A Lot of Assumptions In This Thread
Perhaps the people who enjoy posting in a forum such as this are also a "sample of one." As I was reading I noticed how thought patterns seemed constrained around certain viewpoints of science, and of "scientific" observation of the universe.
As much pride in intellect as I see in these forums (or in my own mind), it is a fact that our species is more moved by emotion than thought: on a ratio of about 99.99 to .01, I would estimate. Hence, art in some form or other (especially "other") is far more important to our species than Science, regardless of how much the "sample of one" in this forum may have opposite views. Almost everything we as a species or as individuals do is emotion-motivated. Most of our rational thought is devoted to rationalizing our emotion-driven actions. If you are a scientist, you can no doubt recognize this fact, however you may wish to value that fact. Nor is it sensible not to accept who we are. Scientists accept reality.
Intuition has to do with how we feel about actions and values, as opposed to how we think about them. I lived in Trinidad and Tobago. Honestly, it seemed near-devoid of overt thinking and planning. As an outsider, I constantly asked people why they did the things they did. Usually, the simple answer was, "My heart told me to." I concluded these people had little-to-no communication with their minds. But the funny thing is, the intuitive process of Trinidadians often resulted in success. Probably no more, but certainly no less, than the number of successful results rational thought would have achieved. The clincher for me was that Trinidadians, person per person, were a far happier people than people of my native USA. Happiness, not riches, was the goal of Trinidadian life. Technologically backward they may have been, but their low crime rate, overall joy in life, acceptance of peoples of all faiths and races, and freedoms of expression, were a more-than-profitable offset from mere material wealth.
I concluded that we, who are so much emotion, must use both rational and heart-based thinking, if we wish a society that progresses both materially and spiritually. In the end, he who dies with the most happiness wins. Since material progress and intelletual attainment also brings happiness, a balanced society would think with both its heart and its head. In cases of a tie, go with the heart.
It is true that thoughts of the heart often cannot be proven via science. On the other hand, thoughts of science often cannot proven via the heart. Science without spirit devolves into crass materialism, while spirit without science degenerates into superstition.
A scientist is supposed to learn from experience. In our history, we have seen how the predominance of superstition in the form of powerful churches sacrificed science on its alter. All those years of potential progress and thought gone. The flip side of the coin is now turned up. Science has weeded the spirit from its garden of knowledge. Yet without both heart and mind, how may we truly be human?
I am not advocating dismissing the dispassionate in proving scientific modelling or observation. However, if we listened to our heart, may we not have been observing or modelling different ideas altogether? Perhaps our models would have developed differently.
It is only lately that any society has had the affluence to develop real science. We are babies in getting the most benefit from it. To think that we may now make grand conclusions about a galaxy we just discovered is to put ourselves in the position of the first European settlers of America, who thought it was all theirs, and it was all the same as the tiny strip of land they first stood upon. In all the glory that now unfolds before us, brought by our fledging and exciting science, we are yet babies, whose eyes are just starting to focus. We think our mother is the world and our egocentric selves own her.
It is with the extraordinary impetus of science starting in the 1800s that we first started breaking our chains of superstition that allowed the churches for so long to proclaim themselves the sole harbingers of Truth. A prophecy of both Christianity and Islam is that in the Last Days the stars will fall from the heavens. Scientific enlightment was partly responsible for the Luminaries of Religion, turned superstition, to be cast from the heaven of understanding. But as scientists filled the vacuum as the exponents of Truth, mankind had already the learning curve.
There is a now a backlash against science. It started with the use and deployment of nuclear weapons. It gathered momentum with the discovery of how “progress” resulted in ecological destruction. It snowballed with the stalling of the U.S. and Soviet space programs, which achieved but one giant step, instead of a series of steps. The science of medicine, which contained such thrilling hope, is now a political football for arguing about costs. Examples go on. It did not take long for the Luminaries of science also to be cast from the heavens.
