If, for any reason, you decide to start contemplating the world around you (or inside you), you have two choices: You can use your own senses and reasoning to figure it all out, or you can rely on the senses and reasoning of others who did their own contemplating and, you know, wrote stuff down. Both have advantages and disadvantages and there’s nothing preventing you from combining them. The primary disadvantage of (only) going solo is that there’s a tremendous amount of world to contemplate and you only have so much time in which to do it. On the other hand, there are and have been many more other people than there are of you. Some of those people have equipment that’s really expensive. Some of them spent a lot of time counting shrimps or staring at the moon, irradiating themselves, or being eaten alive by mosquitoes. And, thankfully, a lot of them wrote down how many shrimps they counted, and why they were counting shrimps, and took positions on what varying population densities mean. That’s fantastic. You don’t have to count shrimps. You don’t even like shrimps; they’re weird looking and you’re mildly allergic. There are a few drawbacks, however,[…]
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