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There are many instances in history of “embarrassingly,”: • The theory that the earth is not the center of the universe - people persecuted sometimes killed fo

There are many instances in history of “embarrassingly,”: • The theory that the earth is not the center of the universe - people persecuted sometimes killed for different assumptions. • Spontaneous generation, the idea that life just arises out of nothing, at the time period this was accepted and other ideas disregarded which led to many lives lost due to disease. • Mental illness assumptions in the past led people to view people with mental illness as possessed by demons, etc. leading to cruel and unusual confinement for these individuals • Lots of other examples I would also propose that when observing our primate ape cousins even the smartest monkey to us appears to be “embarrassingly” putting together a coherent picture of actual reality. Then that proposes an interesting thought experiment. If we encountered an alien species with as much intellectual distance from us as we are to the monkeys, then how would our most innovative theories fare against theirs? I would imagine we would be seen as “embarrassingly,” able to put even a fraction of the puzzle together. We have our senses, and therefore we design our materials and probes to match our senses. Sometimes we can imagine high dimensionality in say the form of a tensor? Sure. Maybe we don’t have a complete picture so we build and optimize tools only related to our own sense processing. What if there are more than our senses, and we are incapable of seeing a deeper image of reality? What if have the senses of a snail as a comparison to an even more advanced species.

saagarjha 8y ago
None of those examples you mentioned had a lack of evidence, which is why we changed our perspective on how those things worked. The opposition to them was not scientific.
incelmods 8y ago
this is about science. scientists, by today's definition of the term, were enemies of the church (and still are). other scientists did not burn anyone for saying the earth rotates around the sun, they did not put nails in demented people's heads because "demons," nor did they implement any of the other examples you are thinking of. the rest of your comment is based on the wrong assumption of your start, hence there is no embarrassment for earlier works. Newton was not embarrassed by quantum mechanics.
lisper 8y ago
> If we encountered an alien species with as much intellectual distance from us as we are to the monkeys, then how would our most innovative theories fare against theirs? That depends on how far you are willing to suspend disbelief in your concept of what such an alien might look like. Are they made of atoms? If so, then they are overwhelmingly like to have senses very similar to ours. This is because our senses are fundamentally rooted in the physics of atoms, and there just aren't that many fundamentally different things that atoms can do. They can absorb and emit photons, they can stick together and be pried apart, they can emit alpha and beta particles, and they can fuse and fission. That's about it. And with those fundamental building blocks there is only so much you can do. You can imagine, say, aliens that can natively detect different parts of the E-M spectrum than we do, but that's not going to lead them to new physics that we haven't discovered. On the other hand, if these aliens are made of dark matter then all bets are off. But given how hard it is for us to detect dark matter at all it's hard to imagine how we would get to the point where we would even recognize a life form made of it, let alone figure out how to communicate with it.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > our senses are fundamentally rooted in the physics of atoms, and there just aren't that many fundamentally different things that atoms can do. They can absorb and emit photons, they can stick together and be pried apart, they can emit alpha and beta particles, and they can fuse and fission. That's about it. And with those fundamental building blocks there is only so much you can do. Our traditional physical senses: - Sight. Based on interacting with photons. - Sound. This is based on atoms physically colliding with each other. However, we process it using a complex apparatus that essentially performs a Fourier transform on the raw air-pressure data, extracting the frequencies of the wave pattern that reaches our ears on the assumption that a wave pattern is what we will get. - Touch. This is based on atoms colliding with each other. It is set up more for the detection of large-scale structural characteristics. (e.g. hard / soft / liquid) - Smell. This is based on atoms colliding with each other. It is totally unlike touch in that the sense of smell processes molecules based on their molecular shape -- the specific way in which they interact with dedicated sensors -- rather than on their physical characteristics. At this level, you're interacting with a molecule more than with a substance. - Taste. From a physics perspective, this is basically just the same thing as smell. From a biology perspective, it's pretty different. I don't see this as good evidence that the set of possible senses is meaningfully limited by a simplistic view of how atoms can physically interact with other atoms. We have many other senses that are less obviously based in simple physical interactions, like the sense of time. Some people have had magnets implanted, leveraging their existing sense of touch into a sense of magnetic fields. This is something humans don't ordinarily have, and is actually not allowed for by your list of the capabilities of atoms -- you forgot that atoms can hold an electric charge -- but is analogous to some other animals' ability to sense electric fields. I'm curious how you think "emitting an alpha particle" differs from "being pried apart" or "fissioning".
Tomte 8y ago
To all your "embarassing" examples: what would have been the plausible alternative? "people would have understood mental illness like we do today" and "people would have had a better understanding of abiogenesis" is emphatically not a possibility. People saw mental illness, were afraid of it, and put it into the very best system with explanatory power they had at their disposal. I can't see anything qwrong with that, and certainly don't see why you should laugh at them.
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  On the point of mental illness, Foucault is well known for his view on it (quoting from SEP): >But, according to Foucault, the new idea that the mad were merely sick (“mentally” ill) and in need of medical treatment was not at all a clear improvement on earlier conceptions (e.g., the Renaissance idea that the mad were in contact with the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy or the seventeenth-eighteenth-century view of madness as a renouncing of reason). Moreover, he argued that the alleged scientific neutrality of modern medical treatments of insanity are in fact covers for controlling challenges to conventional bourgeois morality. In short, Foucault argued that what was presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific discovery (that madness is mental illness) was in fact the product of eminently questionable social and ethical commitments.
meroes 8y ago
What's interesting to me is while we have no reference for how close we are to understanding ultimate reality, you are nevertheless sure enough in your beliefs to call ancestral knowledge and other species 'embarassing'.

