Explanations are paintings or drawings. If in the future we somehow lived inside a computer simulation where objects popped into existence from nowhere and then dissappeared or where we could walk on water if we said a magic formula and any other extravagant miraculous phenomena existed, then we would create a science and a description and explanations of cause and effect based on this.

 

So the science or explanations (the causes and effects, the organizing principles etc.) would be a function of the universe we were observing. Change the rules of the universe and the science will change. Extrapolate this to the oddest and most creative combinations of phenomena we could design in the simulator and you would have a Science that would become an Art, a design, an invention, arbitrary with no intrinsic truth other than we are locked inside that particular universe through the simulation.

 

Now imagine that we are really living inside a simulator where a god or an alien race is designing the reality we observe and hence our Science. In this case isn't science just a painting, an art form ? What difference than does it make if we are inside a simulator or if this is the bare reality, isn't it just a quirk combination of elements, cause and effects, just like any quirk Painting (like the more abstract paintings) ? Reality/physics/universe could be (in a simulator) or could have been (in other possible universes) anything imaginable, hence even science is at the most fundamental level truly Arbitrary. In this sense, seen from a far enough angle everything is just an Art form, Art is Science.

What you are saying has some truth to it. Logic is based on cause and affect relationships we see in the world around us. If we plot these cause and affect relationships on a piece of paper with the x-axis being cause and the y-axis being affect, we could paint pictures using logic. The art of science. The problem with drawing on a 2-d plane is that one can also create abstract art, 3-D drawings in 2-D space, optical illusions, etc., just like a good artist can on his 2-D canvas.

 

The question becomes how can one decide which is objective reality and which is subjective reality since both can be drawn on the same plane? One artist can take a photo of a forest and another will paint the forest. Sometimes the painting is more appealing due to the subjective affect it will create within our minds. Although the photo could be enhanced in Photo Shop to give it more subjective glitter.

hence even science is at the most fundamental level truly Arbitrary.

No, science is dependant on the universe that it observes.

Science is dependant on the universe it observes, combined with its expectations of what it is suppose to be. When everyone thought the earth was the center of the universe, that expectation defined how the universe was percieved by science. The astronomers did a excellent job correlating the path of the planets and stars, with what little they had to work with, based on the earth center assumption. The correlation was so good, that it was eventually used as proof that the earth was indeed the center of the universe. It becomes a self forfilling type of thing after a few generations forget it was only a good practical assumption at one time.

There is also the issue of complexity. No matter what the science is based on, on what the cause and effect chains are triggered by and in turn trigger...etc...if you want to achieve a complex result you'll need complex knowledge of the science.

 

So I would say you could change the rules of the universe in many ways to change the resulting sciences in many ways, but I think it would still be limited in the simplicity/complexity department.

Aliens you say?