That is the real problem. How do you construct a metaphysics that at the same time contains heuristics for the microscopic and for the macroscopic.
I agree with a lot of people that quantum gravity is likely to result in this new heuristics, but I honestly fail to see how 1) any quantum gravity is going to be testable other than by internal consistency (which you lambast), that is, how experiments are going to be accessible; 2) how knowledge of quantum gravity could affect (or would have affected) political economy.
Feynman once said that the problem with hard-nosed scientists is not that they lack imagination but that what they imagine is constrained by everything they know to be approximately true. We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
??? The Fates are kind.
I had no complaint about internal consistency--but what we were getting was faith. In a sense there was no choice about that, but I thought that in that case we should own up to it.
Then again, a non-formal proof of consistency, might serve, but--and now I am wandering off-topic, perhaps those funny little symbols were not as important as everybody thought? I was slowly coming around to the intuitionist view that mathematics should be comprehensible. Even if the intuitionists treated Cantor very badly--which they did--they weren't wrong about everything. Hilbert's project had its uses, but the core of it had failed. It was time to let mathematics be done in a style appropriate to its content.
So during this period, it was the logicians, not the mathematicians, who were my guides. They wanted proof of consistency but knew they had not gotten it, and owned up. They knew they needed to do something about it, too, even if what they did lay outside of logic. The Fates are kind.
