Back to The Road of Science and the Ways to God, which, happily for us, just so happen to converge. In fact, "converge" isn't quite right, being that they can never really diverge to begin with. Again, truth is Truth and man uniquely knows it -- but only in a logoistic and theocentric cosmos. Only in a cosmos that is one because under God.
Jaki next gets into some of the epistemological problems that arose as a result of modern physics, which in turn created a gaping hole for anti-science, anti-Christian, and anti-Western a-holes such as Deepak to jump in. In short, inexact measurement was taken for inexact causation, so that epistemology was conflated with ontology.
We are speaking of course of quantum indeterminacy, which Jaki is at pains to emphasize does not mean what the Deepaks of the world think it means: that we create reality by observing it, i.e., that observation causes the collapse of the wave function. But don't tell that to all those new-age publishers and their shelves of Quantum Whatever books!
Think I'm exaggerating? I'll just put the word "quantum" into the amazon search engine and see what comes up: Quantum Leadership, Quantum Wellness, Quantum Wellness Cleanse, Quantum Success, Quantum Prophecy, 5 Steps to a Quantum Life: How to Use the Astounding Secrets of Quantum Physics to Create the Life You Want, The Quantum Doctor: A Physicist's Guide to Health and Healing, Supercharging Quantum Touch, The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation and Immortality, etc.
Anybody care to wager that if I search for Quantum Sex right now -- in a manner of speaking -- I won't find it? Hmm?
Here it is: chapter 4.6, Cosmic Energy & Quantum Sex, right there among Love My Yoni, Love Myself, Eve's Secrets and Vagina 101, and -- of course -- The Post-Menopausal Challenge of the New Millennium.
So, how did we get to this point, where cutting edge science is misunderstood and reinterpreted as a new religion in exchange for cash and other valuable prizes, whether it is the misosophy of ideological Darwinism, the tautology of Climate Change, or the endless Quest for Quantum Booty? Yes, yes, Chesterton's Law is binding -- that those who spurn religion don't believe in nothing but in anything. But why is that? Why does the law apply with such rigid necessity?
Well, first of all, since man is in the image of the Creator, he cannot live or think without the Absolute. He might fool himself into believing he can, but the only people who really do so are the severely mentally ill. If you want to see what human life would be like with no absolutes, just visit an insane asylum such as Camarillo Mental Hospital, where I did my doctoral internship. Yes, I realize that it has since then been converted into a California State University college campus. That's my point.
For the whole idea of the "uni-versity" was founded upon the implicit idea of universal and integral knowledge -- which is a bit of a tautology, for any genuine knowledge, if it isn't just opinion, should share in the characteristics of universality, timelessness, objectivity, and absoluteness. If it doesn't share -- or at least aspire to -- these traits, then it can't be knowledge. Seriously, why would you spend upwards of $100,000 to get the opinions of a bunch of people who have never even seen the real world? If that's what you want, you can read the New York Times editorial page for free.
For if the above referenced traits -- timelessness, objectivity, et al -- are not "real," then no knowledge is possible. Which is just the way the left likes it, for if there is no truth then there is only muscle. And if there is only muscle, then there is just the one truth imposed by the left. And instead of a cerebral leader, we end up with a medullard like Obama.
Now, in order to convert bad science (or good science misconstrued) into a religion, two things are necessary. First, instead of pointing toward the Absolute, it must be the Absolute. And then the science of the day must be imagined to be the last word, the ultimate phase, or last chapter of its development. We laugh at people who did this in the past. Why don't we laugh at people who do it today?
Oh wait. We do. Charles Johnson.
The irony is that the same people who, say, criticize the Church for opposing Galileo are the new secular churchmen who are threatened by opposition to their sacred ideology. Thus, if you question the dogma of global warming, you are in league with satan, i.e. Big Oil, who is paying you to say those evil things. Or, if you point out the undeniable holes in radical Darwinism, you are secretly in league with medieval Creationists. No need to actually engage the arguments. Just break out the kindling and matches.
For when radical secularists horizontalize the vertical, nature becomes their new absolute. The real Absolute is, of course Infinite. So what happens to the soul who convinces himself that he has reached the end of his absolute -- who really believes, for example, that Darwinism presents the last word on human existence? A spiritual crisis, really, for one gains a false absolute at the cost of one's very soul.
As Jaki puts it, "To be in sight of the end can easily provoke a peculiar feeling, especially in moderns who [have] replaced God, the infinite, with an endless search in an allegedly infinite universe, and who had grown accustomed to setting a higher value on the search for truth than on the possession of truth itself."
For to finally possess the "absolute truth" of reductionistic Darwinism is to possess something that is quite worthless (that is if Darwinism is true). In other words, the central truth of Darwinism is that everything in the biosphere, from the single cell to the human neocortex, is just a result of random copying errors. You end up holding an opinion that crumbles in your hands into a bunch of selfish genes that can never know their own truth.
I say, if you can believe that, then truly, you can believe anything. Yes, there is a real quantum -- several actually -- and they can never, ever be bridged from the bottom up. These are the infinite ontological discontinuities between matter and life, life and mind, mind and spirit, and spirit and God. To reverse the vector flow of this timeless emanation and involution is to dig oneself an ontological hole which can only end on the other side of reality.
But that's okay. As Chief Wiggum said when the Simpsons fell into that giant sinkhole, "they're China's problem now."
***
More on Deepak's Quantum Bullshit.
