4 ms·

However, as you illustrate yourself, it is no longer the 13th century and we have a large amount of evidence to suggest the relationships between things extend

However, as you illustrate yourself, it is no longer the 13th century and we have a large amount of evidence to suggest the relationships between things extend further than a simple jumble of complicated and unrelated data. I don't think it's dogmatic to point this out at all, I think it's dogmatic to deny it, needing to roll the clock back over six hundred years to posit a situation where the evidence may indicate otherwise. Even if that were granted, I'm still not so certain that it makes sense. Humans have been finding laws to apply for much of recorded history. I realise it's quite a long way from the elegance of something like general relativity to the simplicity of something like pythagoras' theorem, but the emergence of the former depended upon the epistemological grounding of the latter. It was not my intent to make allusions to a unifying great spirit or any such nonsense, merely that for the vast majority of recorded history searching for the patterns and relations in material reality has given humanity most of it's most spectacular successes. To cast this all away and try to parcel everything into microscopic localities which are not thematically related at all and thus discard what can be learned by taking a wider view. That said, I'll check out the dappled universe idea, I've not come across it before. It amuses me more than a little that this particular concept is being pushed by someone neatly straddling the disciplines of philosophy and physics though, isn't that in itself something of a defense of a broader view?

foldr 17y ago
>we have a large amount of evidence to suggest the relationships between things extend further than a simple jumble of complicated and unrelated data. Oh yes, of course. But there's a lot of middle ground between a complete jumble and complete unity. I don't think anyone is suggesting that there are no regularities at all, just that the ones that there are may be relatively local and particular. (They're still pretty damn impressive for all that, though.) I think this is an aesthetic problem in a way. Everyone seems to have a kind of Platonic aesthetic these days -- everything has to be ultimately simple and unified and abstractly beautiful. If you'll excuse a stupid metaphor, it's sort of a question of how you visualize God's office. Does it just have a plain desk with a couple of pens and two equations written neatly on a notepad, or is it a huge jumble of dusty books and papers covering every conceivable topic at every conceivable level of analysis? I think part of the reason for my "conversion" to the dappled view of things was that I started to find the Platonic aesthetic less and less appealing. (Of course, it might be a really bad idea to let aesthetic considerations have this much influence, but maybe that's another topic.) >It amuses me more than a little that this particular concept is being pushed by someone neatly straddling the disciplines of philosophy and physics though, isn't that in itself something of a defense of a broader view? I think it's a bad kind of slippery slope argument to go from "there are some interesting connections between some things" (certainly true) to "everything is deeply connected and unified" (plausible, appealing in some ways, but not something a rational person has to believe).

foldr 17y ago

>we have a large amount of evidence to suggest the relationships between things extend further than a simple jumble of complicated and unrelated data. Oh yes, of course. But there's a lot of middle ground between a complete jumble and complete unity. I don't think anyone is suggesting that there are no regularities at all, just that the ones that there are may be relatively local and particular. (They're still pretty damn impressive for all that, though.) I think this is an aesthetic problem in a way. Everyone seems to have a kind of Platonic aesthetic these days -- everything has to be ultimately simple and unified and abstractly beautiful. If you'll excuse a stupid metaphor, it's sort of a question of how you visualize God's office. Does it just have a plain desk with a couple of pens and two equations written neatly on a notepad, or is it a huge jumble of dusty books and papers covering every conceivable topic at every conceivable level of analysis? I think part of the reason for my "conversion" to the dappled view of things was that I started to find the Platonic aesthetic less and less appealing. (Of course, it might be a really bad idea to let aesthetic considerations have this much influence, but maybe that's another topic.) >It amuses me more than a little that this particular concept is being pushed by someone neatly straddling the disciplines of philosophy and physics though, isn't that in itself something of a defense of a broader view? I think it's a bad kind of slippery slope argument to go from "there are some interesting connections between some things" (certainly true) to "everything is deeply connected and unified" (plausible, appealing in some ways, but not something a rational person has to believe).