saagarjha 8y ago

None of those examples you mentioned had a lack of evidence, which is why we changed our perspective on how those things worked. The opposition to them was not scientific.

incelmods 8y ago

this is about science. scientists, by today's definition of the term, were enemies of the church (and still are). other scientists did not burn anyone for saying the earth rotates around the sun, they did not put nails in demented people's heads because "demons," nor did they implement any of the other examples you are thinking of. the rest of your comment is based on the wrong assumption of your start, hence there is no embarrassment for earlier works. Newton was not embarrassed by quantum mechanics.

lisper 8y ago

> If we encountered an alien species with as much intellectual distance from us as we are to the monkeys, then how would our most innovative theories fare against theirs? That depends on how far you are willing to suspend disbelief in your concept of what such an alien might look like. Are they made of atoms? If so, then they are overwhelmingly like to have senses very similar to ours. This is because our senses are fundamentally rooted in the physics of atoms, and there just aren't that many fundamentally different things that atoms can do. They can absorb and emit photons, they can stick together and be pried apart, they can emit alpha and beta particles, and they can fuse and fission. That's about it. And with those fundamental building blocks there is only so much you can do. You can imagine, say, aliens that can natively detect different parts of the E-M spectrum than we do, but that's not going to lead them to new physics that we haven't discovered. On the other hand, if these aliens are made of dark matter then all bets are off. But given how hard it is for us to detect dark matter at all it's hard to imagine how we would get to the point where we would even recognize a life form made of it, let alone figure out how to communicate with it.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
> our senses are fundamentally rooted in the physics of atoms, and there just aren't that many fundamentally different things that atoms can do. They can absorb and emit photons, they can stick together and be pried apart, they can emit alpha and beta particles, and they can fuse and fission. That's about it. And with those fundamental building blocks there is only so much you can do. Our traditional physical senses: - Sight. Based on interacting with photons. - Sound. This is based on atoms physically colliding with each other. However, we process it using a complex apparatus that essentially performs a Fourier transform on the raw air-pressure data, extracting the frequencies of the wave pattern that reaches our ears on the assumption that a wave pattern is what we will get. - Touch. This is based on atoms colliding with each other. It is set up more for the detection of large-scale structural characteristics. (e.g. hard / soft / liquid) - Smell. This is based on atoms colliding with each other. It is totally unlike touch in that the sense of smell processes molecules based on their molecular shape -- the specific way in which they interact with dedicated sensors -- rather than on their physical characteristics. At this level, you're interacting with a molecule more than with a substance. - Taste. From a physics perspective, this is basically just the same thing as smell. From a biology perspective, it's pretty different. I don't see this as good evidence that the set of possible senses is meaningfully limited by a simplistic view of how atoms can physically interact with other atoms. We have many other senses that are less obviously based in simple physical interactions, like the sense of time. Some people have had magnets implanted, leveraging their existing sense of touch into a sense of magnetic fields. This is something humans don't ordinarily have, and is actually not allowed for by your list of the capabilities of atoms -- you forgot that atoms can hold an electric charge -- but is analogous to some other animals' ability to sense electric fields. I'm curious how you think "emitting an alpha particle" differs from "being pried apart" or "fissioning".

Tomte 8y ago

To all your "embarassing" examples: what would have been the plausible alternative? "people would have understood mental illness like we do today" and "people would have had a better understanding of abiogenesis" is emphatically not a possibility. People saw mental illness, were afraid of it, and put it into the very best system with explanatory power they had at their disposal. I can't see anything qwrong with that, and certainly don't see why you should laugh at them.

claudiawerner 8y ago
On the point of mental illness, Foucault is well known for his view on it (quoting from SEP): >But, according to Foucault, the new idea that the mad were merely sick (“mentally” ill) and in need of medical treatment was not at all a clear improvement on earlier conceptions (e.g., the Renaissance idea that the mad were in contact with the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy or the seventeenth-eighteenth-century view of madness as a renouncing of reason). Moreover, he argued that the alleged scientific neutrality of modern medical treatments of insanity are in fact covers for controlling challenges to conventional bourgeois morality. In short, Foucault argued that what was presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific discovery (that madness is mental illness) was in fact the product of eminently questionable social and ethical commitments.

meroes 8y ago

What's interesting to me is while we have no reference for how close we are to understanding ultimate reality, you are nevertheless sure enough in your beliefs to call ancestral knowledge and other species 'embarassing'.