Science and Spirituality

[Outta here]

Maybe it should say beware all 'Zans'.

I'm not sure if I should be shocked, amused, offended or flattered!

Now be quiet.

tsk tsk! careful, you've just taken a giant leap into the most common and tedious abyss of ridonculous relgiosity since Gaia was queen of the heap ... stating their piece then attempting to stifle all free thought or speech to the contrary.

Indeed Cliffy - beware all that seeks to stifle the need or desire for any truth that might be acquired through experience or critical thought or self determination.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Are science and spirituality compatible?

Yes.

Can the notion of Spirit be coherently included in a scientific view of the world?

I'd have said yes if you hadn't capitalized spirit. If by "Spirit" you mean some non-corporeal part of your personality that exists separately from your brain and can potentially at least survive the death of your body, I'd say no. But if the term is as Cliffy defined it, "the individual search for truth and meaning in one's life," and to truth and meaning I'd probably add a few more things, like fulfillment and joy, I'd say yes.

Spirituality to me is about one's emotional response to the world, and I've always found that the more I can know and understand about it, the stronger and more positive that response is. For me, what science has discovered about reality is so much richer and more varied and surprising and interesting than anything any religious tradition ever invented, I find it very difficult to understand why anyone would opt for such a pale--and often demonstrably false--imitation of reality. The great J.B.S. Haldane once remarked that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose. The best science is deeply informed by spirituality, the need to know, to understand, the mysterious intuitive leaps that lead to new knowledge, and taking delight in finding out surprising and interesting new things. A scientist who lacks awareness of spirituality will never be anything more than a technician fiddling at the fringes. Science is first and foremost a human enterprise, one of our more successful ones, and suffers from all the usual weaknesses of all human enterprises--ego, dogma, tradition, bureaucracy, etc.--but at its best it's fabulously exciting and awe-inspiring and humbling. And because of its uniquely evidence-based, self-correcting nature, the best is what survives and endures.

I looked up at the sky from my back yard when I came home this evening, and there was Orion. I could see the vague fuzzy patch below the three stars that form Orion's belt, and I remembered seeing spectacular Hubble images of that area. New stars are being born there as we watch. Some day there may be life there, looking at us, if we're still around then. And suddenly, all the irritations and vexations of my day evaporated--and today was a uniquely irritating day for me--in the face of the grand scale of the universe and the fabulous sights to be found in it. That's my version of poetry.

 

[Cliffy]

Indeed Cliffy - beware all that seeks to stifle the need or desire for any truth that might be acquired through experience or critical thought or self determination.

Zan,Not to worry. I have been dealing with these types for over forty years and they have never had an effect on me yet. MHz is a rare breed though. Kinda part JW and part Rottweiler.

 

[MHz]

I'm not sure if I should be shocked, amused, offended or flattered!

All, but since this is not a punishment they aren't all at once all of the time.

tsk tsk! careful, you've just taken a giant leap into the most common and tedious abyss of ridonculous relgiosity since Gaia was queen of the heap ... stating their piece then attempting to stifle all free thought or speech to the contrary.

Indeed Cliffy - beware all that seeks to stifle the need or desire for any truth that might be acquired through experience or critical thought or self determination.

Actually I can end any conversation I am involved in at any time I wish (unless I am also a hostage). Cliffy is certainly free to carry on with any one else he wishes to, as are you.

 

[Cliffy]

Here is another take on the subject, "Science Meets Spirituality".

YouTube - When Science meets Spirituality Part1

 

[s_lone]

Yes. I'd have said yes if you hadn't capitalized spirit. If by "Spirit" you mean some non-corporeal part of your personality that exists separately from your brain and can potentially at least survive the death of your body, I'd say no. But if the term is as Cliffy defined it, "the individual search for truth and meaning in one's life," and to truth and meaning I'd probably add a few more things, like fulfillment and joy, I'd say yes.

It's clear by your heartfelt testimony that science and spirituality are compatible. But of course, the term ''spirit'' is pretty vague and can be used in so many contexts. And the fact that I capitalized the word can easily be misleading.

