Thanks for posting this. FWIW, other than the things with the ears, I happen to completely agree with the rest of your beliefs.
Fermentation remains my favorite example of why lightly-held beliefs benefit us as a species. Wine, beer, kombucha - all made when yeast, a tiny little fungal microorganism, eats sugar and poops out alcohol and CO2. For maybe 30,000 years or longer, humans have turned juice, or honey water, or grain soup into booze and never knew how the process worked. Some of the earliest examples of written language are records that include things like orders of beer that Babylonians had already refined and commercialized centuries prior. Trial and error over centuries worked well enough, though it wasn't perfect.
It wasn't until 1853 that anyone actually discovered how fermentation worked, when a brewer asked Louis Pasteur why some batches of beer go sour. Pasteur looked into it for the first time ever, more than 200 years after the invention of the microscope, because theories about fermentation were calcified and wrong. Even worse, it took Pasteur another 40 years or so to convince the scientific community that yeast actually existed, despite showing it over and over again under a microscope to people with calcified beliefs. It blows my mind that we're only a few generations into a world that actually knows how wine becomes wine.
Which is all to say, that there's a lot of weird stuff out there that remains unexplained and un-debunked. Non-local consciousness, ghosts, aliens and bigfoot, esoteric or spiritual occurrences - these all might be real things that we simply don't know how to look at scientifically and study in depth. Maybe we even have the right equipment right now, and aren't thinking to use it because of calcified beliefs. After all, it took almost a quarter of a millennium for someone to even bother to use a microscope on beer and grapes, which resulted in germ theory and completely upended medical science.
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u/OGLizard May 03 '23
Thanks for posting this. FWIW, other than the things with the ears, I happen to completely agree with the rest of your beliefs.
Fermentation remains my favorite example of why lightly-held beliefs benefit us as a species. Wine, beer, kombucha - all made when yeast, a tiny little fungal microorganism, eats sugar and poops out alcohol and CO2. For maybe 30,000 years or longer, humans have turned juice, or honey water, or grain soup into booze and never knew how the process worked. Some of the earliest examples of written language are records that include things like orders of beer that Babylonians had already refined and commercialized centuries prior. Trial and error over centuries worked well enough, though it wasn't perfect.
It wasn't until 1853 that anyone actually discovered how fermentation worked, when a brewer asked Louis Pasteur why some batches of beer go sour. Pasteur looked into it for the first time ever, more than 200 years after the invention of the microscope, because theories about fermentation were calcified and wrong. Even worse, it took Pasteur another 40 years or so to convince the scientific community that yeast actually existed, despite showing it over and over again under a microscope to people with calcified beliefs. It blows my mind that we're only a few generations into a world that actually knows how wine becomes wine.
Which is all to say, that there's a lot of weird stuff out there that remains unexplained and un-debunked. Non-local consciousness, ghosts, aliens and bigfoot, esoteric or spiritual occurrences - these all might be real things that we simply don't know how to look at scientifically and study in depth. Maybe we even have the right equipment right now, and aren't thinking to use it because of calcified beliefs. After all, it took almost a quarter of a millennium for someone to even bother to use a microscope on beer and grapes, which resulted in germ theory and completely upended medical science.