- The hierarchy of sciences in which, in terms of human beliefs about the real world, psychology trumps everything;
- The New Yorker on the plausibility of impossible beings (from 2017);
- Recalling that Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense;
- How “more than half of Americans” claim they’ve been visited by ghosts, without necessarily knowing what they’re talking about;
- The opposite of the “constitution of knowledge” is what many of us are living in.
I may or may not have described the ‘hierarchy’ of sciences and how it’s worked out in recent decades. (Harari does this 50,000 foot take on the opening page of Sapiens.) Take the basic sciences, even just those taught in high school, and you come to understand that physics underlies everything. Physics boils everything down to elemental particles and basic forces that (seem to be at least) consistent across the entire observable universe. Knowing physics, you can construct chemistry. You understand how the elementary particles bond together into atoms, heavier and heavier ones, and how the atoms combine into molecules, bigger and bigger ones. You stop speaking in terms of physics and use higher-order formulations, to discuss chemistry. Similarly, chemistry underlies biology, and you can discuss biological constructions in terms of chemistry, or use other sets of higher-order formulations, to discuss biology, and life. At each steps there is an emergence of some sort, in which simpler orders of reality underlie higher orders, and you use different terminology at each level, but ultimately biology boils down to chemistry which boils down to physics. Evolution explains how life (biology) has come to exist in its present form, including human beings, and why such things as history and the arts exist, because evolution is partly about evolution of the human mind, which has become optimized to survival — not (crucial key point) the understanding of physical reality. Thus the arts are obsessed about some topics, and not other theoretical ones.
(This is one of the themes of the essay I placed that will be published in a year or so.)
Further, the understanding of human nature, or human psychology, as it’s evolved for survival, provides a crucial insight. There’s a distinction between what is real (which has been captured and refined by the “constitution of knowledge” over the past 500 years) and what people believe. The latter is the former mediated through evolutionary-driven human nature: psychology. So to realize what people *believe*, the formulation of the above hierarchy turns out to be:
Physics << Chemistry << Biology << Evolution and Human Nature << Psychology << Human Culture and the Humanities (and Politics)
To the point where many people dismiss or deny all the basic science at the left end, if it conflicts with their cultural identities, which have derived in spite of them.
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The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz, 30 Oct 2017: Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them, subtitled “The relative plausibility of impossible beings tells you a lot about how the mind works.”
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