This. I'd say it applies to a lot, If not all subjects.
In my experience teachers rarely explained, why we need the subject, and what's it's use. Now I see myself digging thing on my own, and realising how cool a lot of subjects are.
That's exactly the opposite of being "beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring".
Turns out, its chlorophyll.
The clouds of Jupiter, when viewed from a planetary scale, have a similar amount of [apparent] complexity.
We simply bias familiar complexity due to our evolutionary pathway.
A planet-sized fungal-like Gaia creature that "eats" clouds by atmospheric manipulation and is able to seed it's lower planetary orbit with proto-replicative molecules would scuff at such a self-centered bias.
yes!
Just as Carl Sagan likened consciousnesses as an emergent phenomenon that happens somewhere between the neuron count of a worm and a dog an a certain ape; " Life " is a word we use for a MASSIVE AMOUNT OF COMPLEXITY.
we are not a single species in a vacuum - we are clearly, nearly obviously, the product of our environment, literally.
We are a biosphere, stuck in a gravity well, fed by the sun: without Sol (gravity really under the hood), we cannot afford the fight on the second law of thermodynamics. We use it to locally displace some entropy and get us a lil complexity, even if temporarily.
life is just some magnitude of complexity. its an illusion.
we are not special.
we came from tidally-stirred, protein-packed, slurry pools of eventually-replicative molecules. probably packed tightly into some mineral for a backbone at first; eventually crossing the line from a repeating geologic/acid formation and more of a proto-algaeic-slime of a chain of molecules that depend on each other.
shit is moot. once you have replication - even if that seems like a massive gap to you (not to me), you have a resource-competing-selfish entity. It will then innately, by its own merit of existence, compete against itself for its own resources and be subject to random mutations due to ionizing radiation. ionization radiating is pretty universal, so no leap there.
the molecules would be subject to increasing selective pressure.
Darwin's theory.
either we here, or we aint.
the universe, time, and pretty much everything is dominated by bacteria like molecules, i am sure.
"intelligence (as we know it)" - (the ability to arrive at the same state from different inputs) is a mini-max point in many evolutionary pathways that we can easily see felines arriving at in our absence.
we are nothing special.
For a hypothesis to have explanatory power, it must be falsifiable. Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing.
What observation in your mind would falsify the existence of God?
> and hence can explain nothing.
Could you explain your reasoning here?
Let's hope we don't have this problem here on planet Earth, and especially at a core, fundamental level(s)!
Meanwhile can you expand on your take on Naive Realism here? What's the specific issue with Naive Realism you're pointing out? (am aware there's issues)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
(More seriously, Indirect Realism is actually several centuries old already, isn't it?)
And yes, it is indeed very old...old and forgotten, even by those who have knowledge of it.
But it may even be worse: what is it in the first place?
The whole video is pretty good, and the specific point starting with "You cannot prove a vague theory wrong" is explained around 5:10.
In re:
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing.
Feynman restates it from a different angle: he calls these kinds of things vague theories and states that they are not very useful to scientists because they can be hard to prove wrong.
Throughout he gives a bunch of examples of such vague theories that cannot be proven wrong. (eg that moogles did it, or the positions of the planets influenced when to go to the dentist, or maybe it was caused by flying saucers. )
He also points out Newtons laws which are not vague, and thus can and have been proven somewhat wrong since (see also: Einstein) .
I think further down our thread, this is in re whether saying "God did it" (or "A wizard did it" etc ) has Explanatory power:
* Why do the planets move in ellipses: "God did it"
* Why do the tides go in and out: "A wizard did it"
* How fast will an apple hit my head if dropped from precisely 10.25 meters, and will I need to wear a helmet? "Zeus knows the answer"
etc.
I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
(ps. The answer to the latter should be about ~14.17 m/s ~= 50.4 km/h . Something you could go out and measure for yourself outdoors if you like! )
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything
> and hence can explain nothing.
If I'm not mistaken, what you're referring to is the fundamental unknowability of certain things, and this state often causes the mind to hallucinate "facts" like the two above. "It is unknown, therefore it is a fact that anything is possible" is plain bad thinking, but paradoxically it is very popular thinking (thus: proper thinking), even among relatively smart people.
There must be something going on here that can "explain" (in a non-incorrect fashion) all of this, it seems unlikely that we've stumbled upon never before encountered phenomena.
> I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
I too enjoy building simple strawmen and knocking them down:
"Science exists, and "is correct", and I believe in it, therefore my personal opinion of fact is factual in fact".