By Spirit, I didn't quite mean the ''non-corporeal part of my personality that exists separately from my brain and can potentially survive its death.'' By Spirit, I'm talking about something that is universal rather than individual.

Very simply put, the idea of Platonic Forms is close to what I am talking about. (It's been expressed in many other ways throughout the history of philosophy)... This idea that the manifest world is just the surface of things, that there is an underlying structure that you can't really touch, smell or see but only assess with your mind.

The manifest world is a manifestation of what? Of Spirit. Here's an image to support the idea... The manifest world is like the surface of the ocean with its waves crashing on the beach of human consciousness. But what is there under the waves? Spirit. And in the end, the waves are not separate from Spirit, they are its exterior manifestation. The manifest world IS part of Spirit.

In my view, science is constantly dealing with what is going on beneath the waves. What is more intangible than the equations that underlie gravity? You can't touch these equations, you can't taste them, you can't SEE them... Of course, you can see an equation written on a piece of paper, but you need to understand the equation with your mind in order for it to have meaning. The written equation is just a symbol of the pure mental concept, that can only be ''seen'' with reason, not with the senses. To a child, the equation is just gibberish because it can't mentally grasp the concept.

So science is constantly going under the surface of manifest reality to understand what is really going on, and the further it goes, the more intangible things become, the more it needs to deal with abstract concepts and equations.

Of course, there is nothing intangible with a piano falling on your head (that is a pretty manifest version of gravity...) And there is nothing intangible about an atomic bomb! But again, the atomic explosion is the manifestation of principles that can only be assessed with the mind.
And it is in that sense that I speak of a universal Spirit. This Spirit is like the paper on which the story of the universe is written.

Or here's a perhaps better analogy:

The manifest world is like the actual letters that you are reading right now. You see them with your eyes (your senses). But Spirit (the ''non-manifest'') is like the syntax that makes these letters intelligible. Spirit is what makes it all coherent.

All that being said, I could understand why you wouldn't want to use the term ''Spirit'' for what I am talking about because of the numerous ways you can anthropomorphize the word. What would you suggest?

 

[s_lone]

Here is another take on the subject, "Science Meets Spirituality".

YouTube - When Science meets Spirituality Part1

Thanks for posting this Cliffy. I've watched it after posting my previous post and realize I was trying to explain exactly what this man is explaining better than me.

I have a feeling Dexter Sinister will have something to say about this...

 

[Scott Free]

For a more in depth look at the subject, see the movie "What the Bleep do we Know?"

I watched this movie and found it made some outrageous distortions of fact, many of the so called "experts" are expounding on topics out of their field, or in the case of Davis Albert edited to say something he never meant, and IMO the movie is thus guilty of outright deceptions like you would expect from any spiritualist charlatan.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

I have a feeling Dexter Sinister will have something to say about this...

How clever you are... :smile:

The good Dr. Hagelin, three-time Natural Law Party candidate for President of the U.S., professor at the Maharishi University, proposer of a Vedic shield to end terrorism and war, has gone off the deep end. There`s no justification in physics for most of what he says about its connection to consciousness, and he says some things that flatly aren`t true. Superstring theory is indeed an elegant bit of mathematics, as he says, but it has no grounding in anything we know about the physical universe and so far it`s made no testable predictions that would distinguish it from the Standard Model of quantum theory. It is not the Unified Field Theory, physics has not discovered the unity he speaks of, that`s just mystic nonsense of the same sort that the movie What the Bleep Do We Know is full of. As it turns out, we know quite a lot, but you won`t find anything useful about it in that movie. It`s an elaborate tissue of fabrications and distortions, and deliberately misrepresents the results of a long interview with physicist and philosopher David Albert so that he appears to agree with the film`s central thesis, that consciousness and quantum theory are linked, when in fact he does not.

The universe is quite wonderful and mysterious as it is, there`s no need to make up crap about it.

 

[darkbeaver]

Everything grows in crap though. Even answers start as crap.

