Contraction though is a bounded short term cost with long-term benefit. You only have to audit existing beliefs for the continued necessity of Thing that has lost an important explanatory contest. Its adaptive fitness in your head has been lowered.
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But occasionally, this approach will stall and you’ll be faced with a genuine rather than apparent mystery. You’ll need to follow Dirk Gently’s law: don’t eliminate the impossible. Ie entertain the possibility of needing to adding/eliminating primitives.
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Removing god from “mystery of wall stain” is trivial. Removing god from “creation of life” is not. Adding is never trivial. You can’t add just a local ghost to explain a case. You must add ‘ghost’ as a base class to universe (you have inescapable existence proof).
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Removing a dog — ontological primitive that has very few explanations it is needed in — is something like extinction. Beyond a point, it is doomed as a breeding, self-perpetuating, employed Thing, and any loss of an explanatory contest “job” might be the last.
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Anyhow, that’s it for my elucidation of the mystery of mysteries. Stay mentally healthy and computationally robust by constantly solving both Holmesian apparent, or epistemological, mysteries and Gentlyian ontological ones. Head Darwinism ftw.
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See Kathleen Belin’s essay “The Game’s Afoot: Predecessors and Pursuits of a Postmodern Detective Novel” (in Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction) for some of the background that inspired this thread.https://amzn.to/2rbzRSL
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