We are going to see, eventually, that there is only one Truth. We will need every road that leads to It. We will see that all truth is interconnected through Truth. This includes the truths of the poet and philospher, the primitve and sophisticate, Religion and Science, mathematics and playthings, the venerated and the childlike. The famous Traveling Salesman problem of Networking, which no computer could solve because the sheer number of permutations grew too great, was first solved to optimality with soap bubbles.
I suspect Truth is infinite in scope. If there are other intelligences, I bet we will need their divergent ways of relating to their cosmos to grow in understanding.
Consequently, the speculation about the intelligences of other species and what they must do and what they must value and what they must feel, is nothing more than an echo of Manifest Destiny all over again. As scientists we must purge ourselves of such specie-ist thinking. "If they are not like us, they are bad!"
As for the speculations about under what conditions life may develop, I suggest this, too, is nothing more than specie-ism. Chlorine is as corrosive as oxygen. Silicon, like carbon, has eight electron rings. I do not say life will be based upon other chemical bonds and reactions. I say I am a baby to the study of the galaxy, and I need make no conclusions as yet. Most especially, I do not have to conclude that the galaxy revolves around me.
The one fact of life on our planet that may be generalizable is that if there is a way for life to occupy an ecological niche, life will so occupy it. We have life in the snow valleys of the Himalayas, under the Antarctic icecap, in tiny pockets of warmth around magma vents at the bottom of the ocean, in the solid stonework of the lava tubes of the Pacific isles. We have life everywhere you could not expect it.
The most important lesson that science is now teaching us is that we need to develop a Science of Truth. We must become, through our minds, more than we are now to grow in understanding and wisdom.
Some of you may find the next few paragraphs a re-statement of much of René Descartes’ “Meditation 1: OF THE THINGS OF WHICH WE MAY DOUBT.” Also, the slug’s world described below may remind some readers of Edward Abbott’s "Flatland: A romance of many dimensions."
Consider a simple slug crawling upon a sheet of glass. This creature’s world contains but 2 dimensions. Since it is simple, it has no understanding of the time dimension. The slug may move left or right. The slug may move back or forth. That is all it “knows.”
Now assume you have a ray gun that shrinks, without otherwise affecting, whatever you irradiate. You shrink the slug until it becomes so tiny that the otherwise-unperceivable flaws in the glass become small humps over which it must crawl. By changing only the creature’s size, you have caused it to behold a new dimension: up and down. Note that the glass (the creature’s cosmos) did not change. Because the slug’s physical size changed, its perceptions of reality changed.
So it is with humans. We are tiny, in 4 dimensions, in relation to our Cosmos. If we were tinier still, would we directly perceive the 9 dimensions postulated by string theory? Would our understanding change merely because we underwent a change in size? Without doubt, some of our understandings of the nature of the Cosmos would be different. An irrevocable conclusion, then, is that our size distorts our understanding of Reality. Although we understand our finite minds are unable to perceive reality in toto, we dismiss the idea that we, in fact, may know NOTHING of True Reality. After all, we have our physical senses, and our ability to measure observable phenomenon.
We have 5 physical senses. In some ways, they are weak and “tiny” in relation to the cosmos. In other ways, they are powerful and large. Since scientists dismiss PSI powers, ESP, astral travel, and the like, scientific investigation relies upon the combination of the input from the senses and the deductions our rational faculty makes from that input. We know our senses may be fallible (e.g., seeing a mirage). We also know our ignorance causes us at times to to perceive inaccurately. Consequently, we sometimes conclude erroneously because of what we fail to perceive. Our ignorance also causes us to conclude wrongly based upon what we do perceive with more accuracy.
For the most part, the technology we use is only an extension of the senses we have. For examples, sonar is increased hearing. Analysis of microwaves and radar are vision widened across the electromagnetic spectrum. Our physical characteristics, then, place us in the same position vis-à-vis perception as the slug’s size places the slug in its perception of its cosmos. Yet, we see that the slug cannot perceive 2 of its dimensions. We believe, on the basis of not much at all, that we are different from the slug, because our cosmos has an up and down, and because we have a rational mind. This is ego. It is the same pride that once believed in the geocentric universe. Because we have the limitations we have, we, even with science fiction and other imaginative delights, do not currently know that which we do not know.
