Horse said to dmb:
I agree with much of what you say but it's still very important to remember
that DNA-based life is no more than one possible way for life to exist and that
it involves an environment and a context. Not having experienced something (or
maybe mis-interpreting something that we do experience) should not blind us to
the probability that it exists. Isn't this part of the 'Cleveland Harbor
Effect'?
dmb says:
I think the lesson of the Cleveland Harbor Effect is other way around. "It was
a parable for students of scientific objectivity," he says. To say "he rejected
the observation and followed the chart" is to say to ignored the actual
experience because of what he thought. What he thought acted as a static
filter, "shutting out all information that did not fit." (This is good
description of what's known as "confirmation bias".)
The idea of life that's not DNA-based is not exactly comparable, because there
are no observations or experiences being ignored. The idea, I think, is only
based on extrapolating upon the biological charts we already have. I mean,
nothing like that has been observed. It's reasonable and I don't think there is
any ideological resistance to it but it is pure speculation, a plausible
abstraction for which there is no empirical evidence. As far as I know, anyway.
The Cleveland Harbor Effect is about throwing out NEW "facts" when they don't
fit with the intellectual patterns. "When a new fact comes in that does not fit
the pattern we don’t throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact." Here, I
think, "facts" are empirical reality while the patterns are conceptual (and for
a radical empiricist like Pirsig empirical reality always comes first and
concepts are always secondary). It seems to me that non-DNA life forms would be
greeted as an exciting discovery. Sci-Fi writers and real scientists have been
dreaming about it for a while. If a "contradictory fact has to keep hammering
and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two
people will see it," then alternative life forms would be something like the
opposite. It's an abstract pattern that keeps hammering and hammering and lots
of people desperately want to see it - but nobody ever has.
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