“I no longer claim to know anything
But I still have persistent suspicions.
My greatest suspicion holds that
All my suspicions may prove wrong.
Intelligence recognizes
That nothing now seems impossible.
Have a good hearty laugh
And do not dare to mourn me.”
–Robert Anton Wilson
when we look at religion and, to some extent ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of “belief”, epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find a prey at distance. Your eyes are not sensors aimed at getting the electromagnetic spectrum of reality. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.
via https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rationality–432e96dd4d1a
Sometime last year I picked up on Kenneth Stanley’s and Joel Lehmann’s 2015 book called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned - The Myth of the Objective. In the book they develop an argument for an advanced teleology based on experiments with synthetic processes of knowledge acquisition in the context of AI, ALife, and Learning. The argument roughly says, that if you want to reach a goal, that is ambitious in the sense that the exact sequence of steps (the route) which will get you there, is not known, then accumulating possible steps is a better strategy than heading directly into the direction of the goal. That’s because chances are, that some of these steps will turn out, but unforseeably so, to be precisely what is needed to make the next move when negotiating the route. So far so good
Human knowledge expresses itself in three different modes, i.e. as explicit, semantic or verbal knowledge, as implicit, tacit or intuitive knowledge, and as visual, pictorial or episodic knowledge. To refer to knowledge only as „explicit knowledge“ would neglect the other modes of knowledge that are of equal importance for higher cognition. Unifying frames of the different modes of knowledge are the aesthetiic principle on a formal level and the mimetic principle on the level of reference.