Andy

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson’s law that "The number of rational hypotheses
that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work
seemed dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another
hypothesis would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have some doubts
about the humor or benefits of it.
If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the
general validity of all scientific method!
If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster
than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the
results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge”
― Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance

“But there’s a kind of offering in the generosity of water holding you afloat. In the way water holds feeling, how the body is most alive submerged and enveloped, there is the fullness of grace given freely.”
― Jessica J. Lee, Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin's Lakes

“He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the
time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the twentieth
century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, in the
next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps
one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more
the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent
decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth
from a multitude you are increasing the multitude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth
through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of
scientific method that is causing it to change”
― Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance