Science: Do we believe or do we accept?

[citybutch]

Was sitting here thinking AJ... and it came to mind (I would love your response to this) that perhaps one of the great differences between a spiritual understanding of the world around us and a scientific one is that in science the question is how and yet in a spiritual sense we want to know why. Science sees the patterns that allow us to predict... but at the same time the randomness of creation and life... i.e. certain events had to have happened in order for life to exist.

Thoughts?

[imperfect_cupcake]

Originally Posted by citybutch

Was sitting here thinking AJ... and it came to mind (I would love your response to this) that perhaps one of the great differences between a spiritual understanding of the world around us and a scientific one is that in science the question is how and yet in a spiritual sense we want to know why. Science sees the patterns that allow us to predict... but at the same time the randomness of creation and life... i.e. certain events had to have happened in order for life to exist.

Thoughts?

well, for me - I know you asked aj but I'm going to answer too - the magic thing that makes me feel all the beauty/wonder is that for me... there *is* no why. it just... is. It has it's own inherent value just for the same meaninglessness as the next thing. A cockroach is as different from a human as a cougar. for me there is no why. *I* get to invent the why, for me. it's up to me to give my own life purpose and meaning. That's a big fat responsibility.

sometimes, I'm not up to the task, lemme tell you. But most of the time, I am.

and in that, I do get a sense of "spirituality" in the sense of the word meaning "a sense of wonder and beauty and feeling of unity and smallness/humility all in one." for me spirit doesn't have to mean supernatural or other worldy. it's a concept word for me that I "get" the translation of. I don't mind it being applied.

[imperfect_cupcake]

It applies to New Age invocations of quantum mechanics or chaos theory or relativity theory

* SHRIEK* sorry but that really gets on my tits. I once watched a 3.5 hour movie on just that called What the bleep do we know and it is the loss of those 3.5 hours out of my life is something I mourn heavily. I'm pretty non-judgemental when it comes to beliefs but some things I just can't take.

Granted I have The Tao of Physics, but I actually didn't find that book flakey or unreasonable.

[imperfect_cupcake]

Originally Posted by honeybarbara

* SHRIEK* sorry but that really gets on my tits. I once watched a 3.5 hour movie on just that called What the bleep do we know and it is the loss of those 3.5 hours out of my life is something I mourn heavily. I'm pretty non-judgemental when it comes to beliefs but some things I just can't take.

Granted I have The Tao of Physics, but I actually didn't find that book flakey or unreasonable.

I f*cked up that last sentance. I didn't find the book that flakey (meaning a touch) or too unreasonable (meaning for 1974. despite new advances each reprint has not been updated and I find that a bit suspect as some of the particle theory has moved on to better theory). But it does state in the epilogue "Physicists do not need mysticism, and mystics do not need physics, but humanity needs both" so I did find the read interesting and far less offensive than the WTFDWK movie

[Toughy]

Originally Posted by honeybarbara

* SHRIEK* sorry but that really gets on my tits. I once watched a 3.5 hour movie on just that called What the bleep do we know and it is the loss of those 3.5 hours out of my life is something I mourn heavily. I'm pretty non-judgemental when it comes to beliefs but some things I just can't take.

Granted I have The Tao of Physics, but I actually didn't find that book flakey or unreasonable.

The Secret gets my tits also. The book and the movie. Oprah made it a success and it just was a waste of time.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by honeybarbara

* SHRIEK* sorry but that really gets on my tits. I once watched a 3.5 hour movie on just that called What the bleep do we know and it is the loss of those 3.5 hours out of my life is something I mourn heavily. I'm pretty non-judgemental when it comes to beliefs but some things I just can't take.

Granted I have The Tao of Physics, but I actually didn't find that book flakey or unreasonable.

I saw that movie, mistakenly believing that it was a feature-length treatment of Brian Greene's brilliant book "The Elegant Universe". Boy was I wrong!

To give you a taste of just how painful that movie was for me, I will borrow from Douglas Adams description of Vogon poetry.

"...During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal hemmoraging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of is own legs off."

It was horrible. It was painful. It was a complete bastardization of the physics.

It is ironic that my introduction into Quantum Mechanics was Fritjof Capra. I read that, then Taking the Quantum Leap, then the Dancing Wu-Li Masters. Then I happened to pick up a book on QM that was not written from a 'spiritual' point of view and fell in love. Here was a description of the science that made the more New Age rendition of that same material fade into ugliness by comparison. The fact that the universe just works this way and it plays out without any apparent interference from an supernatural entity is just awe inspiring to me.

I wrote a paper about the New Age misuse of QM a while back and made myself read and watch The Secret (if I'm going to criticize something, I should at least familiarize myself with the subject matter. I wish more people who are critical of science would do the same). One of the things I find most disturbing is the whole idea of "we create our own reality". I understand that this is supposed to be a 'kinder, gentler' world view but I find it callous. As callous as the kind of Ayn Rand Objectivism philosophy beloved of free market fundamentalists. Typically, when people are talking the 'we create our own reality' line, they are doing so from a relative position of privilege. I think that any of these philosophies should be viewed not from the point of view of someone in comfort but someone in great distress.

