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Comment by JessieHenshaw on What are the open problems in Human Rationality? · 2019-05-22T13:35:11.676Z · LW · GW

I'm a natural systems scientist, who noticed some time ago that it takes organization in nature to use energy, and then takes development to create organization. I was a physicist, but physics seems limited to studying things that can be represented with numbers. Organization is really not so open to that. So I developed various pattern languages, starting with the seemingly universal pattern of "natural growth," as a process of organization development. The pattern begins with an accumulation of small things or changes expanding into big ones, and then to produce stable organization in the end the progression has to reverse, with accumulating smaller and smaller things or changes leading toward a state of completion. If you look close, really everything we do follows that pattern, of diverging then converging accumulations. That seems to mark "time" as an organizational, not a numeric process.

So... for science to apparently not to notice that seems to be a very strong hint as to what in the world is wrong with human thinking. It's not just Descartes. Somewhere in the evolution of human thought, seemingly well before science chose to define nature with numbers, we seem to have decided that it was the job of reason to define reality. Of course we then get it wrong every time, as reality is already defined and so defining it is just not our job. Nature defines reality, and we can only do our best to study it. So, I don't know is my questions will help anyone else yet, but they might. It does seem "less wrong" as a point of view though, rather than to err by assuming our best rules of prediction define the world we are trying to predict. That's contradictory.