Which brings us to the flaw in scientific investigation. Science investigates observable phenomena. We pretend we can validate scientific deductions because they explain the universe as we see, hear, smell, taste and touch it. This is circular reasoning, and hence fails to prove anything. Because we can only see, hear, smell, taste and touch, we only prove those things that those limited senses tell us make sense to investigate and prove. This investigation of Truth is close-minded. We slugs have proven, via simple movement along all possible paths, that the world has but 2 dimensions.
Who knows what phenomena are not observable to the 5 senses? Who knows what phenomena are observed incorrectly or incompletely?
Imagine that the slug lives inside an enormous baking dish. A slug travels straight towards the side of the dish. Because it is a slug, and because objects in motion tend to stay in motion, when it reaches the side, it unwittingly travels up. When the slug initially starts to travel up, part of its body is still on the bottom of the dish and part is on the vertical side. Suddenly it has 3 dimensions, however briefly. Being a slug, it may not notice. Nor will gravity affect its slimy crawl in any noticeable way.
Once the slug is moving up the side, its world reverts to 2 dimensions. The slug does not realize that the up-and-down dimension has replaced the back-and-forth dimension. The slug is secure in its knowledge that its world is 2-dimensional: left and right, back and forth. Since the brief period of time in which the slug’s world had 3 dimensions is not a repeatable (and hence, verifiable) phenomenon, that observation of 3 dimensions is dismissed as a mistake in measurement or deduction.
Now imagine you are in a spaceship traveling towards a distant star. As you approach the star, at some point you enter the star’s gravity well. When you do, the dimension of back and forth in which you WERE traveling has now become your up-and-down dimension. Although to you it seems as if your journey is still along the same forward-and-back spatial dimension, you are now traveling up and down relative to your prior dimension of travel. You never noticed. Your senses are too flawed to distinguish the dimensional shift.
The point of these speculations is that we do not know what dimensions we do not perceive, nor is there any “real” spatial dimension to our senses. However, our senses tell us that there is.
This is the first Age in which we may find ways to overcome the "size" of our senses. One way (and it is important to stress that we must find infinite ways) of "re-sizing" our minds (since we cannot re-size our physical bodies nor our 5 senses) is to use linear (sometimes called matrix) algebra as an analogous framework for perception of Truth. Even, for example, Scriptures and Science can be "matricised", to reveal their relation, the vector of enlightenment you get by grouping one subset of the Scripture and Science of the matrix, the determinant permitting the inversion of the entire set of Scriptural and Scientific understandings to get a new matrix of understandings, the "eigenforce" of the truth lying along the multidimensional vector of the matrix, and the ways of combining other sets of vector matrices of Scripture and Science to achieve new perceptions of reality. I am using one such matrix herein to show how the stars fell from the heavens, both materially and spiritually.
This is a powerful analogy and tool. Matrices are what mathematicians and scientists have to use because the Cosmos is too vast and too inter-related to use simple one-line or one-curve mathematics.
Understanding Heisenberg's Principle on the quantum level led to the realization that observers on the macro level also unavoidably alter what they observe. Hence, we are limited in what we can know about anything, because learning one fact about that anything alters what used to be the reality of that anything into a new reality.
It also ALTERS THE OBSERVER.
Statistics has this thing called "losing a degree of freedom." Every constraint you place upon the object observed (e.g., It is going THIS fast) steals a freedom from you to make another statement about the object (e.g., It is located HERE). In statistics, the reason for the loss of the degree of freedom is analogous to Heisenberg's Principle, but has a different cause. Whatever you measure is known in statistics to be a sample of the entire reality. Because you cannot know whether a sample is reflective of the true Reality (e.g., SOMETIMES it goes THIS fast, instead), when you make an observation, you limit with what certainty you can generalize ALL of your conclusions about the sample to the whole Reality. That is, you increase the likelihood that all of your conclusions together are wrong.
