Tejinder,
Thank you, I am deeply appreciative of your help on this point! I've already looked up the video, and noted with particular fascination this quote:
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Eckhart Tolle on awareness:
1:58-2:10 - "You are the awareness behind it without which none of this would be here. You'd just be atoms and molecules in space. You are the awareness that enables this entire world to be."
I hate to give a teaser (you know I really don't :), but based on the above quote I think you and others may find interesting a new mini-essay I'll be adding soon.
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I suspect that at times though my unrelenting insistence on proper use of the scientific method that I come over as, well... a maximally reductionist materialist, or some such atoms-only description?
I find that idea delightfully amusing, since it is very far from how I actually look at the world. I just like to take good care of my tools. You don't leave your saw out in a light rain to rust, and you don't leave your scientific methodology out in a drizzle of unverifiable data that degrades the verifiability of its outcomes. But that does not mean that I hate rain, nor that I disdain knowledge and perspectives that come from perspectives utterly inaccessible to the narrow scope of the scientific method.
Science originated as and continues to be a philosophy, by which I mean a collection of precepts that some person or group of people have postulated (not proven) to "important" for understanding the world in which we finds ourselves. Some of the precepts of science are astonishingly arbitrary in the overall scheme of things, and I say that as a computer science type for whom the creation of new and arbitrary worlds is one of our primary motivational drivers. Programmers build new worlds, and do so in no small part because they love to explore worlds that are not as limiting as our own physical world.
(From that world-building perspective, why should experiments be replicable? Why should matter on the other side of your universe look or act anything like matter here? Why not magic? Why not time travel? Why not allow violations of causality, when for example you can just create new branches each time such an event occurs... or perhaps do something far stranger? The universe of universes that could be is mind-boggling in size, and no one knows that better than a good programmer who loves novelty and has with no inhibitions about "sacred" rules of physics.)
In the case of the philosophy of science, one of the most important precepts came straight out of Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism. That is the idea that when Yahweh/God/Allah created the material world, he chose to make it orderly, that is, highly predictable and based on relatively simple rules. This particular faith assumption was powerfully advocated by Sir Isaac Newton, a man who wrote more on Christian philosophy than he did on physics. He believed deeply in a Creator God, and from his own experience and readings about how to build new things, he presumed as a principle of faith that God would have made the universe in a similar fashion, using a small tool kit and materials with reliable, replicable properties.
(As a fascinating counterpoint, that rule of reliable replication did not hold true forever for Damascus swords. A multi-fold forging process combined with a subtle heat-induced formation of two alloys allowed the makers of these swords to give unparalleled resistance to breaking, and an ability to hold a sharp edge much longer. With acid etching the folded layers created a beautiful fractal-like fold-over surface pattern, the damask. We know now what no one knew then: These swords and their subtle alloy formations were possible only because their forgers used steel from mines in southern India that happened to have a bit of vanadium in the ore. When those mines were exhausted, the ability to make new Damascus swords also ended. Their forgers moved on, no doubt in great sorrow over their loss, and the very phrase "Damascus steel" took on a note of mystery and magic, a phrase for something that had become a lost art. Is it any wonder then that the fictional versions of these swords came to dominate the magical worlds of Tolkien and nearly every other fantasy author who followed his lead?)
That science is a collection of faith-based philosophical precepts not that different from those other philosophies and philosophical religions is often completely forgotten. The reason why it is forgotten is that the phenomenal success that it achieved when applied to the physical world. Science enable levels of material-world construction and creation utterly unmatched by any other philosophy or religion. However, it did so at the high cost of extreme narrowness of scope, since science as a philosophy is only designed for and only works well at manipulating the material world. It simply avoids the "big picture" issues that almost every other philosophy found important. The danger of course is that due to this very effectiveness, those who practice only science can completely forget that a bigger picture even exists.
When considering the role of science versus philosophy and religions that examine the world closely, I have a nerdy comparison that I nevertheless find quite apt.
Particle quantum physicists had a tendency to look down a bit on condensed matter quantum physicists, feeling that only their own particle-smashing strategy provides meaningful access to the deep and pristine (but also inherently reductionist) knowledge that can come only by probing individual particles at smaller and smaller scales. Yet historically, it is condensed matter quantum physics rather than particle physics that has produced the most bizarre and unpredicted quantum phenomena, including the Mössbauer effect, superconductors, and superfluids. It is also without much question condensed matter quantum physics that has had the most impact on our daily lives by enabling technologies such as semiconductor electronics.
So my comparison is simply this: Science is like particle physics, while philosophy and philosophical religions are like condensed matter physics. Only the latter bother to get their hands dirty with the complex situations that we call everyday life, and by doing so they uncover and address extraordinarily impactful issues that will forever beyond the scope of science.
Cheers,
Terry
Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)
Essayist's Rating Pledge by Terry Bollinger
"Quantum mechanics is simpler than most people realize. It is no more and no less than the physics of things for which history has not yet been written."