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Comment by drostie | Hacker News Reader

That's kind of the modus operandi of physics, I suppose. Max Planck started from a specific conclusion, that the spectrum of the Sun is limited at high frequencies in ways that Maxwell's theory clearly is not, and then searched for some way to explain the difference.

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The difference being that Planck knew what the reality was (we knew what the spectrum of the sun looked like), but with consciousness we don't really know what the reality is (there is no "spectrum" of the mind for us to match).

Okay how about Einstein then? My understanding is that he also worked backwards in order to develop his theory of Special Relativity; he was trying to "fit" a theory to a universe that presupposed that the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe, including a constant speed of light for all observers. Relativistic effects weren't known to be reality at the time this theory was proposed. Much later, scientists developed experiments to confirm relativity.

Maybe we're still searching for the right theory of consciousness to know what exactly we're trying to measure?

>Relativistic effects weren't known to be reality at the time this theory was proposed.

Umnn, Michelson–Morley and Maxwell equations were enough experimental evidence before Einstein. Einstein work was reconciling Mechanics to confirm with electromagnetism, and not the other way round.

EDIT: Not to say there isn't some physics theory developed independent of experiments. But relativity is not a good candidate.

Lorentz transformations predate special relativity, so there was definitely work going on in this area prior to relativity.

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