In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself.
Interpretation
The exchange of ideas between fields can often lead to misunderstandings or misinterpretations.
Richard P. Feynman suggests that when discussing how concepts from one discipline affect those in another, one risks appearing foolish due to the complexity and nuances involved in each field. This highlights the challenges of interdisciplinary dialogue, where the intricacies of each domain may not easily translate, leading to confusion.
In practice
In a lecture about the importance of collaboration in academia, one might quote Feynman to illustrate the perils of miscommunication.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
But who can remember pain, once itβs over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity, a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs).
People 'demand' the opportunity to gamble away money they do not have, just like people 'demand' money from loan sharks at extortionate interest rates. This is a warped, empty type of freedom, in which the powerful are free to exploit the vulnerable.
My personal history, along with the history of many black people in this country, is rife with trauma born out of anti-black policies aided and facilitated by presidents and their administrations.
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