The example I always use (and anyone can find their own) is that of a young child whose mom and dad worked above the 100th floor of WTC 1 and WTC 2, who never came home the evening of 11 Sept. Now, according to the The Secret, anything that happens to us is something we attracted. So either this young child attracted the death of her parents or her parents attracted orphaning of their child. What could possibly be more callous than that? One can look anywhere on the planet where misery is a constant companion and one will be moved to ask "so what did that person, this three year old born into a war zone in Sudan" attract here? If we view things that way then there's really no need to feel compelled to do anything to alleviate their suffering. I mean, if you are suffering in a universe that will give you whatever you wish just for the asking and visualizing then your misery is your own. That sounds neither kinder nor gentler to me and yet it is an inescapable conclusion of the logic of The Secret.

Cheers
Aj

[imperfect_cupcake]

As callous as the kind of Ayn Rand Objectivism philosophy beloved of free market fundamentalists. Typically, when people are talking the 'we create our own reality' line, they are doing so from a relative position of privilege. I think that any of these philosophies should be viewed not from the point of view of someone in comfort but someone in great distress.

you might be really interested in a new BBC series put out called "watched over by machines of loving grace" that I loved. I agreed with a lot of the principle statements the writer of the series was making, but I didn't quite agree with the full conclusion at the end. But I really did empathise why he thought that way and it was and interesting take. here's the synopsis for the first episode:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011k45f

if you go to the right in the box you'll see the link to the other episodes. Try googling the names of the episodes, you might be lucky to find a torrent for them.

As for Douglas Adams (one of my favorite authors) and his invention of vogon poetry... yes. I agree. what made it worse was the cartoon of the double slit experiment was a great explanation in lay terms. Like you, I thought it was going to be something about real QM. gosh, it was a horrific discovery as the realisation came through, wasn't it!

I feel very sorry for one of the scientists who later had to claim over and over that they twisted and took out of context everything he said to support their claims. Imagine the piss-take at work when people find out?

[/tangential aside for scientific pity]

I just went to Uncaged Monkeys in oxford with Prof Brian Cox, Ben Goldacher (whos blog on debunking shitty science journalism I strongly suggest for a read if you haven't read him already) and Simon Sing. It was really fun and I loved it but Prof Cox's collegues really took the piss out of him in front of the audience because he's a giganto sex symbol here. I was suprised no one threw their panties on stage. They kept picking the inappropriate questions from women in the audience sent in by text for the Q&A session like "what colour boxers is prof cox wearing" etc. The MC then said, after Cox very patiently declined the questions and exited stage left for the next section in the show, "Thank you audience. Later, Professor Cox will be pole dancing." Ok. I snorted at that one. But poor bastard.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by honeybarbara

you might be really interested in a new BBC series put out called "watched over by machines of loving grace" that I loved. I agreed with a lot of the principle statements the writer of the series was making, but I didn't quite agree with the full conclusion at the end. But I really did empathise why he thought that way and it was and interesting take. here's the synopsis for the first episode:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011k45f

Several things leap to mind and I am going to have to watch this series. Hopefully the BBC will stream it.

This particularly caught me, "A series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers."

This reminded me of the following:

“In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the
table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of
nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.”

(George Dyson -- Darwin Among the Machines)

Which then reminded me of this article, written 11 years ago by a very clever man named Bill Joy (he created Java) called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us"

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by citybutch

Was sitting here thinking AJ... and it came to mind (I would love your response to this) that perhaps one of the great differences between a spiritual understanding of the world around us and a scientific one is that in science the question is how and yet in a spiritual sense we want to know why. Science sees the patterns that allow us to predict... but at the same time the randomness of creation and life... i.e. certain events had to have happened in order for life to exist.

Thoughts?

For the most part I agree with the first part. I think that science deals very well with how questions and a limited set of why questions. For example, science can deal with the question "why do we die" it cannot deal with the question "knowing that I will die, why should I live". Religion deals with a different set of why questions having to do with ultimate meaning. For better or worse, science is not tooled-up to handle ultimate meaning questions.

As far as your last part about certain events having had to happen in order for life to exist, I think that is an artifact of our perceiving our existence as somehow special. For example, in order for me to exist my parents had to have been born, had to live long enough to meet, have sex at least once, and then my mother had to live long enough to give birth to me. It would be tempting to look at that chain of events and conclude that since I am here (obviously) all those events came to pass and *therefore* there must be some great cosmic meaning or force that caused it to happen. Put another way, I could look at my parent's life as having happened so *that* I could come into existence.

I think we do something similar with the Universe. I know that a great deal is made about the perfect set of conditions that (allegedly) have to obtain in order for life to exist on this planet but some of that stuff is just an artifact of looking for specialness where it may not exist. For example, I've heard people say on numerous occasions that if the Earth were ten feet or ten miles in either direction then life wouldn't be possible. Except that is entirely wrong. Our orbit is not a circle, it is an elipsis so by definition we vary in our position relative to the Sun. It is certainly more variance than 10 miles (the distance between Earth at its closest point and at its farthest point varies by ~3 million miles!). The biozone (habitable zone) around Sol may be as close to the Sun as Venus orbit and possibly as far out as Mars' orbit. That gives a lot of variance.

Yes, some of the constants of the Universe appear very finely tuned and if they had slightly different values we wouldn't be here. But the fact that they have the values makes our existence possible, it does not mean that those values *had* to be where they are. Just that if we were going to be there, they had to be what they are.

Does that make sense?

Cheers
Aj