we love stories ¹. oxytocin is released with trustworthy narratives, and an increased level of this molecule is associated with prosocial behavior as well as with the state where it is easier to change beliefs and attitudes; moreover, oxytocin is closely associated with serotonin, together being named here-and-now molecules, so the release of oxytocin might also have a correlate compound in feeling good which is associated with serotonin. still, science, aiming at describing the processes around & about us, might be sometimes messy - that's totally fine considering that researchers elaborate knowledge from the depths of the unknown (as Hamming said while comparing science & engineering, “in science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it” ²). while decent amount of the scientists love their craft because of sensory beauty they experience, main and deeper driver is the beauty of understanding ³. here comes the critical point and applied Occam’s razor - it is appealing to propose the beautiful, elegant & simple narrative explaining the research products by satisfying the craving for understanding & storytelling.

our system is not optimized for perceiving the universe as it is, with all its complexities & levels of scale. do you ever think about the curvature of the Earth while planning your route to the city downtown? ⁴. it's not useful in our everyday experience, we would rather think of following the flat path and local ups-and-downs on the way. even though we know from elaborating the knowledge about the geometry of Earth, it is not something we can sign up for being witnesses from our direct experience with the world. we, as biological systems, have evolved in a particular domain while facing particular needs to care about and problems to solve, and it doesn't include being perfect observers on all levels of the inference. actually, our ability to coherently perceive the world might be developed as a result of the existence of the scale where it is possible to infer causal relationships considering the correcting limits of nature. we might not even be aware of the existing phenomena in nature, as ants are not aware of the highway built next to their anthill, or as apes are not aware of the skyscrapers - these concepts are simply outside their coordinate system of what should I care for (one might also say that it's outside their range of intelligence). the uncomfortable truth in the AI race is that we don't hold any exclusive rights on intelligence ⁵ and we don't know what might be the challenges AGI will think of as problems in its survival domain.

quantum theory posed us a serious warning on that matter - are we always able to make sense of the observed behavior, and can we act as independent 3rd parties producing what we call objective, reproducible results of measurements? I believe that we are inclined to explain the things, call it vital force, or rather evolved treat, which allowed for better survival as we can now share the experience in easy-to-grasp form (still everything finally stumbles into vital force of evolution:). whereas we don't currently know whether it's the limit we bump into while discovering nature with the tools of natural sciences we are here being able to understand, or it's simply one of the bigger mental challenges we are yet to solve with the preferable explanation, what we can say for sure, which are heart-warming consequences:

• introducing new ways of thinking is so much important! basically, it's powerful to stand at the point of view where “sky is the only limit” while combining and synthesizing available information in unexpected ways. as we don't know about the hard limits of the perception (except direct I/O calculations based on the properties of the sensory and motor systems), let us think there are none of them and stumble into them during exploration of vast thinking lands and it will be the next discovery.


• our everyday experience might be illusionary when facing the way nature works. we should be aware that while craving for truth and not understanding, we might find no understanding at all. in the same time, everyday life, in the domain we exist, doesn't call for aggregating all scales of the information. it's science on its own, with all the nonlinearity around sociocultural phenomena. so, call for scientists: sometimes you should go beyond the experience and feelings. call for those who want to enjoy life: do not necessarily optimize for scientific discoveries, they might be completely irrelevant at the scale you live in.


• iterative scientific progress and holistic integrity of the scientific community are keys to the development of quality knowledge and theories. the more people are juggling the new marbles into the joint pool, the more intersections of the ideas we have, while iterations allow for feedback and improvements in the concepts. it's unavoidable that there is a tension between acceptance of new theories in society and the pace of scientific progress thus keeping the ideas floating becoming more and more familiar will increase the general rise of oxytocin levels:)