The necessity of risking everything you are. — Re-Assembling Reality #31. By Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer In Essay #30, we shifted the questions we were asking from “How do I know what is true?” to “How do I decide what to believe?” …

Because we can only know afterwards. — Re-Assembling Reality #30. By Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer In the last Essay (#29 — Commitment) we considered what to do in a storm at sea, when abstaining from action is not an option: We can sink or we can swim, but we can’t do nothing. This kind of…

Acting as though you believe something is true. — Re-Assembling Reality #29. By Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer All the way back in Essay #5 we said that, according to the Enlightenment Vision of science, science had to be certain: Any ‘science’ worthy of the name had to provide knowledge. And any ‘knowledge’ worthy of the name had…

Taking a fresh look at some age-old problems. Re-Assembling Reality #26b, by Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer Believers in Elon Musk say that the man is so influential, he is able to tank the market cap of Tesla by $250 billion with a single Tweet. While that would seem…

What pet elephants teach us about the stock market. — Re-Assembling Reality #26a. By Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer Models are ubiquitous in science: Epidemiologists make models of viruses spreading. Physicists make models of electrons moving through metals. Neurologists make models of brain activity. Engineers make models of building structures. If the models are any good, they tell us…

If your brain was lying to you, how could you tell? Re-Assembling Reality #23d. by Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer In Essays #23a and #23b we discussed ways of obtaining information about the universe. In Essay #23c we discussed ways of putting the information we obtain together to draw…

Do we build theories, or weave them? Re-Assembling Reality #23c, by Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer In Essays #23a and #23b we looked at how we get information: the raw stuff from which ideas and theories are made. But, regardless of how we got it, a collection of unconnected…

When knowledge is faithful. Re-Assembling Reality #23b, by Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer The information we have about the world does not come to us by one single mechanism. We saw in Essay #23a that we can learn about the world by reason, and we can learn about the…

Science as a virtuous practice Re-Assembling Reality #28, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt This has been a long journey. In the early essays, we put up mind maps of what we might have wanted science to be like (#5). We said that, on the Enlightenment View, the objectivity…