2024.02.14
As [Robert Anton] Wilson pointed out, "certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude." [...] To sympathise with the Certain for a moment, they do not have it easy. There are billions of people on this planet and they all have wildly differing ideas about politics, ethics, theology, art and science. It is very hard for the Certain to insist that their own position is the only right, true and undeniable one, especially if they posses a basic knowledge of mathematics and probability. You can rationalise away this problem by deciding that the rest of the world is basically composed of idiots, but it is rarely a good idea to admit this publicly.
Life is more accurately measured in probabilities.
"Shut up," he explained.
Yea, brethren and sistren, now abideth doubt, hope and charity; these three; and the greatest of these is doubt. For doubt puffeth not itself up into pomposity; doubt suffereth long, and is kind. With doubt all things are possible.Other ones I liked:
Science does not assume "natures" spookily indwelling "within" things, at all, at all. Science posits functional relations between "things" or events. These functional relations can also be called patterned coherencies or, in Bucky Fuller's terminology, "knots" – energy patterns and interferences between energies. All scientific models describe such energy "knots" between "things" and not spookily indwelling "within" "things." Science also increasingly doubts the existence of "things" in the [Thomas Aquinas] sense and speaks more of relations between space-time events.
In summation, scientific models consist of mathematical generalizations that presently appear useful. The habit of calling these models "laws" is increasingly falling into disfavor, and the working philosophy of most scientists is frankly called "model agnosticism." This attitude is that our models can be considered good, relatively, if they have survived many tests, but none are certain or sacred, and all will be replaced by better models eventually. Models that cannot be tested at all, even in principle, are regarded as meaningless, or as the Logical Positivists used to say, "abuse of language."