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I don’t think that the assumption is that the natural world is dumb. The scientific discovery process aims to highlight new insights to help us make a better an
by nerbert 5y ago
I don’t think that the assumption is that the natural world is dumb. The scientific discovery process aims to highlight new insights to help us make a better and useful description of the world. Implying that the starting point is "dumb" is incorrect. The starting point is a blank page, that will be filled by the research, whatever they find out.
- avianlyric 5y agoI understand what your trying to say. But I don’t agree with words you’ve used. We don’t assume nothing, that’s clearly not true. A basic assumption we make is that the natural world is capable of perceiving us and responding to our actions. The question we’re normally testing is how complex the process between perception and response is. As general rule we assume that process is extremely simple (“dumb”), and work to understand how complex (“smart”) it actually is. For example, in this paper the scientists didn’t start by proving the dogs were capable of observing the humans and responding to their actions. That was a given. What was tested was how complex the dogs perception and decision making process was. Using words like “dumb” and “smart” are extremely crude. But it’s the words used by GP and OP.