(Untitled)

[raccaldin36]

Knowledge is paring away from a gestalt, not a building up into a whole. That's why science is reductive.

Our initial impressions are gestalts, generic wholes. As we get to know, we find out what's wrong with our impressions and remove those inaccuracies. A smaller body is indicative of greater understanding

Comments

[metaspective]

I think the resultant smaller body can also grow as we discover its relationship to other reduced or gestalt conceptions. First we turn a formless cloud into a solid lattice. Then we connect that lattice to other lattices, or place it next to regions of cloud which are in the process of taking shape.

[raccaldin36]

Or maybe there's one giant gestalt with smaller components, and you're sculpting it in pieces. A tree can be carved into a canoe, oars, some small figurines, but it was still a tree to begin with: you just had to separate it out to slice off the irrelevant bits in the best way.

Makes me think of manufacturing planets in Hitchhiker's Guide.

[metaspective]

Yup, so the Logical Positivists said (and probably many other philosophers and scientists before and after them): the compartmentalisation of science is an artifact of its incompleteness.

And xkcd has this covered too, of course: http://xkcd.com/435/