Views from Crestmont Drive

End of November. The sun sets early; the house is chillier. We have our thermostat set to 68. And I think I’m approaching the finishing of one of my long-term projects. And still working on another.

• Adam Frank on learning skepticism by growing up in New Jersey in the 1970s, and learning about con men;
• David French on bespoke realities.

Big Think, Adam Frank, 30 Nov 2023: The most important lesson about being a scientist I learned in New Jersey, subtitled “I grew up in New Jersey in the 1970s and that experience gave me everything I needed to become a skeptic.”

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Here’s a provisional thesis (not even a provisional conclusion). The mysteries that most perplex us scientifically — like, say, the nature of consciousness, or what happened “before” the Big Bang — or that attract the most wild, often conspiracy-driven, thinking — like UFOs — are perplexing because either 1, we’re asking the wrong question, or 2, we’re driven by evolutionary derived biases to detect “causes” where none actually exist. We see things that aren’t there; we project our familiar experiences onto things that exist independently of human reality.

Quick example: what happened before the Big Bang? This may be like asking what’s north of the North Pole. We’re asking a nonsensical question, because we perceive the passage of time, based on our immediate experience, in a way that doesn’t apply to the entire cosmos. (Stephen Hawking IIRC, way back in A Brief History of Time in 1988 [which I read!], proposed the idea that time is a dimension that curves back upon itself, as a sphere does. OTOH he’d apparently updated some of his theories by the end of his life, and I’ve not kept up.)

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