Certainty and Doubts, Hope and Faith

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Nickeson, Lawrence

Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users? ~ Clifford Stoll

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[Michael]

July 21 [1930] Walter Russell says that the fundamentals of science are so hopelessly wrong and so contrary to nature, that nothing but a major surgical operation upon the present primitive beliefs can ever put them in line for a workable 'cosmogenetic synthesis'.

I like this little story by Richard Feynman ( a great proponent of the best of the value of uncertainty):

"What science is may be something like this: There was on this planet an evolution of life to the stage that there were evolved animals, which are intelligent. I don’t mean just human beings, but animals which play and which can learn something from experience (like cats). But at this stage each animal would have to learn from its own experience. They gradually develop, unit some animal could learn from experience more rapidly and could even learn from another’s experience by watching, or one could show the other, or he saw what the other one did. So there came a possibility that all might learn it, but that transmission was inefficient and they would die, and maybe the one who learned it died, too, before he could pass it on to others.

The question is, is it possible to learn more rapidly what somebody learned from some accident than the rate at which the thing learned from some accident than the rate at which the thing is being forgotten, either because of bad memory or because of the death of the learner or inventor?

So there came a time, perhaps, when for some species the rate at which learning was increased reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely new thing happened; things could be learned by one animal, passed on to another and another, fast enough that it was not lost to the race. Thus became possible an accumulation of knowledge of the race.

This has been called time-binding. I don’t know who first called it this. At any rate, we have here some samples of those animals, sitting here trying to bind one experience to another, each one trying to learn from the other.

This phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world. But it had a disease in it. It was possible to pass on mistaken ideas. It was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The race has ideas, but they are not necessarily profitable.

So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs.

Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true and to try to find out from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile, rechecking by new direct experience and not necessarily trusting the experience from the past."


Interesting that you saw Daniel Pinchbeck.  He seems like a very cool frood...

[Jana]

Until we get a branch of science on Origins and a Science of Interdisciplinarism, we cannot really say we have entered the scientific age. And we do not appear to be learning very fast.

Take for example the burning of the state of Victoria. We have a sunburnt country, with insufficient water and forested with highly volatile trees which give off explosive oils. We still have a population that builds houses made of sunbaked wood. Wind gusts of up to 60 miles per hour fanning the fire at (47 degree Celsius = 116.6 degree Fahrenheit). 100 dead and 700 homes gone when people are already struggling due to recession.

www.earthbagbuilding.com/slideshow.htm  —Earthbag buildings.

[Francis]

So there came a time, perhaps, when for some species the rate at which learning was increased reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely new thing happened; things could be learned by one animal, passed on to another and another, fast enough that it was not lost to the race. Thus became possible an accumulation of knowledge of the race.

The downside here is that we have to take the knowledge second-hand or worse (third-hand, fourth-hand, etc.). We learn from someone else's experience. We devalue our own experience in favor of the collective dogma. After awhile the information becomes obsolete and even toxic, because circumstances have changed and we still cling to old and obsolete ideas. So it's a double edged sword. 

[Jana]

The downside here is that we have to take the knowledge second-hand or worse (third-hand, fourth-hand, etc.). We learn from someone else's experience. We devalue our own experience in favor of the collective dogma. After awhile the information becomes obsolete and even toxic, because circumstances have changed and we still cling to old and obsolete ideas. So it's a double edged sword. 

Yes, when the top monkey, ie: the institutions and people of authority, are hell bent on accumulating more power and resources at the expense of the tribe, then we have to start operating in ways different to that which we have automatically played for millions of years. We have to change our leadership/membership pattern and we now have to embody the whole tribe within, including the Alpha Male, "the decider." If the broad reach of civilization itself is destructive to the earth and our potential life-support systems, then seeking validation from an authority system that is biologically obsolete is plainly species suicide. Thus each of us must be awakened to the "call of the wild," to the Muse, to our inner sovereign leader to avoid rote learned obsolete-science.   

Awesome series on Sapiens' origins.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jJgZO-I1kU&feature=PlayList&p=50F4325A4774A9B5&index=0&playnext=1  —Walking with Cave Man Series Part 1, #1

[Francis]

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. ~Whitman

[Michael]

Theory vs Fact.  Science as uncertainty explained in simple terms.