exo_doc
Foolish Earthling
Here is an article on what humans can and/or cannot know and why.
http://monkeywah.typepad.com/paranormalia/2010/06/mysterian-thinking.html
This article raises some good points and some good food for thought.
Well, I might as well post it...........here it is:
Mysterian thinking
Humans may be incapable of solving the ultimate mysteries of the universe. So says Martin Rees, cosmologist and president of the Royal Society, in an interview with the Sunday Times yesterday - a view that the paper treated as headline news.
Rees thinks problems such as the existence of parallel universes, the cause of the big bang, or the nature of our own consciousness are just too difficult for our puny brains to resolve. He points out that the discoverers of relativity and quantum mechanics were able to use mathematical models developed by mathematicians decades earlier, whereas the maths does not yet exist which could unify the two.
The Times wheeled in BBC science presenter Brian Cox to provide the more 'optimistic' view, that the idea that some things are beyond us to understand is too bleak, and history does show we can eventually overcome the most difficult of problems. And my sense is that a lot of scientists, likewise, despise 'mysterian' thinking. People like Rees, they think, just want there to be something rather mysterious about the universe, something that is beyond us to figure out, that makes it altogether more grand than if we brought it down to our level.
I'm with Rees on this, but not at all for the reasons the despisers give, which I think is just their way of explaining the paradox to themselves. With the Big Bang it's the old question: how does one explain how something comes from nothing. With consciousness, how does one explain how chemical reactions generate a sense of awareness. Specifically, what would the explanations look like? Would they be expressed mathematically, in terms of equations? What would that explain, exactly?
The boundaries of rational thinking as a means to understand everything seem too obvious to be worth stating. But it's not at all the done thing to point them out, and I can sort of understand why. After five centuries of breathtaking advances in human thinking, science can't afford to impose limits on itself; if it could see the barriers ahead it would slow down and lose momentum. Better to hurl itself headlong at the problems, and only admit defeat if the mysteries are still unresolved - when? By the middle or end of the century?
Rees's remarks stimulated a couple of other reflections. One is how closely the universe he describes matches the model in spiritualist literature, for instance when he talks about other 3-D universes embedded alongside ours. "In theory," he says," there could be another entire universe less than a millimetre away from us, but we are oblivious to it because that millimetre is measured in a fourth spatial dimension and we are imprisoned in just three." This echoes the idea, which seems to derive from channelling, that the deceased inhabit exactly the same space as ourselves, a world of their own superimposed on ours.
Then we might remember that, for some, mystical contemplation has been regarded as the true way to complete knowledge. Mind control and spiritual practice - or in the case of people like Meister Eckhart - just being born with a certain kind of consciousness, can bring - so they tell us - insights into the ultimate nature of Being and Reality. An understanding that is intuitively felt is clearly different from one that can be written down on a piece of paper, but I wonder if it would seem, to those who experience it, any less meaningful. My guess is that, on the contrary, it would seem a lot more so.
What does everyone think?
http://monkeywah.typepad.com/paranormalia/2010/06/mysterian-thinking.html
This article raises some good points and some good food for thought.
Well, I might as well post it...........here it is:
Mysterian thinking
Rees thinks problems such as the existence of parallel universes, the cause of the big bang, or the nature of our own consciousness are just too difficult for our puny brains to resolve. He points out that the discoverers of relativity and quantum mechanics were able to use mathematical models developed by mathematicians decades earlier, whereas the maths does not yet exist which could unify the two.
The Times wheeled in BBC science presenter Brian Cox to provide the more 'optimistic' view, that the idea that some things are beyond us to understand is too bleak, and history does show we can eventually overcome the most difficult of problems. And my sense is that a lot of scientists, likewise, despise 'mysterian' thinking. People like Rees, they think, just want there to be something rather mysterious about the universe, something that is beyond us to figure out, that makes it altogether more grand than if we brought it down to our level.
I'm with Rees on this, but not at all for the reasons the despisers give, which I think is just their way of explaining the paradox to themselves. With the Big Bang it's the old question: how does one explain how something comes from nothing. With consciousness, how does one explain how chemical reactions generate a sense of awareness. Specifically, what would the explanations look like? Would they be expressed mathematically, in terms of equations? What would that explain, exactly?
The boundaries of rational thinking as a means to understand everything seem too obvious to be worth stating. But it's not at all the done thing to point them out, and I can sort of understand why. After five centuries of breathtaking advances in human thinking, science can't afford to impose limits on itself; if it could see the barriers ahead it would slow down and lose momentum. Better to hurl itself headlong at the problems, and only admit defeat if the mysteries are still unresolved - when? By the middle or end of the century?
Rees's remarks stimulated a couple of other reflections. One is how closely the universe he describes matches the model in spiritualist literature, for instance when he talks about other 3-D universes embedded alongside ours. "In theory," he says," there could be another entire universe less than a millimetre away from us, but we are oblivious to it because that millimetre is measured in a fourth spatial dimension and we are imprisoned in just three." This echoes the idea, which seems to derive from channelling, that the deceased inhabit exactly the same space as ourselves, a world of their own superimposed on ours.
Then we might remember that, for some, mystical contemplation has been regarded as the true way to complete knowledge. Mind control and spiritual practice - or in the case of people like Meister Eckhart - just being born with a certain kind of consciousness, can bring - so they tell us - insights into the ultimate nature of Being and Reality. An understanding that is intuitively felt is clearly different from one that can be written down on a piece of paper, but I wonder if it would seem, to those who experience it, any less meaningful. My guess is that, on the contrary, it would seem a lot more so.
What does everyone think?
