Memethuzla
Once considered intelligent, did some maths at Cantab, a bit of computering (middleware & stuff, city) now interested in homeopathy & nonstandard medicine (from a positive point of view), and a load of other things, from cosmology to Sinology.
No, I am not anti-science, nor anti-skeptic, but I am anti the pseudo-skeptic; the buffoons who think they know it all, that they are somehow arbiters of reality. And I am anti-bully, too.
I would rate myself as a logical hard-line skeptic when it comes to accepting the conventional, however, which is going to put me in opposition to True Believers in the 'authority' of Science, a more than faintly ridiculous notion.
My scientific attitude is more "how's that happen, then?" and "how would we understand & predict" than of Popper's "trial & error" error.
If one goes with the repeatable experiment hypothesis, it follows that history can never have happened, then we are doomed to repeat only mistakes.
I think Haack has a clearer vision, quite encouraging.
Time for an anecdote. Many years after the death of successful former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Isaac Newton, someone rummaging through his rooms at Trinity discovered a trunk full of forbidden literature, occult stuff, something that might have had another man burnt at the stake at the time.
Woooo, as you might say.
I wonder how much the wisdom (and practices) of earlier ages informed his thinking. If only more recent Chancellors had the perspicacity to foresee events, perhaps we would have had a return to grant-funded education for clever people, instead of spending all the money on cornflake packets, just to make up the numbers.
If I see something that doesn't fit with theory, I reckon the theory is a bit off-key, not Nature, and not the observation.
I'm not even certain that nature has immutable Laws, and it certainly has no need of self-appointed judges or policemen. All we need to do is get a better handle on events.
What continually astounds me is the way so many positivist Scientarians, atheists to a man/whatever (something different about the functionality of some part of the brain, then?), utterly refuse to realise that their Scientism is a belief system, tantamount to a new God, complete with Scripture, High Priests, Saint, Martyrs, & an Inquisition into heretical tendencies.
Now, that certainly is suspension of disbelief, and puts them quite in line with Western Christians of the middle ages, for whom their God was an obvious, evident, albeit ineffable, reality.
It just might have a something to do with their being the MMR generation, maybe.
The term “Scientarian” is a neologism of my own, to disambiguate from scientists proper, who come to phenomena without prejudices.
Time for another anecdote:
On 21 March 1666, Newton presented a paper to Royal Society "On gravity". I've often conjectured he fully intended the pun.
I hope that if anyone ever cracks the problem of anti-gravity, the paper gets called "On Levity".
Now, can anyone out there explain the mechanism by which inertia works?
Action at a distance, mechanism,anyone?
--Memethuzla (talk) 02:07, 12 December 2010 (UTC)