The division to four elements is made from the "first person" i.e. subjective view: you as a person experience heat/fire in the body, moisture/water (eg. in the mouth), solidity/earth (flesh) and air (eg. in the lungs). As such it is still valid and useful for describing your first person experiences, and to some degree for describing how stuff in the world affects you, though much less for how stuff in the world around you interact.

As for "changes becoming smaller and more focused" that's not true -- each new physical world theory is vastly more complex than the one it replaces. I think it's likely that as we go deeper that trend will continue, and my personal belief is that there is no end to how deep we can go. But that's the joy of science.

It is an excellent point about the Occam's razor. However assuming Sun going around the Earth was also Occam's razor, and Earth around the Sun as we progressed was also Occam's razor. Now neither one is true per se and we have a bizarre space-time twisting with Einstein's GR that works the best so far. And we may well find exceptions to GR at some point and replace it with something stranger.

And it was the same on the atomic scale -- individual atoms = OR, then electrons orbiting the nucleus = OR, then the strangest of all, probability wave = OR, and standard model with numerous patches. That is the pattern with scientific discoveries has always been Occam's razor at certain depth, but at a deeper level the previous OR reasoning didn't hold true.

Maybe you can say it like this: if there is a finite depth you can go to, perhaps there are constant laws. But if you can always go deeper in observations -- which I would intuitively pick as the option -- then it might well be that the laws themselves can be nuanced into infinity. So the Truth presumed to be captured by the laws would always elude us by a hair's breadth.

Even parametrized time changing of laws would still be laws. I'm not proposing the laws change randomly -- and I don't take the credit for the idea, heard it elsewhere -- but that it is essentially a leap of faith to think they are constant (just because we humans have laws) and that they are completely accessible to our way of thinking. They may change in ways that may never appear to make sense to our rational minds, e.g. a constant here and there drifts unexpectedly, some patterns that occurred before no longer happen or happen differently, and so on.

If true, then research on matters of immediate consequence (e.g. quantum) would be useful, and research on what happened billions of years ago less so. Which I think is already the case (regardless of constancy of laws) -- much as I find theories in astrophysics fascinating, I wonder if we are essentially making up those stories by stacking one set of assumptions after another.

...as someone said once are human-centered idea, that there are laws obeyed by nature that we can grasp with our minds and that those laws must be unchanging. This is the unspoken assumption, that the models that would explain the physical processes never changed in the course of the evolution of the Universe. I'm beginning to think that such assumption is no different from Newton's "mind of God" that he wanted to know -- we just call it slightly differently.

And how is this claim relevant? If those "laws" have not been unchanging, we may be wasting enormous time and money trying to find out how it all began in a way we imagine has to have happened, ie. producing theories that have no consequence other than to satisfy philosophical questions that we insist must be posed only in a certain way -- and they can't even do that. I hope at least some consequential discoveries and tools will be made along the road.

Let's hope someone in DARPA has read the book past the first couple of chapters and will alert the management to not cancel their funding for the camera that they got the idea for after reading the first couple of chapters. :-)

I didn't mean it to be a definition -- I wanted to include not just fantasy but also other things which cannot be proven with reasoning, that are still consequential.

But that is the point: the fantasy -- or that which cannot be proven using critical mind and reason -- has a purpose. Novels are pure fantasy but some can have a big impact on your life and even your current behavior in a measurable way (there was a study in the news recently, "reading a novel changes the brain"). I know quite a few had for me.

Some people say it doesn't matter if something is right or wrong, what matters are the consequences of that thing. The OP talks about consequences: religious people have (supposedly) better health indicators. My two cents is I can't imagine radical Islamist or Christians who get easily worked up about this or that feeling better due to their religion, but they are outliers. It may also be that people who are calm and appreciative of their community beliefs and behaviors gravitate towards religion.

It isn't obvious that what we are seeing is matter, dark or otherwise, but only that we see an effect that causes lensing as per our theoretical models and methods of observation. Maybe it's some other force field, maybe conditions are different in the part of the universe we observed -- this is far out but not so much compared to something called "dark matter."

How wrong a particular field of science is depends on how quickly scientists in that field can run experiments and how easily they can measure results, so that they can adjust their model. That's why physical sciences are often quite right, life sciences a hit or miss, and social sciences are often wrong -- the latter have it the hardest re running an experiment and measuring the outcome.

Faith and "spiritual" disciplines fall in a category similar to this last one -- they are hopeless when it comes to measuring and repeating because their main business is things like the meaning of life which defy experimentation. But they have observed some patterns, e.g. doing bad things to other people eventually may make one feel bad as well, so there is some wisdom built into their heuristics (eg. monthly fasting, don't steal etc.). Their theories about how old the Earth is etc. are laughable but in my opinion those aren't the center anyway.

Bottom line -- I think how right one can be depends on how frequent are the statistical processes that they talk about.

... funny looks like I picked up "cheat sheet" unconsciously b/c I don't remember reading it. Looks silly now. :-)

That's right -- the keyboard was also a "cheat sheet" with all the available BASIC instructions. It was brilliant and with its colors and design to me it's still the most exciting keyboard ever! Plus I knew about an equal number of C64 and Spectrum users, almost no one from the C64 camp did any programming and almost all from the Spectrum camp did. Those printed keywords were just begging to try them out.

I'd just add that the degree to which our brains can be fooled depends on the emotion we have invested in it. For years I haven't played any games after Half Life, and once I watched the gameplay of some to me uninteresting western game, "Red Dead Redemption", some poker playing character made some joke about his wife, and I had a clear realization that the computer is playing a WAV file on cue. I was a completely separate, objective observer of an audiovisual rendering machine. But then I watched Portal, with its teleporting thing invoking a slight dread from the HL days, and suddenly all that GladOS was saying was real. I had to fish for that feeling in my mind that can look at the game objectively for what it is.

So I'd say what makes something feel real is its ability to make us project into it. Graphics can help, but is only a part of it.

In my experience often I start with what I think is the algorithm that will solve the problem, and then I discover that there are nuances in the real world that make my original algorithm/idea/flow inadequate, and that requires refinements, iteratively, until I get the right algorithm. Now this kind of nuanced tweaks requires very nuanced tools, and nothing is more suitable than text. Certainly some pictures with arrows wouldn't cut it.

On a related note, I checked to see what that beta thing was about and I instantly hated it. It has as much appeal as seeing a mobile version of a site on my HTML5-capable phone.

Marc Andreessen was an early investor in Leap Motion, touted as a game-changing, visionary product, which ended up being a flop. That it would be a flop I think was obvious to anyone who put some effort into imagining the actual use for the device vs. thinking about it logically. I would make a guess that Marc is making the same mistake with BitCoin -- thinking about BC value in "logical" terms vs. trying to imagine what it would feel like to use those at any significant value for purposes other than hoarding or speculating. As someone on /. described it, until that behavior changes, which doesn't look likely, BC is only an electricity-wasting Ponzi scheme.