This thread is a result of issues raised by Lurid Archive over here.
Off the top I’d like to tip my hand, so don’t glance away in politeness, but take a good look.
I agree that science can inspire a wonderful and creative vision of the world around us. I am also concerned with any vehement anti-science stance. No caricature of any class of people adequately represents even one of those people as they exist as a whole and unique individual; that is, even the most materialistic and empirical person is not merely only that.
I am not hostile to rationality, but I am hostile to the idea the rationality is the only way to get at truth. Without its complement (irrationality? emotive energy? <shrug> ), rationality is a dry and barren landscape of empty tautologies.
quote:Lurid Archive writes:
Phrases such as "the lowest common denominator of the qualia of our experiences" are quite striking.
Yes, it might be quite striking, but does that make it incorrect? What I mean here can be understood by the following:
Imagine that you are observing through a one-way mirror a person sitting in a room on a patterned sofa reading a magazine with a coffee table in front of them. The walls of this room are painted a friendly shade of light blue and there is sunlight streaming in from a west facing window that casts subtle mixtures of light and shadow through out the room. Further suppose that we have access to a machine, call it the science machine. This machine can, within a few seconds, perform any sort of measurement that any discipline of science allows. Does using the machine to record a finite set of facts ever capture the qualia of the moment when we look through the mirror?
No, of course not. If I use the machine to record all I possibly could about the physical elements in the room qua physics, then I get a break down which talks about indeterminate clouds of electrons centered around tiny pinpricks of mass. That is pretty much all. Where has the comfy sofa gone, and where is the person sitting on it? Where has the colour of the walls gone? Etc.
If I use the science machine to give me a chemical analysis of the contents of the room then what do I get? Do I get a summary of what is printed on the page that the person is reading? Do I gain access to the thoughts that the article is producing in the person? Where have these qualia gone?
Etc., etc. The point being this: any scientific discipline includes the data that it is a priori enabled to include, and excludes all the rest. The splendour of qualia that is present in any moment gets lost as we narrow down the parameters of which qualia are relevant to our battery of observations.
Further, I am inherently skeptical about a division between internal and external reality. While I admit that I can’t explain this skepticism here (for a good understanding of what I mean, you’d either have to: (i) read through diZzy, or (ii) read through the one hundred or so pages spanning around thirteen papers that I have written on this and related themes), I will say that I don’t think that, say, chemistry is limited per se by its referring to the little bits as objective; rather, I will say that it creates for itself a finite box in which to place a infinite number of relations. In other words, while chemistry may have no ceiling on what it can accomplish, it does necessarily limit its function by excluding all those things that are not chemistry qua chemistry: it can not, for example, tell me anything about the experience of enjoying my lunch today. And if it does attempt to tell me about the why of enjoying my lunch, then the qualia of the actual event gets paired down into a series of formulas representing, say, the chemical composition of my sandwich in conjunction with the chemical composition of my body at the time. It excludes things that influenced my sandwhich tasting so good, such as the Hip-Hop music playing in the background, the sun at my back, and the attractive woman I had the pleasure of dining with. Where are these elements in the chemical description: they have disappeared.
In short, I do not see how any scientific investigation, which, if it desires to actually come to conclusions must by necessity include only a finite (regardless of how large the finite actually is) data set and a finite tool box, can ever arrive at a full description of the diversity of qualia present in any one moment.
Another interesting issue we might want to discuss is the differentiation of qualities from quantities. Science seems to depend upon a backbone of mathematics, and mathematics is, after all, more (but not solely) about quantities.
Lurid, like you I find thinking about, say, QM, fascinating and mind blowing. But, unlike you (although I find this hard to reconcile with your stance in the “Dimensional Perception…” thread), QM is QM and not metaphysics. Metaphysics is a separate pursuit, but we can (and I think ought to) talk about QM plus metaphysics. Maybe call it QMM. This is different from simply QM or M all by their lonesome. If we are synthesizing, then we must be aware of that fact—we are outside the box—and I think that it is this recognition which aids in our not falling too deep into our own illusions.
In closing, I’ll restate something I said over in that “Dimensional…” thread: I firmly believe that we are all magicians but many are not aware of their own magick; thus, Lurid Archive, the pursuit of magick is never closed to you, but you have to try to see how what you are and what you do are already themselves magical. IMHO, this is the hard work which Mordant refers to over in the M & M thread.
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[ 19-03-2002: Message edited by: modthree ] |
