Facts rush towards us like an oncoming train, and facts tie us to the track.
Your car won’t start. That’s a fact. You think the battery is dead. That’s a hypothesis. Your neighbor has jumper cables and you start the car off of her car’s battery. That’s an experiment that yields data supporting your hypothesis. Maybe you drive around for a while and your battery either recharges or it doesn’t. Either way, that’s another fact, which tends to disprove or support your hypothesis. Perceiving facts, developing hypotheses, experimentation, then revising, when necessary, those hypotheses in light of newly perceived facts are defining processes of the human mind. Humans continuously perceive, hypothesize, experiment, and revise, rarely even aware of the process: call it the empirical loop.
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