< Redacted

Parent

~pink2ds

The problem with the "silver bullet" perspective is that the world is a messy and complicated place.

The universe has not only matter but also processes (just like your computer has not only copper but also electrical currents running through it). Of course, once physics dig deep enough they might find that matter is energy or vice versa. We'll see.

We still know so little about the universe, about the human mind, about the best ways to run human society. It's maybe not as neat and teleological as once thought.

> We all inhabit the same universe. It's exactly the same for you as it is for me.

That's probably true. But if it is, then there is very much we don't know about that universe and how it works.

> this is why philosophical models have been designed

I appreciate that you wrote models plural here. That's sort of what I like about the pomo approach, the universe is this messy tangle and there are more than one thread to start trying to follow. Some models fit better (make more accurate predictions) for some data, other models for other data. For example dark matter explains some things better than modified gravity and vice versa. Quantum physics is another well known example where we find that using it for some domains is way better than special relativity, but not for all (for example we don't have a quantum theory of gravity yet).

Feynman had a wonderful example:

> Incidentally, psycho-analysis is not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witch-doctoring. It has a theory as to what causes disease - lots of different 'spirits' etc. The witch doctor has a theory that a disease like malaria is caused by a spirit which comes into the air ; it is not cured by shaking a snake over it, but quinine does help malaria. So, if you are sick, I would advise that you go to the witch doctor because he is the man in the tribe who knows the most about the disease; on the other hand his knowledge is not science. Psychoanalysis has not been checked carefully by experiment.

Now, these days we hopefully know a little bit better about what helps and doesn't help in terms of psychology than we did in Feynman's time, but there is still a lot to learn. The world is a weird place and we're coming at it from all kinds of different directions, is my point here.

When a discipline tries to claim that it covers all fields perfectly—like those various churches of the 19th century I mentioned (I guess I forgot the most politically influential one of the bunch, American evangelical baptism)—I kinda back away a bit from that. I wanna encourage a much more mish-mash-y, patch-work-y, inconsistent view of the world. That's not to say that the Universe itself is necessarily inconsistent, but that our "best knowledge of it, so far" can be.

There are many pairs of philosophies that both can't be completely true, but, doing our best to follow them can be best practice with what we've got so far. A kind of sloppy, pre-synthetic dialectic.

One example is acceptance vs improvement. Do we accept things as they are or do we try to improve them? Both hopefully. We don't want to kid ourselves into seeing things as something they're not, but, we want to change things for the better.

Write a reply

Replies

~tskaalgard wrote (thread):

You're the only one talking about a "silver bullet" here. I never brought that up at all, and you're also reading a lot more into all of this than is necessary. Both matter and energy are material realities, I'm not trying to say energy doesn't exist (where did this even come from??).

Slow down and approach words at face value.