A paradigm, Thomas Kuhn said, in his extraordinary book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is “an entire constellation of beliefs, values and techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community.” He understood that paradigms are strongly built arrangements in our minds based on how we perceive the world. Plus, they are held not just by me as an individual, but reinforced by a community of like-minded people.
For example, in the community of physicists, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) so brilliantly described the law of gravitation and laws of motion that for the next three centuries Newtonian physics was the paradigm by which the scientific community understood the universe. During those centuries, bits of data that did not fit with the Newtonian paradigm were ignored or rejected. But then came Albert Einstein (1879-1955) who showed how those bits of information helped us understand the universe even better. Thus was born the paradigm of quantum physics.
Like polaroid lenses, paradigms let some light in and keep some out. Like all of us, my mind works hard to give me an arrangement of information (paradigm) that helps me make sense of what I experience. Everyone else in the communities of people with whom I share does the same thing. Among us evolves a broad consensus of approximately the same paradigm. We trust it and arrange our lives around it.
But learning about paradigms has also taught me that the paradigm in my mind screens my experiences so that only the information that fits the paradigm is taken in. What doesn’t fit — oh well, it must be wrong or irrelevant. Whatever paradigm the community I’m in uses, we do so because it helps us understand the world. Our temptation is to revere it so highly that we believe it’s superior to all others. But, in fact, it is only a paradigm, and it’s best to hold it with humility because no paradigm, no matter how useful it is, ever gives a complete and precise picture of reality. It gives me only the best picture that it can at the moment. New information, if I’m open to it, will likely demand that my paradigm be tweaked or replaced entirely. Because Multi Earth thinking is a paradigm, it grips our minds powerfully, despite the obvious failure of the thinking that we have several planets available for our use.