“… that they were not to content themselves with inquiring whether one system of epicycles was better than another but that they were to sit down to the figures and find out what the curve, in truth, was.”
Interesting. However, none of this would have been possible without Tycho Brahe’s highly accurate data dump from the spanking new Uraniborg observatory. Copernicus was doing new math on increasingly old, corrupt data tables. He had especially messed up the orbit of Mars (which Brahe "hired" Kepler to fix.) As we now know, this is down to the Martian orbit having an orbital eccentricity 5.6+ times that of earth. To figure out what the curve in truth was, you had to figure out what in truth it was actually doing within a certain margin level of resolution/margin of error. And you had to believe what you were seeing even if it went against the scientific consensus of the day. Kepler’s big moment came when he wondered if the reason Mars appears to speed up and slow down is because it actually is speeding up and slowing down. This is of course against the principle of uniformity of heavenly motions inherited from the past consensus.
An intriguing corollary: once the data within that margin of resolution became available, a European astronomer figured it out. This suggests to me that a little bit of historical co-incidence goes a long way and narrowing those ranges of possibility, but once everything needed is in place, we would get there.
Another interesting bit from that time: it was Galileo‘s training as an artist that enabled him to recognize the moon had mountains. He knew chiaroscuro. When he looked through what today would be a very primitive telescope, he nonetheless saw enough to recognize that he was looking at uneven terrain on a three-dimensional surface.
Yes, Brahe was key. But I'm not aware of anyone arguing that data isn't helpful (observation). It's just that observation isn't an adequate account of discovery. In a sense, Copernicus and his dearth of good data proves the point that you can get the right theory--heliocentricity--without great data. I like your anecdote about Galileo.
Fascinating stuff on Ashby's selection model. The footnote about Fletcher's narrative framwork caught my attention because it kinda bridges the gap between deterministic selection and creative expansion. I've noticed in my own work that the best problem-solving moments come when switching between constraint-focused thinking (Ashby's bounded selection) and storygenerating mode where unexpected connections emerge. Pickering's critique nails it though.
The intelligent design guys make this very argument when asserting that Darwin’s theory cannot explain the spontaneous emergence of new forms. Steven Meyer wrote a paper for The Smithsonian in 2004 on this topic which they published and then retracted.
With respect (and I do mean that), I’m not sure how you can believe that the ‘abductive’ inference escapes fro the universe of possibilities. Maybe that universe is bounded for you (us) but it’s not clear to me why you consider this a hard boundary. Maybe Mozart ( or Schubert) was ‘unthinkable’ at the time, but now a clear progression. Are you sure ex post facto ‘abductive’ inference won’t be the same?
The point is that many inferences, from scientific discovery to more commonsense ones, involve selecting from an effectively infinite set of possibilities. We know too much, basically, so that for any given inference we’ve had to ignore too much. It’s not that abduction is magical, it’s that it somehow manages to select plausible items from this exhaustive list and we don’t know how the “search” goes. It’s not magical as much as it is a puzzle of intelligence. We don’t notice we’re doing this, but when you go to program an AI, you do. The question isn’t escaping from all those possibilities but somehow dynamically selecting from them on the fly.
“… that they were not to content themselves with inquiring whether one system of epicycles was better than another but that they were to sit down to the figures and find out what the curve, in truth, was.”
Interesting. However, none of this would have been possible without Tycho Brahe’s highly accurate data dump from the spanking new Uraniborg observatory. Copernicus was doing new math on increasingly old, corrupt data tables. He had especially messed up the orbit of Mars (which Brahe "hired" Kepler to fix.) As we now know, this is down to the Martian orbit having an orbital eccentricity 5.6+ times that of earth. To figure out what the curve in truth was, you had to figure out what in truth it was actually doing within a certain margin level of resolution/margin of error. And you had to believe what you were seeing even if it went against the scientific consensus of the day. Kepler’s big moment came when he wondered if the reason Mars appears to speed up and slow down is because it actually is speeding up and slowing down. This is of course against the principle of uniformity of heavenly motions inherited from the past consensus.
An intriguing corollary: once the data within that margin of resolution became available, a European astronomer figured it out. This suggests to me that a little bit of historical co-incidence goes a long way and narrowing those ranges of possibility, but once everything needed is in place, we would get there.
Another interesting bit from that time: it was Galileo‘s training as an artist that enabled him to recognize the moon had mountains. He knew chiaroscuro. When he looked through what today would be a very primitive telescope, he nonetheless saw enough to recognize that he was looking at uneven terrain on a three-dimensional surface.
Yes, Brahe was key. But I'm not aware of anyone arguing that data isn't helpful (observation). It's just that observation isn't an adequate account of discovery. In a sense, Copernicus and his dearth of good data proves the point that you can get the right theory--heliocentricity--without great data. I like your anecdote about Galileo.
Fascinating stuff on Ashby's selection model. The footnote about Fletcher's narrative framwork caught my attention because it kinda bridges the gap between deterministic selection and creative expansion. I've noticed in my own work that the best problem-solving moments come when switching between constraint-focused thinking (Ashby's bounded selection) and storygenerating mode where unexpected connections emerge. Pickering's critique nails it though.
Cool. Glad we’re tracking!
Hey, great read as always. Loved how you connected Ashby to Shannon, realy insightful stuff!
The intelligent design guys make this very argument when asserting that Darwin’s theory cannot explain the spontaneous emergence of new forms. Steven Meyer wrote a paper for The Smithsonian in 2004 on this topic which they published and then retracted.
With respect (and I do mean that), I’m not sure how you can believe that the ‘abductive’ inference escapes fro the universe of possibilities. Maybe that universe is bounded for you (us) but it’s not clear to me why you consider this a hard boundary. Maybe Mozart ( or Schubert) was ‘unthinkable’ at the time, but now a clear progression. Are you sure ex post facto ‘abductive’ inference won’t be the same?
Hi Michael,
The point is that many inferences, from scientific discovery to more commonsense ones, involve selecting from an effectively infinite set of possibilities. We know too much, basically, so that for any given inference we’ve had to ignore too much. It’s not that abduction is magical, it’s that it somehow manages to select plausible items from this exhaustive list and we don’t know how the “search” goes. It’s not magical as much as it is a puzzle of intelligence. We don’t notice we’re doing this, but when you go to program an AI, you do. The question isn’t escaping from all those possibilities but somehow dynamically selecting from them on the fly.