“But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory.”
“To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.”
“Every mysterianism, though it may fail to predict details and quantities, is ultimately vulnerable to the one experience in all the world that it does prohibit—the discovery of a non-mysterious explanation.”
Wow! Certainly no shortage of great insights and quotable aphorisms in this posting and commentary. Yet I will still claim that mysterious answers can be rendered not just harmless, but positively helpful if you exploit them properly. How to exploit them? Well, first you recognize them by the suggested 4 signs. Then you turn around sign #1 and treat them as a curiosity-magnet rather than curiosity-stopper. Then you turn around sign #2 by empirically investigating to find the moving parts. (Like the folks around Delbruck who thought that investigating life would reveal new laws of physics.)
And finally, avoid falling into the traps implicit in signs #3 and #4.
“But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory.”
“To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.”
“Every mysterianism, though it may fail to predict details and quantities, is ultimately vulnerable to the one experience in all the world that it does prohibit—the discovery of a non-mysterious explanation.”
Wow! Certainly no shortage of great insights and quotable aphorisms in this posting and commentary. Yet I will still claim that mysterious answers can be rendered not just harmless, but positively helpful if you exploit them properly. How to exploit them? Well, first you recognize them by the suggested 4 signs. Then you turn around sign #1 and treat them as a curiosity-magnet rather than curiosity-stopper. Then you turn around sign #2 by empirically investigating to find the moving parts. (Like the folks around Delbruck who thought that investigating life would reveal new laws of physics.) And finally, avoid falling into the traps implicit in signs #3 and #4.