As pointed out by others, the atomism of Democritus is not a solid theory, but a blue vs. green position. One fellow thinks that if you divide something repeatedly, you’ll never stop being able to divide it; another fellow disagrees with him, they come up with elaborate verbal justifications for their positions.
So why don’t we consider some Greek theories that were actually solid theories? Aristarchos argued that, since the sun was so much bigger than the Earth, it made more sense for the Earth to orbit the sun than the sun to orbit the Earth.
Other mathematicians thought about this theory, and eventually responded with, “well, if that were true, we should expect to see parallax effects on other stars. We don’t, so either everything orbits around the Earth or the stars are unimaginably far away.”
Well, it turns out that the stars are unimaginably far away, and so the parallax effects are too weak to see with the naked eye. But the Greeks had their priors in the right place for the evidence they had access to.
Likewise, things like natural selection (as we understand it) and intelligence explosion don’t seem like they’re obvious without evidence to back them up, and could be reasonably dismissed without that evidence.
People here routinely make statements regarding the universe about which the available evidence is still inconclusive. If we care about the accuracy of such claims it seems worthwhile to pay attention to the how such statements worked out in the past.
As pointed out by others, the atomism of Democritus is not a solid theory, but a blue vs. green position. One fellow thinks that if you divide something repeatedly, you’ll never stop being able to divide it; another fellow disagrees with him, they come up with elaborate verbal justifications for their positions.
So why don’t we consider some Greek theories that were actually solid theories? Aristarchos argued that, since the sun was so much bigger than the Earth, it made more sense for the Earth to orbit the sun than the sun to orbit the Earth.
Other mathematicians thought about this theory, and eventually responded with, “well, if that were true, we should expect to see parallax effects on other stars. We don’t, so either everything orbits around the Earth or the stars are unimaginably far away.”
Well, it turns out that the stars are unimaginably far away, and so the parallax effects are too weak to see with the naked eye. But the Greeks had their priors in the right place for the evidence they had access to.
Likewise, things like natural selection (as we understand it) and intelligence explosion don’t seem like they’re obvious without evidence to back them up, and could be reasonably dismissed without that evidence.
People here routinely make statements regarding the universe about which the available evidence is still inconclusive. If we care about the accuracy of such claims it seems worthwhile to pay attention to the how such statements worked out in the past.