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Where do these theories come from? For most of the history of science, it was mistakenly believed that we ‘derive’ them from the evidence of our senses – a philosophical doctrine known as empiricism:
I call such theories bad explanations.
Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.’
Rational Attempting
Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse.
Religions will no longer want to claim the design of the biosphere as one of the achievements of their deities, just as today they no longer bother to claim thunder.
Its most glaring mismatch is that, in reality, evolutionary adaptations are of a wholly different character from the changes that take place in an individual during its lifetime. The former involve the creation of new knowledge; the latter happen only when there is already an adaptation for making that change.
And reach always has an explanation.
but only if it reflects an underlying regularity.
The regularity in this case is that all the words in any given language are built out of only a few dozen ‘elementary sounds’, with each language using a different set chosen from the enormous range of sounds that the human voice can produce.
Although pictographic writing systems were invented in many societies, and universal alphabets did sometimes evolve from them in the way I have just described, the ‘obvious’ next step – namely to use the alphabet universally and to drop the pictograms – was almost never taken.
I suspect that neither the opportunities nor the pitfalls of universality ever occurred to anyone until much later in history.
A small change in a system to meet a parochial purpose just happened to make the system universal as well. This is the jump to universality.
That is a universal system of tallying. But, like levels of emergence, there is a hierarchy of universality.
Both the future of civilization and the outcome of a game of Russian roulette are unpredictable, but in different senses and for entirely unrelated reasons.
no explanation has enough reach to predict the content of its own successors
CHAEREPHON, he has today asked the Oracle who
they call ‘knowledge’, namely justified belief, is a chimera. It is unattainable to humans except in the form of self-deception;
not to seek the truth, because they claim that they already have it.
People who converge upon the truth converge with each other.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods Like horses, and cattle like cattle
fact nothing is easy to see without prior knowledge.
bespeaks
figment
‘For all is but a woven web of guesses.’ Guesses! HERMES: Yes. Conjectures.
But then we do not just accept it blindly or because we imagine it is ‘authorized’, or because we want it to be true.
Only when we fail in these attempts either to reject or to improve an idea do we provisionally accept it.
the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don’t want it.
I am aware that justified belief is impossible and useless and undesirable.
The way to converge with each other is to converge upon the truth.
So the evolutionary pressure is for the psychological damage to be confined to a relatively narrow area of the recipients’ thinking, but to be deeply entrenched, so that the recipients find themselves facing a large emotional cost if they subsequently consider deviating from the meme’s prescribed behaviours.
Memes of the older, static-society kind, which survive by disabling their holders’ critical faculties, I shall call anti-rational memes.
Death does not make sense.
