“but even after you say “Consciousness is caused by quantum gravity”, you don’t anticipate anything”
It seems to me that if you have a testable hypothesis, then you are anticipating something. If I believe in quantum gravity, that’s just a belief. If I theorize that I can run Test X, and I’ll get Y result, then there’s an actual anticipation. Assuming it’s a sane test and a sane hypothesis, I’m just not understanding how you could possibly fail to change your anticipations.
I’ve had this question on a few articles, and thus far haven’t come any closer to enlightenment. It seems to me that the basic failing of “vitalism” or “phlogiston” is that they’re too general, they don’t actually make predictions or change anticipations, and thus you can’t test them in the first place. If they made testable predictions, they’d have to change anticipations (unless you just wanted to ignore the evidence)
“Second, the hypothesis has no moving parts—the secret sauce is not a specific complex mechanism, but a blankly solid substance or force.”
It seems to me that the difference between “phlogiston” and “gravity” isn’t the presence or absence of a complex mechanism; gravity, as it was first understood, just happened to make actual, testable predictions (objects fall at 9.8 m/s^2), and from there it has been refined in to something more complex.
But it seems to me that it’s entirely useful to have a model that makes useful, accurate, “anticipate-able” predictions, even if you have no clue why the model works.
In fact, it seems to me that quite a lot of the failings of science have been when we try to explain “why” instead of “what”, especially when people start embracing the “why” as True Dogma.
I suppose mainly, I’m not clear whether I’m missing something big, or if I’ve already gotten it and the thing to understand here is simply that a lot of other people haven’t gotten it.
It seems to me that if you have a testable hypothesis, then you are anticipating something. If I believe in quantum gravity, that’s just a belief. If I theorize that I can run Test X, and I’ll get Y result, then there’s an actual anticipation. Assuming it’s a sane test and a sane hypothesis, I’m just not understanding how you could possibly fail to change your anticipations.
I’ve had this question on a few articles, and thus far haven’t come any closer to enlightenment. It seems to me that the basic failing of “vitalism” or “phlogiston” is that they’re too general, they don’t actually make predictions or change anticipations, and thus you can’t test them in the first place. If they made testable predictions, they’d have to change anticipations (unless you just wanted to ignore the evidence)
It seems to me that the difference between “phlogiston” and “gravity” isn’t the presence or absence of a complex mechanism; gravity, as it was first understood, just happened to make actual, testable predictions (objects fall at 9.8 m/s^2), and from there it has been refined in to something more complex.
But it seems to me that it’s entirely useful to have a model that makes useful, accurate, “anticipate-able” predictions, even if you have no clue why the model works.
In fact, it seems to me that quite a lot of the failings of science have been when we try to explain “why” instead of “what”, especially when people start embracing the “why” as True Dogma.
I suppose mainly, I’m not clear whether I’m missing something big, or if I’ve already gotten it and the thing to understand here is simply that a lot of other people haven’t gotten it.