 

[talloola]

All that being said, I could understand why you wouldn't want to use the term ''Spirit'' for what I am talking about because of the numerous ways you can anthropomorphize the word. What would you suggest?

'Intelligence, curiosity and energy' equals spirit, spirit is somehow always confused with religion and mixed in with that concept.
In my world the three words above are the roads to learning.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Even answers start as crap.

That's not really a fair characterization of science. Some answers start out as unsupported, and become accepted as the evidence comes in. Most answers start out as unsupported and stay that way, because the evidence doesn't sustain them. There have been three major paradigm shifts in science within my lifetime, that started out as flimsy hypotheses that the data eventually verified or pointed to a different conclusion.


1. continental drift: first proposed by Alfred Wegener in the 19th century, when it was laughed at, but when the data came in in the mid-20th century, it was accepted almost instantly and the whole science of geology was revolutionized.

2. the asteroid impact K-T extinction event: first proposed by a father and son team, the Alvarez's, dad a physicist and son a geologist, and it too was vigorously resisted, until data from all over the world confirmed the existence of an iridium and ash-enriched layer at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary and the impact site was found in Central America.

3. #2 above led to the hypothesis that all major extinction events were due to impacts, on the basis of that single example, and it became conventional wisdom for a while, until it became clear the data did not sustain that conclusion, and the real cause of most extinction events--there are at least five major ones we know about from the fossil record, and a dozen or so minor ones-- was global climate change.

That's how it works Beave, that's how it's always worked. Science is overflowing with ideas and hypotheses, some of which will prove to be right, most of which will prove to be wrong. The test is what do the data show, what does nature actually tell us when we probe it. Your favourite electric universe theory, for instance, remains on the fringe because it has not produced the data and rigorous analyses necessary to make it acceptable. Every web site about it you've ever pointed us to is almost entirely qualitative, scornful of the accepted paradigms, a little bit paranoid, and a little bit cranky. Those are the hallmarks of pseudoscience, and the IEEE engineers you're so fond of quoting are not physicists, they don't seem to grasp that the electromagnetic phenomena they can produce on a lab bench do not scale up to the size of the cosmos. It's all based on qualitative analogies with small scale phenomena, if it looks like X it must be X. They may be right, but they haven't made their case in an acceptable way, and conventional physics easily falsifies some of their core claims.

 

[s_lone]

How clever you are... :smile:

The good Dr. Hagelin, three-time Natural Law Party candidate for President of the U.S., professor at the Maharishi University, proposer of a Vedic shield to end terrorism and war, has gone off the deep end. There`s no justification in physics for most of what he says about its connection to consciousness, and he says some things that flatly aren`t true. Superstring theory is indeed an elegant bit of mathematics, as he says, but it has no grounding in anything we know about the physical universe and so far it`s made no testable predictions that would distinguish it from the Standard Model of quantum theory. It is not the Unified Field Theory, physics has not discovered the unity he speaks of, that`s just mystic nonsense of the same sort that the movie What the Bleep Do We Know is full of. As it turns out, we know quite a lot, but you won`t find anything useful about it in that movie. It`s an elaborate tissue of fabrications and distortions, and deliberately misrepresents the results of a long interview with physicist and philosopher David Albert so that he appears to agree with the film`s central thesis, that consciousness and quantum theory are linked, when in fact he does not.

The universe is quite wonderful and mysterious as it is, there`s no need to make up crap about it.

When you say science has not discovered the unity he speaks of what do you mean exactly? Of course, science doesn't understand everything and in that sense, it doesn't grasp how the universe functions as a unified whole. But doesn't science take for granted that the universe does function as unified whole? How could it not?

And what do you have to say on the idea that the manifest world is all rooted in abstract concepts such as equations that can only be grasped by reason? Can you understand how some people tend to think that ''reason'' or ''spirit'' or ''intelligence'' exists outside the human mind as well as inside?

 

[Dexter Sinister]

When you say science has not discovered the unity he speaks of what do you mean exactly?

