Speaker unverified: belief

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…In the enterprise of science, there might be a trope or an idealization that we're getting closer to the truth. Yeah. Do you think that's the case? Do you think as the enterprise of science just progresses that we're getting closer to the truth? Or could we be in cul de sacs basins of attraction and so on? That's very much associated with scientific realism. So there's this view that there is 1 way nature is and science succeeds in so far as scientific representations conform to this 1 way that nature nature is. From my from my view, sort of takes very seriously the idea that nature could just be sort of inexhaustibly complex. So if you ever try to sort If you ever pin it down in 1 representation, there are ways also that it could be represented inexhaustibly many different varieties of ways that you can investigate it, and then also ways that any 1 representation is lacking. So there's a kind of inherent sort of lack of convergence that that picture brings about. 1 of the ways of expressing this is to say that nature is protean. There's this mythological character, called Proteus, who was a shape shifter. This sort of this, yeah, mythological being that lived in the sea and it would he would keep changing his shape. You couldn't if you could pin him down, he would answer you a question and tell you the truth. But the thing was you had to pin him down. And I think this is a really nice illustration of like what's going on with our interactions with nature as scientists. Nature is sort of inexhaustibly complex. There's all kinds of patterns and things going on there. It can be pinned down and we can get true answers, but it but when we sort of release our grip, it will carry on shape shifting, and there's lots of other ways that it could be. So, yeah, 1 final theory. I'm not so convinced by that. This is very much a view that I think makes sense if your basis for your theory as a philosopher of science is really the biological sciences, which is where I'm coming from. If you're a physicist, it seems much more natural to think that there is 1 fundamental set of laws of the universe which is gonna be nailed down once and for all and could explain everything. Biology just throws up lots and lots of examples, particularities. It tends to be less considered sort of less intellectually satisfying in comparison with physics. Oh, you can just spend all your time in biology doing stamp collecting because there's this thing and there's this thing and there's this thing. How do you tie it all together theoretically? But on the other hand I think that if you take that particularity and that shifting quality to biological phenomena, then actually it just forces you to think about knowledge differently. In in your book you you spoke about a trajectory I suppose of possibly failures of simplification. We just spoke about reflex theory. 1 of the big things is this metaphor of cognition or the brain perhaps as being a kind of computer. Yeah. And you spoke about the early roots of this from reflex theory to cybernetics and computationalism. Can you sketch that out?…

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