Responding to: 4/26/09 “Again, I find myself agreeing with you.”
BB

Brian,
You started this thread by saying you thought long term forces such as “natural cycles” would  overwhelm any local developmental processes.    What I had said was fairly directly that all long term forces were the accumulation of local developmental processes.

There actually seems to be excellent evidence of that, as good as the evidence for evolution.    True, I can’t get it published because the tyranny of “natural law” as a philosophy of science is only frayed at the edges rather than torn in the middle, but I can lead anyone to enough of it to make it quite hard to erase.

It’s certainly made hard to speak clearly about these things,

that our “cultural wisdom” is
“so much more pothole than road” on the subject.

Each individual person needs to decide what to believe for themselves, and I’ve been talking about this as a rather deep flaw in what we are taught, and that most people accept without question.    There’s a more basic question than WHAT laws apply to nature though.  That’s whether laws DO apply to nature.

What the evidence that long term processes come from accumulations of local developments shows rather well is the other possibility.    The laws we perceive are more accurately described as being made in our imaginations from the patterns we incompletely understand in nature.

So the “super pot hole” of human thinking is believing nature is:

making her choices based on what is buzzing around in our heads… rather than the reverse!

What I find most cool about that is that the fix is easy to define, though somewhat easier said than done.   That fix is just for us to turn our “answers” in to questions, and for that to be what reattaches our thoughts to reality.

For example, let’s say our economy seems to be in trouble because of having run out of cheap energy.  Turning that into a question asks “is that the problem”.

If we had limitless cheap energy, and found “perpetual motion machines” of a practical sort, would that finally be the thing to make “perpetual explosion machines” like our economy possible to stabilize?    There I’m assuming the assumed problem is solved, and asking if it would work.

My idea is that if people stopped treating our minds as “containing the laws” of nature, but instead as “looking for the patterns” of nature, we’d stop falling into quite so many of her potholes.   We’d then “have it both ways”, keep our laws of nature and see what else she might be doing as well.

pfh