, we don't throw the system in jail, we just change our sense of what the laws are. Fingerprints all over the "crime scene".
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The Navier Stokes equations provides an existence argument for the solution, even though we can't exhibit such a solution.
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Again that is simply confusing the axiomatic system we invented to describe the behavior for the behavior itself.
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I will go a step further. I would argue that we knew that a theory of fluid dynamics must exist even if we hadn't actually discovered the Navier Stokes equations yet, and did not know if we ever would. Because if we run fluid systems again, they respond to the same causes in the way.
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Of course theories of fluid dynamics exist, that became true as soon as our brains developed enough to count as able to make theories.
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That is in effect my position. To summarise it, if effect follows reliably from cause (which includes effects described probabilistically, which most people are happy with accepting would constitute a valid scientific theory, even if you aren't) then there must exist in principle a description of how the effect depends upon the causes. I never sought to say we would actually find it, in fact I explicitly said we might not.
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But there are many such descriptions, and we have found plenty already. The issue is not if there are ways of describing reality, the issue is how completely unified can they be. Reality does what it does, all we do is assemble familiarities and try to unify them into what we can call an explanation. To think we are doing something different is to lose track of the process and mistake reality for our own language about reality. Our goal is certainly to seek unification whereever we can find it, but the absence of complete unification is a natural consequence of using language to describe something that is not language.