Copernican Inversion

He must have been scared at the moment of his enlightenment.

Can you imagine? The gears of the universe click away and in probably a singular moment, it dawns on him. Like a telling change from a click to a sonorous 'clang' in nature's safe. The safe-breaker had identified the combination.

It takes courage to see things differently. To propose an alternative that will subject one to ridicule, prosecution, even death.

Cultures have axioms. Those truths that need no proof. That need only faith. To question which, is heresy.

To suggest that today's axiom is false is utter madness. It reflects an affection for truth that surpasses the drive to survive.

I do not think most people have that conviction.

I'm reading (or re-reading) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This always puts me in a more pensive mood. Hard to know which passage, which anecdote, which story would strike a chord. I guess it depends on what's going on in my own story. Kind of like the book itself. How the protagonist reacts to a memory is contingent on what demons they are fighting at the time.

In the passage I'm currently on, the author is talking about the Hume and Kant divergence. The pure-empiricism vs a priori argument.

Hume's argument (poorly paraphrased) is that when you sense the world, all that you have access to is the sense itself. So whatever world-model you fit that into is in your mind. So reality is in your mind. Exclusively.

Kant's counter (again, poorly paraphrased and even more poorly understood) is that the sense is building onto a pre-existing model in the observer's mind. That, in absence of this model, the interpretation of the same senses could be different. So, this a priori model is what gets built over time from what you sense throughout your life. This model is not the same as reality, but is not simply a point-in-time sense either.

It is in this backdrop that the Copernican Inversion was mentioned. How for Copernicus, the senses remained the same. But! The model that he was feeding those senses into, the a priori had a tectonic shift.

I keep going back to what it must have felt. To realize first, that knowledge has been unseated. That there is a different truth that explains the observations. That explains them better.

But oh, the truth, he needs to tell everyone about this truth. They have it wrong. This new way... is the only possible explanation. The others must be told!

Once the rush of the unveiled truth washes away, Copernicus still has to contend with the messiness of the revelation. How would he reveal this? Why doesn't everyone get it. How can something be more important than the truth?

He must have been scared.

It is a fracture, right? To have your way of thinking. Your a priori replaced by a new order.

Ordo ab Chao. Order from chaos.

The sensation, the data, that is chaotic. It is interpreted into order. But which order? I think that's what Kant was arguing for.

When that resolution, that solidification does happen. It must be nearly impossible to think about anything else. All that he must have seen, Copernicus, is just the sun at the centre.

A shadow in the market close to noon... The sun is at the center.

Moonlight at night. The sun is at the center.

The gentle twinkle of a planet. The sun is at the center.

He wouldn't have been able to think of anything but that. The sun is at the center.

I haven't been able to feel that for a while. Where everything else is absorbed into the background and a singular idea, a concept, a paradigm remains.

Perhaps the last time that happened was when I saw the genetic algorithm, or the idea of evolution in everything that I thought of. Ideas. Memes. Languages. Religions. Echo-chambers. Diseases.. People.

Let's see where life takes us. Perhaps I may yet again see another sun at the center.