On 05 Jan 2011, at 20:02, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
on 04.01.2011 11:43 Bruno Marchal said the following:
On 03 Jan 2011, at 19:33, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
...
Do you mean that some time ago the times were less obscurantist? If
yes, could you please tell me when?
From -500 to +500. Roughly speaking. From Pythagorus to the closure
of Plato academy. In intellectual circles, of course. This is not
supposed to be taken too much literally. Since 523, theology has been
abandoned by the academics (against their will of course) to the
political powers. Nothing has changed. We have the choice between
fairy tales theologies or the idea that theology is necessarily BS
(and then the dogma of materialism, which is a pseudo-theology which
tries to make us believe it is "science", making science an
authoritative argument in the fundamental matter). Science and
religion are inseparable, and when you separate them you get
pseudo-science and pseudo-religion, and you get the ten thousand
manipulative tools of the powers driven by the special interest,
etc.
I would agree that science is impossible without belief. Yet, in my
view there is a big difference between science and religion as well.
Science is inseparable from a question "How do you know". On the
other hand, in religion such a question would be inappropriate, as
religion is based on the authority. Science is driven by anarchists,
to this end I like what R. B. Laughlin says in his book A Different
Universe, Chapter Star Warriors. A couple of citation from there.
I agree with you, and with Laughlin. But I would not simply say that
religion is based on authority. This is a contingent fact due to
historical circumstances, but also fear-based mammals subroutines,
which have promoted the surrender of theology and religion to
authorities, like in Occident when Plato academy has been closed by
the Romans when they became christians.
The tendency to use authoritative arguments is human and very old, and
appears in both science and in religion, but science tend to fight
against it, and modern religion have institutionalized them.
Exactly like genetics has been captured by the authority for a (short)
period in the Soviet Union, theology, the science, has been captured
in Occident by the Church, unfortunately for a long period.
But theology is a science, like biology, zoology, physics, etc. By
abandoning theology to the authoritative church, not only we have lost
the most fundamental science, but we have erect automatically another
science, physics, into a pseudo-theology, that is a science which acts
as a theology without saying. That is why if you humbly try to explain
that today science have not yet solve the traditional question on the
after-life, the meaning of life, or the mind-body problem, people can
look at you as if you were crackpot, because, they pretend, science
has shown that such question are meaningless, which of course is not
the case.
Science is belief, that is doubtable or falsifiable belief. It is
always hypothetical, and always with an intention of clarity so that
we can say clearly "we were wrong". Theology should be done with that
same modest attitude, with the assumption put clearly on the table,
and then it will evolve accordingly. We have to reintroduce theology,
non confessional theology, in the academic curriculum, but that will
takes time, given more than 1500 years of constant general
brainwashing in the field.
The true mystics know that religion is by its very nature at the
complete opposite of the authoritative argument, and most religions
have originally accept that principle at the start. "God" has no name,
cannot be used for any public purpose, and has to be a matter of
private conviction or feeling/inspiration only, exactly like in
mathematics.
Churches and religious communities are not necessarily bad things,
provided that no authoritative arguments are ever used, and that *all*
questioning and doubts are permitted.
Science is sleepy since 1500 years. In a sense, science has not yet
really begun, because humans still count on the authoritative bloody
argument instead of calm reason in the most fundamental science among
all: theology. And unfortunately this is reflected in the whole human
science field including medicine, where fuzziness makes people
swallowed many form of insidious authoritative arguments.
Things will change with the discovery that the ideally correct
universal machines have already a thoroughly formidable precise and
100% testable theology, actually very close to the non authoritative
discourse of (eastern and western) mystics and of the rational (but
open to mysticism and consciousness) greeks.
Things will *have to* change when biotechnology will lead to (many and
very different sorts of) theotechnologies.
Bruno
"The practicalities of responsible adulthood are arguably the reason
discoveries tend to be made by the young. It is not that young
people are smarter, although they often are, but that they have
fewer promises to keep."
"There will always be scientists – real ones – for the simple reason
that there will always be a steady trickle of anarchists generated
by responsible and good families doing their level best to avoid
this outcome and produce only bankers, doctors, and soccer coaches.
As the older ones are killed of by the practicalites of life, newer
ones rise up to take their place like new grass in spring, in a
cycle of creative rebirth that transcends the generations and is
older than history."
Now a citation from the chapter The Emergent Age, where indeed
Laughlin shows similarity between religion and science:
"Greek creation myths satirize many things in modern life,
particularly cosmological theories. Exploding things, such as
dynamite or the big bang, are unstable. Theories of explosions,
including the first picoseconds of the big bang, thus cross Barriers
of Relevance and are inherently unfalsifiable, notwithstanding
widely cited supporting “evidence” such as isotopic abundances at
the surface of stars and the cosmic microwave background anisotropy."
"The analogy with Greek religion also applies to the humbler end of
the research spectrum, where warring among scientists to see whose
emergent god is more powerful is an everyday reality. A case in
point is ordinary semiconduction. Back when I was in grade school,
it was said that the tribe of semiconductor physics lived in piece
in the Silicon Valley and worshiped crystallinity, the daughter of
which, the gods of valence band and conduction band, caused
transistor actions and prosperity. But then they were invaded by a
hostile tribe of chemists, who worshiped not the crystal but the
molecule and who believed its offspring, the lowest unoccupied
molecular orbital and highest occupied molecular orbital, were the
true cause of transistor action, and that the worshipers of the old
gods wre inferior and unclean. The two tribes engaged in bloody
combat – fought with disinformation, dirty tricks, and refusal to
speak the name of the other tribe’s god – each hoping to starve the
other tribe of research dollars and thus to annihilate it. The war
resulted in stalemate, the vestiges of which persist today. As often
happens in conflicts of this kind, the war was not really over
conceptual matters at all but money, for these warring gods are
actually different names for the same thing. Similar wars occur
routinely in biology, although they are vastly nastier on account of
the greater resources involved."
Evgenii
http://blog.rudnyi.ru
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