[ExI] The difference between Discovery and Design.

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2011-07-28 23:49, john clark wrote:
> On *Wed, 7/27/11, Damien Broderick /<thespike at satx.rr.com>/* wrote:
>
>     "What Aristotle didn't have was 300 years of closely observed and
>     theorized empirical science behind him, itself informed (horrors!)
>     by a monotheistic paradigm that encouraged scientists to assume as
>     their reductionist default that the multiple worlds of empirical
>     experience at many levels were basically *unified* and *lawful*."
>
> But Pythagoras lived almost 2 hundred years before Aristotle and he
> thought the laws of the universe were unified and lawful, he thought
> numbers ruled the world and were behind everything.

In about the same way your garden variety new ager does, not like a 
theoretical physicist does.

Remember, this was long before mathematical science had been invented. 
That was invented around 1623 by Gallileo. Before that science (insofar 
there was any experimental method at all) tended to be qualitative. And, 
as this thread has discussed, experimental science as a method was only 
developed during the middle ages (Alhazen perhaps started, it got 
translated/enlarged by Roger Bacon) and early modernity (Francis Bacon, 
Novum Organum, 1620). It was refined a lot more subsequently - but it 
took centuries.

We tend to overestimate how hard it is to come up with an entirely new 
way of seeking knowledge. These methods are technologies of their own, 
and just like steam engines and transistors require plenty of people 
using and improving them before they become really potent.


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University