George the Giant or invisible cosmic springs that are too small to ever measure? Also a bunch of extra spatial dimensions that information can travel through without us being to see it. I see what you did there.
Ultimately I’d say there is nothing wrong with the primitives thinking, as long as they are willing to upgrade their model as better evidence becomes available. When the primitives finally send someone to check the other side of the mountain and see no giant, they need to eventually assume that the cause must be somewhere else they cannot see, like under the ground.
Also, if they think of a simpler model RIGHT NOW that meets all the above restrictions, they should “upgrade” to that simpler model because it saves computational time to work with it.
When the primitives develop tools to actually see the ground moving, and find out it does this all the time, they have to upgrade their model further to realize that somehow earthquakes are a property of the ground itself.
And so on up to present, and possibly the future when we can model the entire earth as a series of potential energy reservoirs and predict precisely when stress levels are building to the point of an energy transfer occurring.
George the Giant or invisible cosmic springs that are too small to ever measure? Also a bunch of extra spatial dimensions that information can travel through without us being to see it. I see what you did there.
Ultimately I’d say there is nothing wrong with the primitives thinking, as long as they are willing to upgrade their model as better evidence becomes available. When the primitives finally send someone to check the other side of the mountain and see no giant, they need to eventually assume that the cause must be somewhere else they cannot see, like under the ground.
Also, if they think of a simpler model RIGHT NOW that meets all the above restrictions, they should “upgrade” to that simpler model because it saves computational time to work with it.
When the primitives develop tools to actually see the ground moving, and find out it does this all the time, they have to upgrade their model further to realize that somehow earthquakes are a property of the ground itself.
And so on up to present, and possibly the future when we can model the entire earth as a series of potential energy reservoirs and predict precisely when stress levels are building to the point of an energy transfer occurring.