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Out of context: Reply #14890
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It would be nice to reduce everything to a few simple universal rules, just as our eyes habitually abstract a simple pure line from the chaotic tangle of color and edges and motion around us or as our mind abstracts a pattern of events, a plot, out of a welter of events, but these are idealizations as well as compulsions. Undoubtedly, we couldn't function without the ability to abstract, to formulate heuristics, to leap to conclusions, to induce hypotheses and predictions, to devise schemas, to tell ourselves unifying stories. But to design an entire epistemology on this habit of simplifying and unifying—to insist that nature must be fundamentally simple—brings us into conflict with the obvious nature of things around us.