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Frankly, your response sounded like informed "scientism", so popular at the end of 19th/beginning of 20th century. I simply state that we should keep minds open
by bitL 8y ago
Frankly, your response sounded like informed "scientism", so popular at the end of 19th/beginning of 20th century. I simply state that we should keep minds open to different explanations maybe someday observable by scientific method instead of trying to fit phenomena beyond our grasp into mechanisms known and proven today in unrelated areas, while expressing the hope that our civilization keeps improving instead of regressing. I couldn't care less if Universe had a special consciousness layer, or information layer, or we lived in some virtual machine of some grad student in a layer above us or whatever, but I wouldn't rule it out and wouldn't make fun of it either; I would also make sure if somebody comes with such a theory, that they stand on sound grounds instead of some new ageish demonology (popular in current neuroscience ehm) or whatnot. Whether I would allocate funding to it is a completely different matter (99.999% no).
If you start saying that "oh, it's just evolution", your contribution to the topic is zero, skipping any issues with that theory we can't explain yet, making it similar to a religion (which condenses certain observable facts into its rules otherwise it wouldn't survive). It's pretty normal for scientists to believe in 99% BS but if they are 1% right, we consider them super successful. None of the pioneers had any kind of holistic view of a field crunched through by theoreticians, after the initial discovery dust settled, taught at universities, so they inevitably believed all kinds of silly things from our current point of view. I hope the same would hold for our successors, having boldness to explore, instead of blindly taking existing knowledge without any doubts and punishing everyone who deviates from whatever narrative.