Shannon's Learning Mouse Theseus

Theseus was propelled by a pair of magnets, one embedded in its hollow core, and one moving freely beneath the maze. The mouse would begin its course, bump into a wall, sense that it had hit an obstacle with its “whiskers,” activate the right relay to attempt a new path, and then repeat the process until it hit its goal, a metallic piece of cheese. The relays stored the directions of the right path in “memory”: once the mouse had successfully navigated the maze by trial and error, it ...

 Science is Monism

Monism is the default worldview of natural science. In science, an explanation has to be grounded in empirical evidence. In a slightly different take, for a statement to be considered a scientific explanation, it must be falsifiable—there has to be some kind of test that could be applied to the statement to prove it wrong. For example, the statement that the moon is made of cheese is a scientific statement because it can be falsified. Facts can be brought to bear on the claim (such as the d...