According to some thinkers, a more feasible way of demarcating science and religion is to grant science authority in terms of knowledge of the natural world and to appoint it the task of providing humanity with the technological means of mastering the forces of nature to ensure our physical survival and well-being. The proper arena of religion, they say, is the sacred world, with all the ideals and moral directives for human behavior that issue forth from that domain.
But such a separation, he notices, is not possible.
This model is feasible if we believe the sacred world exists independently of, and has no influence in, the world of nature and human life. But the great majority of religious believers today believe that the object, or objects, of their religious devotion is very much present and active in nature and in the lives of human beings. Thus, according to those believers, the absolute demarcation between the sacred and the profane is untenable.
The two realities, the sacred and the natural, overlap and it is not possible to separate them sharply. Then he addresses the issue of different methodologies.
Another approach to this problem is to distinguish science from religion in terms not of their domains of authority but their methodologies. Following this line of thought, science may be identified by its methodology of depersonalizing phenomena. That is, science attempts to account for a given phenomenon independently of the particular subject who observes it. Religion, on the contrary, some argue, is based on experiences taken in their subjective and individual elements.
The attempts to separate these two different modes of looking at the world, both the inner one and the external one, lead to schizophrenia-type disturbances:
But our intellect and feelings do not function autonomously; our thoughts are frequently charged with emotion, and our feelings arise in response to what we think to be true. To reify and alienate these facets of our inner life is to fragment each of us from within. We are persons whose bodies can be objectively studied according to the impersonal laws of physics but whose minds are subjectively experienced in ways science has not yet been able to fathom. In short, by radically separating science from religion, we are not merely segregating two human institutions; we are fragmenting ourselves as individuals and as a society in ways that lead to deep, unresolved conflicts in terms of our view of the world, our values, and our way of life. (Italics, mine.)
In "The Intersubjective Worlds of Science and Religion" Wallace states it succinctly:
"The very distinction between the terms “subjective” and “objective” is itself embedded in a conceptual framework, and there is no way to justify the assertion that any truth-claim is purely objective or purely subjective."
The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist
Do Atheists Make Better Scientists?Is atheism a better solution for those who would like to rely on undisturbed rational thinking? I do not think so, because atheists tend to believe in their own creed which they consider to be the absolute answer! Richard Dawkins and his blind attachment to his narrow “blind watchmaker” view of the role of evolution is one example.
Later on I will show examples of how irrational scientists can be, and how Science suffers from their irrationalities.
Coming next: Can Science be just?
"The attempts to separate these two different modes of looking at the world, both the inner one and the external one, lead to schizophrenia-type disturbances:".
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree with the author, I would nevertheless like to draw attention to the broader dimension of the issue of 'separating' in science.
The first separation occurs already at the school stage. Children are taught subjects that have their own names, e.g. biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, languages, history, religion, philosophy, and so on. These children are so convinced that all these subjects are completely unrelated disciplines that they are even surprised when they discuss the electron configuration in a high school physics lesson and ask: "Then are these electrons the subject of chemistry or physics?".
Another example. When explaining corpuscular-wave dualism, a high school physics teacher invokes theological metaphors, monophysitism, Arianism, orthodoxy, etc. The children are again puzzled. They ask: "How is this possible? The same constructs are not only found in natural sciences like physics and chemistry, but also in physics and theology!".
At the same time, within a single field there can be numerous differences from a categorical point of view, e.g. the differences between the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics that exist in physics, the differences between the phenomenological description associated, for example, with LTP in neuroscience and the description based on the systems biology approach that we see in biology, and finally the thousands of interpretations of the Bible that theologians provide us with. And then there are the methodologies that vary within a single discipline, and yet there are parallels in all these seemingly different disciplines. Not surprisingly, they are all created by the human mind.
Science, however, should seek truth first and foremost, but religion seems to have the same aims. Is the way different? And what is metaphysics?
These topics are sometimes addressed by philosophers, but there is a major problem here - these philosophers generally do not use a sufficiently abstract mathematical apparatus to put this together in a rigorous way, yet emerging from revelation.
Does such a mathematical apparatus exist? Is there a method that looks at other methods and behaves like a narrator? I think category theory comes very close to doing just that. It is able to describe many aspects of reality (present in physics, biology, philosophy, theology, psychology and even art) very abstractly, and at the same time is able to look at it all very deeply. Category theory even works wonderfully for psychoanalysis!
Nevertheless, category theory itself is worth looking at in such a way as to see it from a level of even higher abstraction. For when we use it, for example, only to prove theorems concerning monoidal functors and similar problems, even this beautiful theory will close its depths to us.
And what I mean in a nutshell is that the aspiration of science should not be to separate, but precisely to unify. Scientists seem to know this, but yet they still act the other way around by creating more narrow specialisations instead of putting things into perspective...
The above comment may bring to mind the famous question:
ReplyDeleteHolism or reductionism?
