"Newton didn't invent two terms—gravity (for terrestrial objects falling) and perhaps shmavity (for the moon)—because it would have lost out on the much more powerful unification."

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• Life as we know it would not have been possible in a universe composed of Newtonian point masses with mutual gravitational attraction.claim0.767
  Sloman's assertion about the explanatory failure of classical physics.
• Poincaré's pear-shaped blob theory of planetary moon formation is now known to be factually incorrect, though its sequence illustrates the characteristic morphology of unfolding processes.finding0.762
  Historical finding cited for its illustrative value despite its empirical incorrectness
• Much of what is written by philosophers of science is either false or incomplete because they do not take account of the implications of Schrödinger's ideas for chemistry and biology.claim0.752
  Sloman's broad methodological critique of philosophy of science.
• "[W]e must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons... we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception."quote0.746
  Load-bearing quote from Monadology §17 providing earliest clear statement of the Hard Problem
• "Before heaven and earth, there was something nebulous, silent, isolated, unchanging and alone, devoid, the Mother of All Things. I do not know its name. I call it Tao."quote0.738
  A direct quotation from the Tao Te Ching, used to illustrate the perennial reference to an ineffable ground.
• Terence Deacon's 'Incomplete Nature' seems not to have understood the points about ratchets and multi-stability, or perhaps re-invented them with extraordinarily obscure terminology.claim0.736
  Sloman's harsh criticism of Deacon's philosophy.
• "[W]e must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons... when inspecting its interior, we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception."quote0.735
  Canonical illustration of the Hard Problem intuition that any functional/mechanical explanation faces an explanatory gap for perception
• The deep nature of space appears to be so profound that just the geometric unfolding, when done properly, leads to results which make sense from an engineering point of view.claim0.734
  The mystery that beautiful geometry often yields good structural behavior is acknowledged but not yet fully explained mathematically.