I mean, first, that there's no such thing as a Unified Field Theory, and second, that the claims made about the professor in the opening credits as the discoverer of it are essentially fraudulent. The SU5 referred to there, for instance, is not a theory, it's just a particular assumption about symmetry that's incorporated into the string and superstring theories.

Of course, science doesn't understand everything and in that sense, it doesn't grasp how the universe functions as a unified whole. But doesn't science take for granted that the universe does function as unified whole? How could it not?

Yes, that's a fair statement, science does assume that nature is consistent and comprehensible, at least in principle, though we may not be smart enough to get it.

And what do you have to say on the idea that the manifest world is all rooted in abstract concepts such as equations that can only be grasped by reason? Can you understand how some people tend to think that ''reason'' or ''spirit'' or ''intelligence'' exists outside the human mind as well as inside?

Yes, I can understand that, without necessarily agreeing with it. I think I'd have to say I'm agnostic about that idea. There are very deep philosophical issues here and I can't pretend I have explanations for them, I'm still working out what I think about stuff like that. I've recently been reading Stephen Pinker's book, The Stuff of Thought, which I can heartily recommend to anyone interested in such things. It's about how the human mind actually works, how its workings are expressed in human languages, and what clues we can find in languages that might give us a deeper understanding of things like cognition and consciousness, and thinking in general. It's pretty deep and complex and full of unfamiliar ideas for this old engineer, I think it'll take more than a few readings for me to understand it, but at the moment I really don't feel ready to offer an answer to the issues you raise. Best I can say right now is, I don't know, but I'm thinking about it a lot.

You're certainly an entertaining and provocative fellow my friend, you seem to have a gift for asking profound questions in very simple language.

 

[Outta here]

Very interesting convo. I'm enjoying it, but will be the first to admit that probably 80% of what you're saying is whistling past me. The 20% that's seeping in is fascinating though.

I'm struck by the thought that I'm glad I won't be around the day we've learned everything. Can you imagine not having the mystery that is so indelibly embedded in our understanding of our own existence?

If there's a hell, that could be it. And I wouldn't be surprised to discover if many avid scientists feel the same. If solving the mysteries of life are what drive them, what would they be without that drive?

Heh... funny bit of irony there.

 

[MHz]

1. continental drift: first proposed by Alfred Wegener in the 19th century, when it was laughed at, but when the data came in in the mid-20th century, it was accepted almost instantly and the whole science of geology was revolutionized.

YouTube - Rockies Thrust Up
The above link is an animation of how the Rockies were formed (generally accepted) and it includes the Pacific plate moving under the North American plate. Basically the Pacific plate is moving eastward as well as the North American plate is moving westward (due to the mid-Atlantic spread).
That works fine until you look at a map of the age of the ocean floor.
Age of the Ocean Floor
The age is newest against North America and all the flow is away from North America (down to about Baja). If the flow is in a westerly direction then there is no subduction it is an outflow under California to Alaska. The Rockies were formed because of pressure from below rather than pressure created from an easterly flow of the Pacific plate.

If all the red (in the last link) is the newest ocean floor and it flows in two direction then where are all the subduction zones that should equal the expansion zones?
If the Mariana Trench is a subduction zone why isn't it pushed up, it should be a ridge rather than a trench? It looks more like a rift valley which is a spreading.

These types of maps were not available when plate tectonics theory was first established.

 

[s_lone]

Yes, I can understand that, without necessarily agreeing with it. I think I'd have to say I'm agnostic about that idea. There are very deep philosophical issues here and I can't pretend I have explanations for them, I'm still working out what I think about stuff like that.

I appreciate your humility when it comes to this issue. I think that's a sure sign of a scientific mind rooted in spirituality.

''Stuff like that'' is indeed deeply philosophical if not downright mysterious... I tend to view science as one huge thought experiment (a rather succesful one). In the end, one can always doubt all the way (like Descartes did) and end up with only one conviction, ''I am''. So we're always stuck in a deeply subjective framework and in a way, what we call ''objectivity'' can at best be some kind of commonly accepted subjective framework.