Contained within statistics, is everything I am saying about our perception of the Cosmos. Everything we can see, every use of our senses, steals multiple degrees of freedom from us to be able to generalize what we "know" as being the True Nature of the Cosmos. We increase the probability that altogether our conclusions are wrong. The 4 dimensions we perceive may exist because we are tiny or large in relation to the Universe. Hence, physical size is one of the famous "rose-tinted spectacles." Who knows what non-electromagentic forces regularly exceed c?
Consequently, scientists believe gravity to be one of the 4 forces of the universe. In fact, it may not be a force under any understanding. It may merely be the "grid" that allows the plot of the 4 dimensions that we do perceive to exist and to relate to one another.
Everytime I turn around, I find 1 more indication that gravity is the original "ether" that both underpins and causes physical reality. By defining the relationship of the 4 dimensions, gravity makes the speed of light "c".
Perhaps, the first Unified Field Theory will treat gravity, not as a force in relation to the 3 forces, but as a forceless, active but non-reactive pre-existence that molds (curves) the dimensions; that, in fact, causes those dimensions to exist by creating matter and energy. It is ok by me to call that force other than gravity (Higgs field, perhaps). Even with the Big Bang theory, we come back to gravity, and maybe matter, pre-existing the cosmos. It pre-existed the laws of our cosmos.
We have thought we had invented the Science of Truth many times already. Every time, we found that how we looked at Truth was limited.
For the first time, the understandings of the rational faculty can blend and harmonize with the understandings of the heart (the spiritual or intuitive faculty). Heretofore, the spiritual faculty has proclaimed itself the sole bringing of Truth. However, as prophesied, in the Last Days, when the Order of Things passed away, the stars of religion fell from the heaven of understanding. New Luminaries, the scientists, soon sat upon the throne of Truth.
Man in all actions follows a pendulous motion. For too long he moves in one direction. Suddenly he reverses his movement, and then he goes too far in the other direction.
Consequently, the new Luminaries of science also quickly fell from the heavens of understanding. The Special Theory of Relativity was the greatest leap of Science since Newton. In but a few short years the heavy elements, existing on this planet solely because of supernova (literally, stars falling from the sky), were made to bring thermonuclear reactions (the power of the stars) to Earth (the stars fell to Earth in yet one more literal way). The first use of this power of heaven was to destroy great numbers of humans. The scientific path to Truth had gone too far on its pendulum swing away from the heart, and created weapons of unthinkable destruction.
Science was going to save us all. Science caused way more problems than it solved. The pendulum must swing back and stabilize. We must not lose Science the way we lost Religion.
We begin with the understanding that everything the 5 senses perceive is not just limited, which everyone grants, but maybe, an out-and-out lie. The scientific method, at this time, will recognize ONLY the reality that the 5 senses perceive. As much as I love the scientific method, I believe the future will demonstrate it to be a superstition as limited, and as damaging to progress, as the beliefs of our ancient ancestors, at which we now poke fun.
Due to a deliberate misconstruing of the story of Adam and Eve, women have been subjected for thousands of years. Religion, channeled down the wrong paths in its conceptual stages, has cost us much progress, welfare, peace and understanding. Science is now in its conceptual stages. One of the first major acts of Science was to use the stars that fell from the sky to annihilate masses of people. In part, this is a price we paid by subverting Religion at its conception. It is inconceivable to me that a society that had had women as full partners for these thousands of years could ever have degenerated to the point where use of nuclear weapons upon its own species was a sustainable concept.
What seeds is Science, in it infancy, now planting?
I believe it is the kind of thinking seen here about "other intelligences" that could be weed seeds, instead of fruitful seeds. We must "re-size" our minds.
