 our list of assumptions and limitations are going to inform our list of rules that we're gonna talk about in the next section. But let's look first at these assumptions that we have. The first assumption that we are going to have about the process of science is that the world is real. It's real. Okay, another one that's like, come on, Riggs, do we really have to say that out loud? But yeah, we do because that, we have to have that as a basic point of agreement and acknowledge that that's what science relies on. It relies on the world being real. If we're gonna go into the possibility that the world isn't real, then we're not gonna use science anymore to talk about that or to study that or to test it. In order to test things with science, we have to assume that the world is real. Similar, we have to assume that we have the senses to perceive the world. Our senses can perceive the world. I do get impatient. That's why my handwriting gets bad because I get impatient to write it all down really fast. If I edited, but I will never do that. But sorry for how slow. I'm gonna try to write slowly so that you can read it. I think that's more important and you can watch me on double time and it'll go faster. Just don't tell me you watched me on double time because I don't wanna know what I'm like in that. Our senses can perceive the world. Our brains can understand what we perceive. That's our third assumption. Our brains can understand what we sense. So our brains can put things together and you wanna talk about evidence of our phenomenal brains. I guarantee if I sat with each one of you for just 10 minutes, I could tell you something phenomenal that your brain understands. And it'd be really fun in the comments here for everybody to tell us, like what are the phenomenal things that your brain understands? I love thinking about the things that I don't understand as well. My most amazing husband on the planet is an English professor, a literature professor. He understands Shakespeare. Guess who does not understand Shakespeare? If I hang out with him and he teaches me, if he teaches me how to understand it, I can understand it and I can learn, but our brains can put these pieces together. We have really amazing brains. I love that about us. And the last assumption, and this is super interesting, is that nature is predictable. So we can predict what is gonna happen and that works. Nature can be predicted. The natural world, we can predict what's going to happen or why it's going to happen or it is predictable. As opposed to, oh my gosh, you hear about those horrifying experiments they do on little rats where it's super stressful for the little rats in the experiments when bad things happen to them in an unpredictable way. Science is predictable. I don't know what made me think of that. I wish I hadn't brought it up because it's really horrifying to think about. Let's talk about the limitations because I think this is equally as important and I think I will make the limitations a different color. Some limitations to science have to do with the way we perceive the world. Our perception is limited. And I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna show you really fast. I went down one of these optical illusion rabbit hole last night and I found like, oh my gosh, go look at all the optical illusions out there. Our powers of perception are limited and I'm gonna add this one here as well. Our brains can be unreliable. I know you can't see that one because I should have written that down before we looked at this, but our powers of perception are limited by the tools that we have. A really good example is the fact that we've never actually, we can't see an atom. We can see like evidence that an atom might have been there or evidence that that could be an atom, but we can't actually see it and like hold it and see what it looks like and describe it the way we can see a bird or a tree out the window. So our perceptions are limited, but in addition, our brains can be unreliable and optical illusions, enjoy yourself. Does this not totally look like a little stream of humans running up the stairs and then jumping off and running away and if you look really closely, I'll leave it up there for a second. If you look really closely, the colors are changing but the critters aren't moving. That's an optical illusion. Our brains totally think we've got something moving here. Go play with a bunch of those optical illusions. They're crazy and super interesting and wild to think that our brains actually are that unreliable or can be fooled that easily. I'm gonna connect the next one to our third assumption. The assumption is that our brains can understand what we sense, but honestly, we can't ever be 100% sure. I'll just say like that. We can't ever be 100% sure that what we are sensing or what we are seeing is the way that it is. There is always uncertainty with the process of science and this is that place where I said, you know what, you can't say you prove something because more information can always come down the pipe. Instead, you say, I have evidence to support hmm or hmm or evidence that does not support hmm or hmm. And this is related that we're always learning more. And I think in particular of late, it's been so interesting having sort of a collective experience in a global pandemic. And I know my perception of it being a collective experience is based on many aspects of my who I am and where I am in the world. And so I don't know that everybody had a sense of a collective experience with COVID. And I say that it's collective because the definition of a pandemic is that it is a global event. But it was really interesting to watch the way, especially in the United States, the way if the science learned more, that was used as a strategy to undermine the process of science or the information that we were learning. I am, you know, dude, yes, let's learn more. And I am a scientist. And so it's really easy and natural for me to say, this is how we understood the world in this moment. And what an incredible thing to have learned so much since then. Now we know this, that's very comfortable to me and that doesn't undermine the process. And I think that it's, I think that is a really important thing to be transparent about, that there are those limitations and we are always learning more and modifying what we know, which I love. Like, yes, that is such a great way to approach life. Okay, next up, I have a few rules that are based on these assumptions and limitations, a couple of rules that we'll just hang on to.