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Comment by cristianpascu | Hacker News Reader

A standard case of mixing (or actually confusing) epistemology with ontology. That is to say that something doesn't exist until we get to know something about it. Or, by all means, knowing something about something is posterior to us being here AND that something being there. Here lies the danger of dismissing philosophy as a bag of words when compared with the Holy Science that works, bitches.

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I've been reading Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" recently, and while I think it's actually a really terrible book and Nagel is incredibly uninformed on the theory of evolution, I do think he makes one really good point: the scientific method presupposes that the universe can be understood/observed/measured. It seems like such an obvious axiom, but I think it makes sense why we keep brushing up with observation / consciousness when we push the boundaries of science. It's sort of tautological in a way.

It will be interesting to see as we run closer and closer to the limits of observation and consciousness if we're on the verge of another huge paradigm shift in empiricism.

Or: Through the scientific method, we have discovered something that we cannot explain, and so people are now floating wild ideas that they know MUST be true.

... Which is exactly what the scientific method was designed to prevent. Categorically stating that nothing exists without our eventual knowledge of it is the height of arrogance.

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