If we reduce, we often forget that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. We also feel safe when we can write a scientific paper that will be widely accepted because it is written in a sufficiently narrow field.
If we start combining physics, mathematics, neuroscience, genetics, philosophy, theology, psychology and mystical revelation we are certain that someone will call what we are creating pseudoscience.
This name hypothetically should be offensive, but perhaps this is the very beginning of meta-science?
However, there is a danger here - holism requires a method that is rigorous, able to cover multiple topics simultaneously and that is effective and ultimately produces experimentally validated results (The nature of the experiment in the context to paranormal phenomena is also worth thinking about).
In most cases, holistic approaches are severely inaccurate and philosophical discussions end up returning to square one. That is not the point!
There is another approach - interdisciplinary teams are formed where there are representatives from different disciplines. Is this supposed to be holism? Again, this is reductionism. It seems to me that doing real science requires something extremely difficult, namely that it requires one person to get acquainted with a vast amount of knowledge and find a method to go through and connect the dots.
A truly interdisciplinary team should consist of people, each of whom has at least a strong grasp of many areas of science, philosophy etc.
As for Richard Dawkins, let me express my opinion on him. It reads as follows: He is an idiot.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, I appreciate his commitment, although I am completely unconvinced by his arguments on most topics.
My negative opinion of him is not because he has little knowledge. I believe that he has a lot of knowledge but believes so deeply in his "religion" that he is unable to draw conclusions beyond his paradigm. If something is not in line with his 'faith', it is rejected automatically. However, this danger also affects many other scientists, including those whose views are completely opposite to Dawkins'.
And there is another problem: People look for patterns in every observed phenomenon. If a phenomenon is non-schematic, people either negate it or forcefully pull it up to a particular schema they are familiar with.
ReplyDeleteThis example is also very often discussed in clinical diagnosis. The clinical psychologist has to make a diagnosis about a given case and, in view of this, has to select a model and conclude, for example, that person x has schizophrenia, person y has narcissistic disorder, person z has persecutory mania and so on.
You have to select a model and make a diagnosis. Everything has to fit into an already known pattern. In doing so, however, we forget that the world can be much more complex.
People also say that if something looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck and makes duck-like sounds - it is a duck. Well, it is a question of the definition of a duck. Nevertheless, there may be very different ducks that fulfil the given axioms, and in doing so there may be important differences between them, e.g. in the true motivations of their behaviour or in their internal structure and so on.
And is a star a living organism? According to the definition of life - yes. After all, it fulfils all the axioms required of a living organism. However, this is just a definition, a simple model and a check that the axioms match. If the simple models have proved themselves, we want to make conclusions based on them. However, it turns out that we reach a paradox and the final conclusions are contradictory. What does this mean? Probably that we made too many simplifications at the very beginning of the analysis. We create simple diagrams and are afraid of formulas that scare us with their level of abstraction and complexity. We are afraid of ... of the truth... We want the simple truth. If the truth is too complex, we do not try to aim for it. Simple explanations satisfy a great many. Almost everyone.
I think that one of the victims of the not-so-abstract-thinking clinical psychologists may have been Hegel, who was posthumously diagnosed with a wide variety of mental disorders, including schizophrenia. Was he really that much out of the patterns that others might perceive? This is highly likely, as his philosophy even today is considered one of the most difficult to interpret even by professors specialising in German philosophy.
ReplyDeleteIn the "Corpus Hermeticum", there are several passages that discuss paradoxes and the limitations of human understanding. One of the most famous statements attributed to Hermes Trismegistus is "As above, so below; as below, so above." This statement suggests that there is a correspondence between the macrocosm (the universe) and the microcosm (the individual).
ReplyDeleteHermes Trismegistus also wrote about the idea of unity and diversity, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things. He saw the universe as a complex system of interdependent parts that were constantly evolving and changing (similarly as Plotinus - ephesis, Hegel - absolute spirit, etc.). In this view, paradoxes were seen as an inevitable part of human understanding, since the limitations of language and concepts make it impossible to fully grasp the nature of reality.
Overall, Hermes Trismegistus saw paradoxes as an invitation to explore the mysteries of the universe and to expand our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. His philosophy encouraged seekers to embrace the unknown and to seek wisdom through contemplation and reflection.
Paradoxes are not our enemies. Paradoxes are a great gift. Our enemy may be our mind, which is content with a simple explanation and does not search deeper. This is the path that takes us away from enlightenment, while paradoxes are the path that brings us closer to it.
In a lecture on non-commutative geometry and category theory I attended today, we talked about very interesting issues, namely how certain structures from this theory can be used to describe certain quantum phenomena. Let us note a few points:
ReplyDeleteWe have $\mathcal{F}(X) \otimes \mathcal{F}(Y)$ and $\mathcal{F}(X \times Y)$, where $\mathcal{F}$ is a functor. Can we identify these both formulas canonically?
