Before anything was known about how the world works, trying to explain physical phenomena in terms of purposeful, human-like thought and action may have been a reasonable approach. After all, that is how we explain much of our everyday experience even today: if a jewel is mysteriously missing from a locked safe, we seek human-level explanations such as error or theft (or, under some circumstances, conjuring), not new laws of physics. But that anthropocentric approach has never yielded any good explanations beyond the realm of human affairs. In regard to the physical world at large, it was
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