But science emits one of the boldest theory of all: the world out there IS real and we can ''dissect'' it in order to understand it better. In other words, objectivity IS possible. So far the results of this thought experiment have been pretty satisfying. It's because of science that you and I can have this virtual conversation and that we can delight in what the Hubble telescope can show us. In the end, who cares if the manifest world is one huge illusion (I don't really think it is...)? The outside world has an impact on us, and we have an impact on the world. That's enough evidence for me to consider the outside world as real. I just don't consider the manifest world (what our senses show us) as the bottom line of what there is... maybe I should... But that's an issue we're all going to be struggling with for quite some time I believe.

I've recently been reading Stephen Pinker's book, The Stuff of Thought, which I can heartily recommend to anyone interested in such things. It's about how the human mind actually works, how its workings are expressed in human languages, and what clues we can find in languages that might give us a deeper understanding of things like cognition and consciousness, and thinking in general. It's pretty deep and complex and full of unfamiliar ideas for this old engineer, I think it'll take more than a few readings for me to understand it, but at the moment I really don't feel ready to offer an answer to the issues you raise. Best I can say right now is, I don't know, but I'm thinking about it a lot.

I'll definitely check out that Stephen Pinker book. Seems quite fascinating indeed... And I'll most probably feel a bit lost myself. But unfamiliar ideas can only be healthy if one is grounded in solid critical thought (something I'm working on improving).

You're certainly an entertaining and provocative fellow my friend, you seem to have a gift for asking profound questions in very simple language.

Thank you for the compliment Dex. I do believe these things can be discussed (relatively) simply if we put our heart into it. And I take great pleasure in seeing what your deep and rich mind has to answer to these questions. These discussions are very valuable to me.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Basically the Pacific plate is moving eastward as well as the North American plate is moving westward (due to the mid-Atlantic spread).
That works fine until you look at a map of the age of the ocean floor.

Not quite, plate motions are a little more complicated than that. If you inspect that map showing the age of the ocean floor you'll see that there's a spreading zone in the south Pacific, very similar to the mid-Atlantic Ridge, that runs more or less north east and up under North America. That's the Pacific plate boundary, the east side of it isn't the Pacific plate anymore. The Pacific plate is actually rotating counter-clockwise around a center south east of Australia, not moving east as a whole There are subduction zones along the west coast of South and Central America, and along the Aleutian arc and down the east side of Asia. The plate boundary in the vicinity of California (the San Andreas fault) is sliding past the North American plate, not plunging under it, because of the rotation. Where an oceanic plate boundary collides with a continental landmass, the granitic continents, being less dense, ride up over top. When two oceanic plates collide, the older one dives under the younger one for the same reason, the younger one is less dense. That produces deep trenches in the sea floor, and volcanic island arcs like the Aleutians and Japan.

 

[MHz]

If the clock was wound backwards 70 million years the red and yellow areas would have gone back down at the areas of the cracks. In the Atlantic (and all other areas on the globe) the blue area would be closer to the crack. That should mean next to North America there should be some older land come back up (to keep the same diameter for the Earth) The east coast of North America is not considered to be a subduction zone, if it was it would have much higher mountain ranges.

The direction from the coast of BC is pretty much straight west, even if at Baja the crack heads out to sea and eventually under Australia and around the whole globe. By looking at Baja/California the spreading will eventually separate that thin sliver of land from mainland North America. It will head west yet the current model says it should go under North America.

The Antarctic is surrounded by a crack that has young rock coming up from the core, where is the subduction zone there.

Two more thoughts for this post. I agree that granite is pretty solid rock. If it is 'floating' on molten magma then the magma must be of an even higher density. Just like some materials will not float on water but will float on molasses.

The Rockies would have formed from the pressure of magma flowing up at that crack.

I don't suppose you have a map of the age of the sea-floor for 60 million years ago.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Try this page: Earth History
I haven't looked through everything there, but I think it has what you're looking for.