Good article. Some thoughts:
I probably constrain my experiences in lots of ways that I don’t even know about, but I don’t think there’s always a way to know whether a belief will constrain your experiences, even if it is based on empirical (or even scientific) observation. Isaac Newton’s beliefs constrained all of our beliefs for centuries. Scholars were so unwilling to question classical mechanics that they came up with this “ether” stuff that could never be observed directly, and thus didn’t further constrain their experience, but had the nice side effect of resolving inconsistencies in their previously held theories. However, even though Einstein’s theory was more correct than Newton’s, without Newton’s theory mechanical engineering wouldn’t exist, and without Einstein’s, the Bomb wouldn’t exist. I mean this is obviously a gross oversimplification of the development of the Bomb, but I’m just saying there’s not much use for relativity outside of a classroom/particle accelerator.
Does this mean that there is nothing that is inherently uncertain? I guess another way to put that would be, could Laplace’s Demon infer the entire history of the universe back to front from a single moment? It might seem obvious that there are singularities moving backwards through time (i.e. processes whose result does not give you information about their origin), so couldn’t the same thing exist moving forward through time?
Anyway, great article!