He wrote of the “growing tendency of people to exonerate themselves by arguing that it is not ‘I’ who is at fault, but some mechanical process within: ‘my genes made me do it’; or ‘my high blood-sugar content made me do it.’ Recall the infamous ‘Twinkie Defense’ that got Dan White off with five years for murdering San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.”

Darwinsbulldog wrote:

BWE wrote:yeah, this is a weird thing for a physicist to attach to physics. It reminds me of the stuff that Fred Wolf comes up with about quantum consciousness and that sort of thing. I mean, QM is really weird to be sure and it is fun to speculate on models which might be consistent with QM, but it seems strange to assume that extraneous models should be considered seriously with no way to test the extraneous parts.

I don't think any weird shit can or should be ruled out BUT it MUST be testable. If a scientist is limited in imagination, or thinks of some weird shit but then says to hims/herself that it is "too weird" or 'couldn't be real" then further progress is stifled. No matter how crazy the idea is, then it should be considered SO LONG AS it is testable. This is why I think science should be agnostic about reality and why methodological naturalism should be the compass. The history of science for the last hundred years or so demonstrates that "weird shit" is where the action is at. Not so much for routine science, which can probably survive and do many things assuming naive reality. But coming up with revolutionary breakthroughs might sometimes be beyond imagination. it wont help is thinking is straight-jacketed into what scientist opinions are about "what is real?"
Occum said we should not entertain hypotheses beyond necessity, I would add to that the necessity of having minimum metaphysical baggage. This is why I believe realism in science is both unnecessary and wrong.

BWE wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:

BWE wrote:yeah, this is a weird thing for a physicist to attach to physics. It reminds me of the stuff that Fred Wolf comes up with about quantum consciousness and that sort of thing. I mean, QM is really weird to be sure and it is fun to speculate on models which might be consistent with QM, but it seems strange to assume that extraneous models should be considered seriously with no way to test the extraneous parts.

I don't think any weird shit can or should be ruled out BUT it MUST be testable. If a scientist is limited in imagination, or thinks of some weird shit but then says to hims/herself that it is "too weird" or 'couldn't be real" then further progress is stifled. No matter how crazy the idea is, then it should be considered SO LONG AS it is testable. This is why I think science should be agnostic about reality and why methodological naturalism should be the compass. The history of science for the last hundred years or so demonstrates that "weird shit" is where the action is at. Not so much for routine science, which can probably survive and do many things assuming naive reality. But coming up with revolutionary breakthroughs might sometimes be beyond imagination. it wont help is thinking is straight-jacketed into what scientist opinions are about "what is real?"
Occum said we should not entertain hypotheses beyond necessity, I would add to that the necessity of having minimum metaphysical baggage. This is why I believe realism in science is both unnecessary and wrong.

And I agree with all of that. I meant that the extraneous parts being the untestable parts, should be presented as fun speculation, not information to base behavior on.