Sublime

Observations and assumptions can exist only within an already largely structured system of thinking, one that is a priori riddled with errors.

knowledge and competence are only ever local. There are meaningful categories of universals in mathematics and physics, but not in any remotely social affairs. Humans create universals across disciplines so as to comprehend and communicate, but, as the linguistic philosopher Alfred Korzybski is well known for saying, the map is not the territory. M

The confusion between science as a cognitive activity and science as a producer of testable predictions leaves science open to the critique of the dominion of technology.

Then Godel’s theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some special inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know that what we call ‘reason’ is just an arbitrary game. It’s not special, in the way we thought it was.

After my yarns with Percy, I begin to see the uncertainty principle not as a law but as an expression of frustration about the impossibility of achieving godlike scientific objectivity.

This methodological approach – often summarized in the principle “understanding by building”

have not yet established that the Turing principle itself has the status of a fundamental law. A sceptic might argue that it does not. It is a law about the physical embodiment of knowledge, and the sceptic might take the view that knowledge is a parochial, anthropocentric concept rather than a fundamental one.

The big advantage of physicists—I think Doyne Farmer may have once said this to me—is not what they have learned, the tools. It’s how they have learned to think. In particular, physicists are quite good at being very, very broad, taking tools from all over the place. That is something that economists are very, very remiss in. It is a b—tch to try t