Piet to Heloisa and Rod

Heloisa and Rod,

Thank you for your reports! I find it fascinating to read how differently each of us have been working with our already quite different interpretations of my original suggestion, on October 26, to hold the working hypothesis in mind for a whole day. Following Rod's suggestion, on October 28, each of of us formulated how we wanted to go about holding the working hypothesis in mind (see the protocol formulations by Rod, Piet, and Heloisa). Then each of us reported what happened during the day that we did our own version of the experiment (see the reports by Piet, Rod, and Heloisa).

How about two more rounds, in which each of us will do a different version of the experiment, following the different protocols as formulated by the two others? That way, all three of us will get an actual taste for the three ways in which we have formulated what it meant for us to work with the working hypothesis for a full day.

Specifically, I propose that we follow up what we already did:

November 2:

Heloisa does Heloisa's experiment
Rod does Rod's experiment
Piet does Piet's experiment

by the following two rounds:

November 6:

Heloisa does Piet's experiment
Rod does Heloisa's experiment
Piet does Rod's experiment

November 10:

Heloisa does Rod's experiment
Rod does Piet's experiment
Piet does Heloisa's experiment

and in each case, we can report what happened on the next day, or whenever we have email access.

To what extent these experiments have a parallel with scientific lab experiments remains unclear at this point. Since we are exploring a very non-standard idea, working with the working hypothesis that all is already timelessly complete, we probably should not expect that we can shoehorn our approach into standard scientific protocols.

At the same time, the whole notion of a working hypothesis was inspired by the example of science, so it will be interesting to see how far the parallels can be drawn.

In fact, in science, too, initial experiments can have a strongly exploratory character. And often, important new avenues of exploration start with an accidental discovery that took place while the investigators were actually looking for something quite different. So let us continue our initial explorations, to see where it leads us.

Already I am struck by the fact that all three of us reported about new and quite unexpected aspects that surfaced during our experiments. So instead of just following a protocol, centered around a question and a way of trying to get an answer to that question, we all found fresh aspects to the protocol itself. And presumably, all three of us would reformulate the protocol, if we were to repeat the same experiment. Rod and Heloisa, would you like to rephrase your protocol, before we will start doing each other's experiments?

Piet