The Horizontal Falls are one of Australia’s strangest natural attractions, a unique blend of coastal geography and powerful tidal forces that visitors pay big money to see up close.
But all that is about to change.
Located at Talbot Bay, a remote spot on the country’s northwestern coastline, the falls are created when surges of seawater pour between two narrow cliff gaps, creating a swell of up to four meters that resembles a waterfall.
For decades, tours have pierced these gaps on powerful boats, much to the dismay of the area’s Indigenous Traditional Owners, who say the site is sacred.
It’s not the only reason the boat tours are controversial. In May 2022 one boat hit the rocks resulting in passenger injuries and triggering a major rescue operation. The incident led to calls to halt the tours for safety reasons.
Although the boat trips have continued, the concerns of the Indigenous Traditional Owners have now been heeded, with Western Australia, the state in which the falls are situated, saying they will be banned in 2028 out of respect.
It is you who hears the word “spirit” or “sacred” and goes straight for “those people can’t look at things in a scientific way”. Meanwhile, elsewhere, people engage in cargo-cult science, coating their magical thinking in technobabble. It’s not the language that makes the method.
True. Limited amount of experimental data only allows a limited theory and limited extrapolation. It’s not the amount of accumulated data that makes the method, either. You should be more worried if someone watched an apple fall and, with no further information such as centuries of observational data about the movement of planets, concludes “that is why the planets move that way”. It would be correct, but it would still be an unjustified leap.
Indeed, science doesn’t belong to the west which is precisely why I specified “western science”: You can do science without following the western (actually, European) course of first imposing the mind/body dualism etc. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all the time. Insisting on that kind of delineation is a particularly western scientific mindset, not a neutral scientific one.
The Boltzmann brain is a heuristic: Every time statistics say that some theory would imply that the most likely reason for why we observe phenomena is that it’s all dreamt up by a Boltzmann brain physicists discount that theory. It is, thus, a negative hypothesis, but a hypothesis nontheless and indeed a very serious one. The reason physicists don’t like to investigate in those directions is because they think it’s unsatisfying. But that’s not a scientific measure. Similar things are valid for preferring beautiful over messy maths etc: There’s no reason why the fundamental maths of the universe should look beautiful to us as our sense of beauty evolved for completely different reasons.
Why should I be concerned if a leap of intuition led to the conclusion things falling and movement of the planets were caused by the same thing? Doesn’t matter how a hypothesis was postulated, what matters is that it can be tested and falsified. That is the important thing, not who cane up with it and why. This is what you are utterly failing to grasp, it doesn’t really matter what axioms are assumed or what leap of logic or faith or whatever leads to the hypothesis. Spirits aren’t testable of falsifiable. Same issue with boltzmann brains which is why they aren’t taken seriously apart from as a foil to show how incomplete our understanding still is.
Because if you accept it without proper argument (and that is what I take “conclusion” to mean) you’re not doing science. It would not adhere to the scientific method. I think you should stop trying to lecture me about it.
Indeed, you can take another stone and it will also drop to the ground: Testable, falsifiable. Things, indeed, do fall down. Nature indeed replenishes from the sacred site, that’s also testable and falsifiable, they probably did test it at some time and then went “ohfuckohfuck”. As one can be directly observed it’s physical, as the other can’t it’s spirits. Further investigation then could conclude that the spirits are actually tiny stuff you need a microscope to see, but the people don’t have microscopes also that wouldn’t mean that it’s not spirits, but that spirits are tiny things you see with a microscope: Why change the term?
This not changing of terms also has precedence in western science btw: “atom” means “undivisible thing” (from Ancient Greek ἄτομος, “I cannot cut”). Does it mean that physicists are not able to tell neutrons, protons and electrons apart?
Nothing, whatsoever, about not even having a concept of materialism precludes one from employing the scientific method. Science is not a set of beliefs or insights, it’s a method. And, as you yourself said: Everyone can do that. I’m saying: Just because a tribe didn’t do as much science as Europe from Antiquity to Modernity you shouldn’t assume that they’re talking mumbo-jumbo. They may know shit about quantum mechanics they certainly know a lot about how their environment works.
Another example would be the agriculture of Australian Aborigines, which is so far-out when it comes to techniques that it didn’t register as agriculture to the settlers, they thought Aborigines are hunters and gatherers. Sure, they hunt and gather, but within an environment they had shaped such that stuff grew where it was convenient, and animals lived were they were easy to hunt. You don’t get to that level of ecological engineering without understanding things and interrelationships, that means they did science, even if your tunnel vision can’t recognise it.
Except spirits doesn’t mean tiny physical things, it refers to things outside of the physical that cannot be measured or quantified by definition. If spirit was just their word for biodiversity that would be fine but then we’d be talking about sites being biodiverse and not sacred because we’d have established that sacred isn’t the correct translation. You keep repeating the same baseless justifications for spiritualistic and religious practices to be treated like some kind of science but they aren’t and never will be. They are ritualised behaviours that are successful only because the competing alternatives lead to the collapse of the populations practicing them and would fare less well in alternative environments. We are done here, there is nothing more productive to be gained from you repeating the same misunderstanding of science.