NOTE: Old Text -
It's in orientation - trying to explain from the perspective of the physical is a blind-alley imo. The physical creates nothing of it's own - it is rather (the physical is) the creation of the spiritual universes. The physical is the final 'effect' of spiritual action. Now I am using the word 'spiritual' but these subtler realms can be referenced in any number of ways - and spiritual is a reasonable word to use here.
"The brain puts into reverse, as it were, what the big bang initiated: it erases spatial dimensions rather than creating them. It undoes the work of creating space, swallowing down matter and spitting out consciousness.'"
I agree - I even believe it. Not that I 'believed' it before, I'd never thought of it that way - and it makes perfect sense to me. It resonates. Beautifully put.
The ideas in John Michael Greer's blog hearken me back to the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake and others - particularly the Quantum Physicist Arthur Zajonc - also discussed in the following thread - 'Science Set Free' -
LINK:
Science Set Free | The Paracast Community Forums
The physicist Arthur Zajonc is particularly useful discussing the 'problem of mathematics'.
Great stuff - and as Zajonc states: People have a wrong idea about how science works, thinking that scientists calculate their way towards a discovery - but that is not the way it happens. Insight comes in a 'flash' - walking across a bridge in Dublin, Newton seeing the apple fall - the
answer is seen intuitively - then the scientist gets busy with the math and the experiments [to prove the answer already divined]. Important to keep in mind - the insight is coming forth from 'higher realms' [beyond the discursive mind].
Nice phrase: 'the poetry at the heart of science' - knowledge is an ephemeral moment - insight happens in one instant. And that the scientist is not a passive observer - the observer is implicated in everything.
'Lived experience' is perhaps the single most important phrase I hear Zajonc using as well as other scientists, like Rupert Sheldrake.
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Can we solve the mind-body problem? • View topic • Philosophy Discussion Forums
Thank you for this link, Constance. I have joined up!
Listening to Zajonc - and the story of the sophistication of past scientists - and the
sanity of the prevailing scientific process and thinking - is refreshing - and a reminder that genuine scientific discourse is liberating, and nourishing. A fresh breeze - thank you both.
In the Zajonc audio-link: At 57:00+ Zajonc talks about the 'spirituality' of light - light itself is invisible, it illuminates, we see it's effects, but never light itself. Important words about the 'world of light' after death.
I think for certain you will appreciate Zajonc's exposition on the difference between Newton's theory and Goethe's theory of light within the audio-link supplied by Steve.
Here is a book you may enjoy - I will post the blurb as well within this post as it pertains to much discussed here (all emphasis my own) -
Catching the Light: the Entwined History of Light and Mind
"In 1910, the surgeons Moreau and LePrince wrote about their successful operation on an eight-year-old boy who had been blind since birth because of cataracts. When the boy's eyes were healed they removed the bandages and, waving a hand in front of the child's physically perfect eyes, asked him what he saw. "I don't know," was his only reply. What he saw was only a varying brightness in front of him. However, when allowed to touch the hand as it began to move, he cried out in a voice of triumph, "It's moving!" He could feel it move, but he still needed laboriously to learn to see it move. Light and eyes were not enough to grant him sight.How, then, do we see? What's the difference between seeing and perception? What is light?
"From ancient times to the present, from philosophers to quantum physicists, nothing has so perplexed, so fascinated, so captivated the mind as the elusive definition of light. In Catching the Light, Arthur Zajonc takes us on an epic journey into history, tracing how humans have endeavored to understand the phenomenon of light. Blending mythology, religion, science, literature, and painting, Zajonc reveals in poetic detailthe human struggle to identify the vital connection between the outer light of nature and the inner light of the human spirit. He explains the curiousness of the Greeks' blue and green "color blindness": Odysseus gazing longingly at the "wine-dark sea"; the use of chloros (green) as the color of honey in Homer's Odessey; and Euripides' use of the color green to describe the hue of tears and blood.
"He demonstrates the complexity of perception through the work of Paul Cézanne--the artist standing on the bank of a river, painting the same scene over and over again, the motifs multiplying before his eyes.
"For the ancient Egyptians the nature of light was clear--it simply was the gaze of God. In the hands of the ancient Greeks, light had become the luminous inner fire whose ethereal effluence brought sight. In our contemporary world of modern quantum physics, science plays the greatest part in our theories of light's origin--from scientific perspectives such as Sir Isaac Newton's "corpuscular theory of light" and Michael Faraday's "lines of force" to such revolutionary ideas as Max Planck's "discrete motion of a pendulum" (the basis of quantum mechanics), Albert Einstein's "particles of light" and "theory of relativity," and Niels Bohr's "quantum jumps." Yet the metaphysical aspects of the scientific search, Zajonc shows, still loom large. For the physicist Richard Feynman, a quantum particle travels all paths, eventually distilling to one path whose action is least--the most beautiful path of all. Whatever light is, here is where we will find it.
"With rare clarity and unmatched lyricism, Zajonc illuminates the profound implications of the relationships between the multifaceted strands of human experience and scientific endeavor. A fascinating search into our deepest scientific mystery, Catching the Light is a brilliant synthesis that will both entertain and inform."
It is all of that - light is the key to it all.