I wonder which of these two strawmen most closely matches actual conversations that can be found on the internet. I constantly hear stories about religious people saying incredibly silly things (over and above standard silly Normative Cognition), but I rarely ever encounter it in real life. What I describe in my strawman though (essentially: scientism, the ~religion of science, etc), it is extremely common on all social media platforms, ion TV, in the newspaper, etc.
I'm just trying to talk about Falsifiability. That's the only thing I'm talking about.
If you posit an unfalsifiable ( == untestable) hypothesis, then -unsurprisingly- that hypothesis can't be tested.
Fun for teasing people if you're subtle about it, absolutely! Leaves people really confused until they catch on!
But when troubleshooting or dealing with issues in the real world, it's probably best to stick to testable hypotheses.
I'm not really sure how to explain this any better, it's really basic stuff, so I figure you already know this? (I mean it's basically how you can debug a program or fix a car too. I think Feynman learned it by fixing radios as a teenager, and when he grew up he ended up applying it to quantum mechanics.)
[*] Or - worse yet ;-) - are you a philosophy major?
For fun: two things to try to fit into your model:
Not sure why you bring up that and CWA here at this time though. Does it have something to do with falsifiability from your perspective? I think falsifiability is more of an OWA kind of thing though, isn't it? (The idea being that you never have sufficient information to know if something is true, only if it is positively false. That sounds pretty OWA to me, right?)
I'm interested to hear what you mean by "and the consequences" , because I truly have no idea what you might be seeing, and I'm really curious now. I get the impression you see people making certain kinds of mistakes?
It's like this:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/they...
Could you refer to an existing proof of these claims, or at least put it in some sort of a more logical form that can demonstrate that these things are necessarily true? Narrative format can make not actually true things appear true pretty easily.
But to each simulant, their own programming. Unicuique suum.
I’m more partial to God being Humans that survived the flood (being real and caused by an asteroid exploding over ice caps) and have been chilling underwater, occasionally popping their UAPs up and poking around. But I don’t hold that view too firmly.
Most high schools and every biology course uses the cycle as a milestone of learning, but usually teaches it by pure rote learning, words that have no meaning. Oxaloacetate turns into citrate via the citrate synthase and Acetyl CoA (I had to look this up; of course I learned it three times by heart and forgot immediately after the exam). Most of my teachers taught it like this, a meaningless collection of words and steps that you have to rote learn.
Except for my microbiology professor! We spent a semester learning about the basics of biochemistry, why reactions have to happen the way they happen, until we all had a relatively clear logic. We learned the Krebs cycle at the end, as a special kind of application and use case of the inherent logic. We want to 'reactivate' NAD+ into NADH, so we need an H+. But look at our Malate! There's a nice H dangling there in the OH group. Hs are taken off by dehydrogenases because they de- the hydrogen, so surely our helper is called the malate dehydrogenase. And it is! What happens to an O that has it's H taken away? the most usual outcome is a double-binded O. Which is why our oxaloacetate looks the way it does. If you know what malate looks like you know what oxaloacetate looks like. (And so on).
Of course you can't explain the entire cycle and its terms this way, as names like malate are there for historic reasons, but it gets you far closer to the inherent beauty of the thing. It's just a pity it's usually taught by rote.
You just had bad teachers. The subject is all at once beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring.
We are solutions along a physical, biogeochemical optimization gradient. We're fit to the world around us like a glove.
We're also distributed systems. Every sub-component of every single one of our cells is a computational system in flux, dynamically adjusting to trillions of inputs every single second.
Even the packing of "junk DNA" is a calculated encoding of spatiotemporal expression dynamics and far downstream behavior.
We are the universe encoding behavior unto itself. Exchanging gasses, assembling polymers, replicating, carefully kept in balance. Battling against other systems attempting to utilize the same energy gradients.
> I think we also need inspiration. There is a romance in biology, as in any other science, that a movie like Good Will Hunting could bring out. We need heroes. Whoever delivers us from this pandemic in the form of a slam dunk vaccine, or a cheap quick reliable test, should become a household name, not for their own glory but for our kids—a Feynman for them to dream about someday becoming.
Biology doesn't have the rockets or the fancy computers, but it stands to one day unlock some of the best things for humanity: a world free of diseases, long lives, and perhaps one day, even immortality.
The only reason it's not sexier is that it's still in the punch card phases. We're just starting to scratch the surface of the computers that make up ourselves.