Hmm... this feels like saying that the invention of calculus reduces everything to integrals and derivatives. Realizing Darwinian optimization is all over the place only offers us one more tool in our understanding.
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Replying to @higherOrderNet @NegarestaniReza and
The idea that the Memes, in terms of concepts, and the systems that reproduce themselves more generally, which are most successful in that reproduction will be the most common will be obvious. But systems are fundamentally historical phenomena, one cannot consider
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Replying to @NicolasDVillar1 @higherOrderNet and
the "value" of a system or meme in the abstract because of its numbers, as, being a product of history, its contingency. Reason is privileged relative to Memes because it can recognize these contingencies and even predict them.
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Replying to @NicolasDVillar1 @NegarestaniReza and
I agree. Reason can be thought of AS a meme, but one that transcends the world of flimsy social constructs because of its enduring predictive power.
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Replying to @higherOrderNet @NegarestaniReza and
But what qualifies the success of reason is not its spread, while science as a field of knowledge must be reproduced, reason on its own can exist independently. Factual information discovered by reason will often fail to reproduce.
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Replying to @NicolasDVillar1 @higherOrderNet and
With regards to the reproduction of scientific knowledge, as distinct from memes more generally, even with reference to empirical reality there is no escape from ideology. The geocentric debate is a great example. The ancients believed they had plenty hard evidence
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Replying to @NicolasDVillar1 @higherOrderNet and
after all, if the Earth really did revolve around the sun, we should be able to observe Stellar Parallax as the stars closest to us moved relative to those farther away. The ancients did not observe this, and therefore they concluded that the Earth was the center of the universe
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Replying to @NicolasDVillar1 @higherOrderNet and
However, the properties of Parallax that allowed our current model to exist, revolving around the sun, were also well known to the ancients. Objects very far away had a far smaller level of Parallax. It was entirely plausible that the stars were just too far away to observe
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Replying to @NicolasDVillar1 @higherOrderNet and
Parallax. Astronomers throughout the medieval and renaissance eras made it their mission to try and detect this Parallax. It was only detected successfully in the 19th century. Until the detection of Stellar Parallax, the debates around cosmology were driven by conjectures
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Replying to @NicolasDVillar1 @higherOrderNet and
Galileo and Copernicus made well known the failures of the Geo-centric models and the epicycle modifications, but there was far from a settled alternative. Therefore ideological battles raged: whether the orbits of the heavens was characterized by a perfect circle or an ellipse
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Yes, Copernicus didn't really supplant the Ptolemaic system. The entire change came after he modified some of the equations of motions by way of what was already available (Oresme's work).
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