Sublime

With the hindsight provided by each successive theory, we can see not only where the previous theory made false predictions, but also that wherever it made true predictions this was because it had expressed some truth about reality. So its truth lives on in the new theory – as Einstein remarked, ‘There could be no fairer destiny for any physical

“toy” models of economies—simple models that are so abstract they bear little resemblance to reality.

But modern scientific paradigms are rarely overthrown. Instead, they are built upon. They create a platform that supports new paradigms above them. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was a “dangerous” idea—in Daniel Dennett’s phrase—because it challenged Biblical and human-centric accounts of life’s history, but the true measure of its scientific

Life achieves its effects not by being larger, more massive or more energetic than other physical processes, but by being more knowledgeable.

Daniel echoed the statement Core had made during their visit. “Nothing is certain. Outcomes follow probabilities.”

It is because the laws of physics support computational universality that human brains can predict and explain the behaviour of very un-human objects like quasars. And it is because of that same universality that mathematicians like Hilbert can build up an intuition of proof, and mistakenly think that it is independent of physics. But it is not