Mastodawn

I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.

Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?

Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?

#science #nature #technology

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Distractions

@coreyspowell well, tons of philosophers tried to balance the power of mind and its attachment
to what we call reality, emphasizing that just speculative thinking produces only worthless imaginations, and that truth can only be found when reason is applied to reality. Kant even made it a rule. And Hegel, who wanted to abolish Kants Thing in Itself, still wanted reason to be tied to something that, ultimately, provides what could be called truth - a thing that physics has, while math doesn’t.