And of course it can be said here that in the general case we cannot do this, nevertheless if $\mathcal{F}$ is a monoidal functor, then there is a canonical isomorphism between $\mathcal{F}(X) \otimes \mathcal{F}(Y)$ and $\mathcal{F}(X \times Y)$, given by the natural transformation $\phi_{X,Y}:\mathcal{F}(X) \otimes \mathcal{F}(Y) \to \mathcal{F}(X \times Y)$ defined by:
$$\phi_{X,Y} = \mathcal{F}(\pi_1) \otimes \mathcal{F}(\pi_2) \circ \Delta_{\mathcal{F}(X),\mathcal{F}(Y)},$$
where $\pi_1:X \times Y \to X$ and $\pi_2:X \times Y \to Y$ are the projections onto the factors, and $\Delta_{\mathcal{F}(X),\mathcal{F}(Y)}:\mathcal{F}(X) \to \mathcal{F}(X) \otimes \mathcal{F}(Y)$ is the diagonal map, defined by $\Delta_{\mathcal{F}(X),\mathcal{F}(Y)}(x) = x \otimes x$.
However, it is not the problem itself that is so important, but the analogies, for it is these that we use to describe it. If we reduce this problem to the problem of operators in quantum mechanics we also note that such an 'isomorphism' exists for self-adjoint operators, but does not exist for Hermitian operators. In the latter case something is contained in something, in the former case we have equality - that is my point.
Why, then, do we describe the phenomena of quantum mechanics using operators, when we can define, for example, morphisms that are classes of certain transformations and not focus on self-adjointness or Hermicity, but on the injectivity or surjectivity of the transformations in question? This description is more general and gets rid of several paradoxes.
What's more, we can stop at any time and take a closer look at the entire structure of a category, and there you can actually already point to specific algebras, abstraction classes, operators or whatever you want. It's a bit like time. It shows certain fragments of reality, but does not allow us to see the whole. It protects the mind from seeing that 'one law' you mentioned here once.
But after all, mathematical abstraction knows ways to cheat this time... This seems to me to be precisely the way to the truth. Meanwhile, I learn that nobody seems to have looked into it.
Or do you know of any scientific articles on this subject? Perhaps you could recommend them to me?
"It's just weird how the universe arrives you at different people in the right order.".
ReplyDelete@John G
And today I could say those words to you! Thank you so much for these comments and links! I'll take a closer look tomorrow and the day after!
@ John G.
ReplyDelete"The Wiki I mentioned earlier, https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage describes itself this way: "This is a wiki for collaborative work on Mathematics, Physics, and Philosoph"
I have come several times across nlab entries and I was positively surprised by their high quality!!!
@John G.
ReplyDelete"I in the present day might think this relates to Ark's structure at infinity and the Planck scale for dual light cones for both physics and consciousness."
As for me I do not care about the Planck scale at all. I do not think it has anything to do with paranormal phenomena that we obserwve at the human scale - my primary interest.
"As for me I do not care about the Planck scale at all. I do not think it has anything to do with paranormal phenomena that we obserwve at the human scale - my primary interest.".
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, we are also dealing with other phenomena on a 'human scale', yet their explanations sometimes required a micro- or macro-scale.
In this case and for the moment, however, I do not actually see any direct connection between the Planck scale and paranormal phenomena, nevertheless I have hypotheses regarding the relationship of such phenomena with the subconscious mind, as well as the relationship of the subconscious mind with certain quantum processes, these in turn may be related to the Planck scale to a greater or lesser extent. This is a question to which I do not yet know the answer.
I also have another question, and this topic has also already been touched upon: What is gravity? Is it not a form of information, its macroscopic analogue? Both gravity and information affect the passage of time. There are some very interesting connections, but that's a matter for me for next week, not for today.
Planck scale could go with things like dual light cones via the big bang or a single point of spacetime but yes even if the Cs say 7th density is the light you see near death, we are obviously not seeing it at the 7th density/Planck scale level. We would need some kind of delivery system.
ReplyDelete"Planck scale could go with things like dual light cones via the big bang or a single point of spacetime but yes even if the Cs say 7th density is the light you see near death, we are obviously not seeing it at the 7th density/Planck scale level.".
ReplyDeleteJohn G
Sometimes it is not necessary to wait until death (Although it is also possible to look at it another way, namely to look at what we think of as one life as a series of deaths and resurrections, then the white light always appears - when we lose the whole world, and then the world rewards all suffering) to see this light. This light from the seventh density constantly accompanies us, but the temporalised mind defends itself very deeply against seeing it. Even for people who are open to paranormal phenomena, things like white light or materialisation of objects are rather unattainable. I think this is due to self-induced 'rationalism' and looking for evidence in the observable material world before believing in their existence.
However, I am referring here to 'true faith', which has little to do with wishful thinking or other manifestations of artificial faith.
The real one has a power that we do not usually dream of.