Journal of Scientific Exploration

"man is the measure of all things"--- an ancient point. Everything we experience is filtered through our body-minds, even our empirical perceptions of our brains... Someday maybe we'll have a more humble culture, with greater respect for the infinite expanse and infinitesimal subtlety of Universe, and a more pragmatic/existential approach to knowing. I think the hubristic emphasis on certainty and on having a Big Picture that Explains Everything in Every Way is pretty obviously a defensive compensation for our actual limits as knowers/doers. Without the existential certainty that our is-ness is openness, we search for certainty, for grounds and foundations, in knowledge and action!

I think the hubristic emphasis on certainty and on having a Big Picture that Explains Everything in Every Way is pretty obviously a defensive compensation for our actual limits as knowers/doers.


-jake

I didn't know I had limits!

hahahaha

I see the things I mentioned as the opposite of curiosity, Chris!

Oh no, of course not. What I'm trying to say is that it is hubris which drives us to *pretend* or *believe* we know more than we actually do. That we really 'know it all', or at least, everything relevant; or that a condition of 'knowing it all' is just around the corner. This seems like a great way to shut down curiosity. Curiosity leads to exploration; to living on the verge between knowing and not knowing. To me, that's where the action is. Not-knowing keeps knowing from becoming hubris; knowing gives not-knowing a useful, meaningful shape (for a time). Not-knowing allows those shapes that knowing enacts to remain open to broader horizons. When knowing and not-knowing are conceived as mutually exclusive opposites, that's when knowing tends to become an overly rigid, over-reaching reaction to the inchoate unknown. Or sumthin like that

Not-knowing allows those shapes that knowing enacts to remain open to broader horizons. When knowing and not-knowing are conceived as mutually exclusive opposites, that's when knowing tends to become an overly rigid, over-reaching reaction to the inchoate unknown.

-jake

I like this. Well-stated! We have absolutely no clue whatsoever what is around the corner. Some people are open to turning the corner while others shrink away because doing so might do irreparable damage to their worldviews.

yeah!

I'm going to be contrarian and state this differently because I think that sentence overstates the reality -- we DO have a clue, but it is a clue that we that more as an inevitability. What we really have is a series of complex probabilities of various and sundry occurrences.

-cmarti

Yeah I think you're right for a lot of the discoveries. They seem to follow from one another, even if they are a reaction to or continuance of a previous discovery. This informs the probabilities. There do seem to be some things that come out of left field however, like the principles found in quantum mechanics. The probability of those being the case might have been close to 0% for those involved. It was like "Whoa! What the hell just happened?!" I think this was because the observations overturned many assumptions within science.