I notice that while a lot of the answer is formal and well-grounded, “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience” is itself a story :)
Personally, I would say that any gear-level model will have gaps in the understanding, and trying to fill these gaps will require extra modeling which also has gaps, and so on forever. My guess is that part of our brain will constantly try to find the answers and fill the holes, like a small child asking “why x? …and why y?”. So if a more practical part of us wants to stop investigating, it plugs the holes with fuzzy stories which sound like understanding.
Obviously, this is also a story, so discount it accordingly...
I notice that while a lot of the answer is formal and well-grounded, “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience” is itself a story :)
Yep. That’s just how humans think about it: complex phenomena require complex explanations. “Emergence,” as complexity arising from the many simple interactions of many simple components, I think is a pretty recent concept for humanity. People still think intelligent design makes more intuitive sense than evolution, for instance, even though the latter makes astronomically fewer assumptions and should be favored a priori by Occam’s Razor.
I notice that while a lot of the answer is formal and well-grounded, “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience” is itself a story :) Personally, I would say that any gear-level model will have gaps in the understanding, and trying to fill these gaps will require extra modeling which also has gaps, and so on forever. My guess is that part of our brain will constantly try to find the answers and fill the holes, like a small child asking “why x? …and why y?”. So if a more practical part of us wants to stop investigating, it plugs the holes with fuzzy stories which sound like understanding. Obviously, this is also a story, so discount it accordingly...
Yep. That’s just how humans think about it: complex phenomena require complex explanations. “Emergence,” as complexity arising from the many simple interactions of many simple components, I think is a pretty recent concept for humanity. People still think intelligent design makes more intuitive sense than evolution, for instance, even though the latter makes astronomically fewer assumptions and should be favored a priori by Occam’s Razor.
I don’t have anything to add, but this phenomenon was discussed in greater detail in Explain/Worship/Ignore. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yxvi9RitzZDpqn6Yh/explain-worship-ignore