Solution or Problem

I've had a fever. Now I can't taste anything. Can't tell excellent broccoli quiche from oatmeal porridge. If what follows is in poor taste, or if I am not making sense, please make allowances. I blame it on the virus.

Just now, I'm working on a meme, which may go viral if I let it out of the laboratory. Here goes.

Science involves us engaging with the unknown, which is almost everything since we don't actually know much. Let's be scientific. Let's go with the evidence and keep our ideas out of it. Can't be done. Making sense of the evidence involves finding analogies with things we already understand, as in that book I read recently, "Waves in an Impossible Sea" by Matt Strassler. Here we see science groping for metaphor, making the evidence fit our ideas and adjusting ideas to fit the evidence. It is no longer just about the evidence. It becomes a metareality in our thoughts. We intended to keep ourselves out of it... and then didn't.

Science wants to avoid getting lost in metaphor. The metaphors most used in science are objective and materialistic in an effort to suppress human motives and biases and keep things "real". But it's hard to let go of an idea that works when you discover that it doesn't work. Remember the EPR paradox, Einstein, Podalsky and Rosen objecting to quantum entanglement violating the local realism of causality? You don't remember. You don't do physics.

OK, biology. Everybody does biology. Ever had an ulcer? Remember the early scientific resistance to the idea of bacteria as the cause of gastric ulcers? Remember "It's all in your head, so just relax, stop worrying and get better"? Well, if bacteria are involved, that's a new idea in our heads. Then we use antibiotics to control the bacteria and fix the ulcer. So our heads are either part of the problem or part of the solution. Our metareality has real consequences in altering reality.

Here's the current version of my meme.

We belong to a self-organizing system that sees itself through our eyes, understands itself through our thoughts, emerges from our actions.

Still needs work. There is certainly more to reality than us, but for sure we are part of it. Are we part of the solution or part of the problem?

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I Went To Space and Discovered an Enormous Lie: Ron Garan, Big Think.

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The Big Bang Doesn't Mean What It Used To: Ethan Siegel, Big Think

The Battle For American Energy Supremacy: Just Have a Think, October 12, 2025.