(no subject)

[anotherusedpage]

neonchameleon; I saw this and thought of you. Or rather our ongoing discussion on the nature of reality.

Neil Gaiman puts it better than I ever could (as usual).



"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." - Sam, American Gods



I don't agree with every statement, but the gist of it is my impression of the way the universe works.

Comments

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember the plum-pudding stuff and testing. Don't get me wrong, I see what the usefulness of rigourous testing and the idea of unprovability is.

But... And here I question how big a flaw

Huuuuge flaw. Unbelievably huge flaw that totally undermines the whole of human thinking.

It's happened before... I don't trust it not to happen again. And if/when it happens, it'll be in the area of human thought we are most comfortable with and believe in most strongly - and we won't be able to predict what we've got wrong or how that will change things....

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

Unbelievably huge flaw that totally undermines the whole of human thinking.

With luck, you end up with (dis)proof by contradiction.

And if/when it happens, it'll be in the area of human thought we are most comfortable with and believe in most strongly - and we won't be able to predict what we've got wrong or how that will change things....

I doubt it will be from the (physical) sciences (as you appear to be implying) - the constant checking against the natural world and against logic keeps it honest.

(And what has undermined the whole of human thinking?)

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

No, I suspect it will be in philosophy. Philosophy of ideas, philosophy of existance, that sort of thing. I just think it will effect science more because science expects logic and rules that don't change.

And what has undermined the whole of human thinking

No one thing. It's a process. But things are all interconnected - the world is at the centre of the universe because god put it there, and devils cause disease, and there's a natural order to the animal kingdom with man at the top, and god created the world in seven day - all the ideas are undermined together, and we end up with a totally different societal world view. One new idea affects all the other - if the world isn't at the centre of the universe, ideas shift subtly, it becomes easier to accept that disease is natural, and that the world was formed over a long period of time. And vice versa. Interconectedness.

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

I just think it will effect science more because science expects logic and rules that don't change.

Science expects logic. As for the rules not changing, Science in the 20th Century alone was able to relatively easily cope with Relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics, Atoms being first found then probed and split, Wave/Particle Duality, Quantumn Theory, Chaos Theory and many, many other revolutions that would have been considered crazy by 19th Century scientists.

A greater proportion of scientists than others will suffer from autodefenestration - but science itself will more or less say "Oh. Another revolution. How quaint. Half of you analyse it, the other half try to cover what was there before.

Science may expect logic and rules, but because it stays very close to them continually gets revoluted.

Actually, the two revolutions I see that could hurt science are Ludditism/Fundamentalism (see the _ing 'Merkin Creationists) and Postmodernism with equal validities for all viewpoints and quantification being impossible.