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You say that trade-offs and scarcity are fundamental to biology. I agree, and this implies economics as a more fundamental science than biology or evolution. It still applies in our computer models, where biological details may not.
Undestanding does not flow from explanatory knowledge the way you imply. I understand Dutch and English, but a lot of my understanding of it is inexplicit.
In that same vein, why couldn't we class biology (evolution) under epistemology?
My point is rather that it's not so clean a line between explicit and inexplicit. You're a doctor, so imagine the steps being something like:
- Extensive description of patient's symptoms, test results, conclusion, etc, in English.
- Same as above but mostly made out of quick notes by attending doctors and nurses.
- Only a collection of test names and test results. Test results accompanied by Chinese.
- Just a collection of numbers coming out of tests, without saying which test.
Arguably all the information is always there, and can be read off, but with increasing difficulty, requiring you to learn another language, or do a series of deductions.
Not a doctor. But it's not hard for me to imagine untainted memory but a script with an error such that it can't manage to look up the information.
Let's fuck with your intuitions a little bit:
Say "stop" when it's no longer an explanation:
Didactic chapter in plain English with examples and edge cases, distilled into a concise technical note with formal definitions, invariants, and pseudocode.
Literate program interleaving prose and code, or a heavily commented Python implementation with docstrings and tests.
The same code stripped of comments/tests and then minified or obfuscated (e.g., Python one‑liner, obfuscated C), up through esolangs and formalisms (Brainfuck, untyped lambda calculus with Church numerals, SKI combinators).
Operational specifications with minimal labels (Turing machine tables), then hand‑written assembly without labels and self‑modifying tricks, down to raw machine code bytes/hex and binary blobs with unknown ISA or entry point.
The same bits recast as DNA base mapping with unknown block codec, unknown compression, encrypted archives indistinguishable from noise, arbitrary bitstrings for unspecified UTMs, or physical media (flux/RF) without modulation specs.
How could we integrate that vision with Popper's definition (paraphrased): a tension, inconsistency, or unmet explanatory demand that arises when a theory clashes with observations, background assumptions, or rival theories, thereby calling for conjectural solutions and critical tests.
I don't think a gene has problems. It does not have ideas.
Sure, philosophers and pedants do. But typically people use the word "know" in situations well short of being absolutely sure.
Sure, philosophers and pedants do. But typically people use the word "know" in situations well short of being absolutely sure.
We can't always be wrong, because that implies that correct ideas are not expressible, which makes no sense.
I think there is a sense in which we cannot always be sure that we are right, as there's always some possibility that we are wrong, even if we think we are completely right. And if we are completely right, there is nothing that is "manifest" about that.
Let's say I open my fridge, and there is cheese there, I conclude "I have cheese in my fridge". I may be hallucinating, or wrong about the category of cheese, or it just appears like cheese, or whatever. In that sense I could potentially be wrong. However I find it silly to think that I am infinitely wrong in my assessment of where my food is, all the time. That's like saying that we don't know what happens after we die. We do in every single way in which we use the term "know".
I think this idea that we are always wrong needs a rephrase, such as "we could always consider how we could be wrong", or "there is nothing that justifies our true belief", or "we could and should always criticise", or "nothing exists outside of criticism" (as we picked 1+1 and not 1+2 for some critical reason). The rephrase leaves open the possibility of being right a lot, like about where your food is, because you just found it, while still leaving open the possibility that the cheese you just saw is actually your butter.
Copyright is stifling to creativity, as now people are not incentivised to write fan-fictions.
This is stifling to creativity, as now people are not incentivised to write fan-fictions as much as without copyright.
I fail to see how fan fiction is at all damaging to an original creator.
We have found an example where copyright is bad.
Where is copyright good?
I am not allowed to sell my Star Wars fan-fiction. Why not?
Interesting. I recall this felt 'off'. I keep learning grammar details after 20 years of knowing English.
There are a bunch of things that start with Zu, such as ZuBerlin, ZuThailand, etc. I suppose that too could've been explained clearer