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27 comments:
The Quantum Doctor: A Physicist's Guide to Health and Healing
*snork*
Yeah, because biology is completely reducible to physics. Alternatively titled Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Anyway, back to reading...
Off topic, an interview with Thomas Sowell discussing intellectualism.
Deepak's Quantum Bullshit.
But he's got the "smart glasses".
I gotta get me sumuh those..
The article would be so much easier to read, though, if you didn't have to keep seeing his face. What's with the shoulder clutch in the first picture?
Via the Anchoress, this is an interesting read.
How quickly they gave up their faith, their traditions, their selves in exchange for security.
As a long-time global warming skeptic I have to say I am pretty pissed off right now. I have yet to receive even one fat payoff check from Big Oil!
Not only that, but Big Coal and Detroit also seem to think they can shaft the very people who have at great risk to themselves made the way clear for evil industrial giants to destroy the planet in the name of greed. Not one freakin' check or wire transfer into an offshore account (which they didn't even set up for me!).
Can I at least have an "Evil Minion" T-shirt or something?
Actually now that the global warming mega-fraud is mortally wounded it's time to devise a new Big Lie.
Quantumn Market Forces create instability and poverty in the Third World...
Chistianists subvert Gaia's Quantumn Harmonic Field...
A good leftist could play this quantum stuff either way, possibly even at the same time. The possibilities for undermining America and enriching the elites are endless!
"So, how did we get to this point, where cutting edge science is misunderstood and reinterpreted as a new religion in exchange for cash and other valuable prizes, whether it is the misosophy of ideological Darwinism, the tautology of Climate Change, or the endless Quest for Quantum Booty?"
An interesting relic from 1983, a set of short videos from a soviet defector explaining to a group of Americans, just how it is that their world is being destroyed (and is still), and he brings it directly around to,
"Yes, yes, Chesterton's Law is binding -- that those who spurn religion don't believe in nothing but in anything."
"If you want to see what human life would be like with no absolutes, just visit an insane asylum such as Camarillo Mental Hospital, where I did my doctoral internship. Yes, I realize that it has since then been converted into a California State University college campus."
And the difference is...?
Oh... of course, that was your point.
"For the whole idea of the "uni-versity" was founded upon the implicit idea of universal and integral knowledge -- which is a bit of a tautology, for any genuine knowledge, if it isn't just opinion, should share in the characteristics of universality, timelessness, objectivity, and absoluteness. If it doesn't share -- or at least aspire to -- these traits, then it can't be knowledge. "
Along these lines, an excellent article recently posted on ISI's "First Principles" site, by James V. Schall, S.J.
"... I think, can be seen in the following brief observation: “For all facts harmonize with a true account whereas the true soon clashes with a false one” (1098b11–12). This principle stands behind all philosophical argument. True things fit together by virtue of the basis in being that they all have in common. Sooner or later a false understanding will clash with reality as it exists in things. The mind is made precisely to know what is. It can err. But it always has a corrective, reality itself, which may take time and thought to see why something that is false was originally thought to be true. "
Really a fine article which I highly raccoonmend, it opens with this hefty trol whacker,
"“And the best good is apparent only to the good person; for vice perverts us and produces false views about the principles of actions. Evidently, then, we cannot be prudent without being good.”
—Aristotle, Ethics, VI (1144a35–b1)"
Van:
Seriously though, I do wonder about people who are by any normal definition of sound mind, yet for example seem able to utterly shut out all of the counter-evidence for global warming in recent months. I know this guy in Canada who is a left-wing radio jock. His mantra has been that "deniers" are shills for corporations and "anti-science". He's a smart guy and frankly on some issues (not political) I agree with him. When Climategate and glaciergate and rainforestgate and ad nauseumgate hit it was like he was unable to process the information. It seemed to pass right through him.
These people are perfectly sane in the mundane sense, but they're spiritually insane or at least retarded.
NB said "Seriously though, I do wonder about people who are by any normal definition of sound mind, yet for example seem able to utterly shut out all of the counter-evidence for global warming in recent months. "
From UK's Daily Mail notes,
"Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.
Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying."
And his explanation is probably as true an answer as you'll find, they do really consider themselves to be of the highest integrity and doggedness to their 'ideals'... but as far as tying those 'ideals' to reality, that's of secondary importance to them, at best. As Descartes said,
"And as I observed that in the words I think, therefore I am, there is nothing at all which gives me assurance of their truth beyond this, that I see very clearly that in order to think it is necessary to exist, I concluded that I might take, as a general rule, the principle, that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true, only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive. ""
This Jones couldn't make a clearer statement of his position... he clearly and distinctly conceived his position to be true, and "rightly determining the objects" to support it... was just busywork for file clerks.
(longwinded break)
(cont)
They are literally Preposterous, as Thomas Sowell points out in "Intellectuals and Society", in regards to the leftist attempt to put allegedly good aims of redistributing wealth in front of creating wealth,
"It is literally preposterous (putting in front what comes behind) to begin the analysis with "a sum to divide" - that is , wealth - when that wealth can be created only after capital and labor have been reconciled their competing claims and agreed to terms on which they can operate together in the production of wealth. The habit of many intellectuals to largely ignore the prerequisites, incentives and constraints involved in the production of wealth has many ramifications that can lead to many fallacious conclusions, even if their verbal virtuosity conceals these fallacies from others and even from themselves."
and that is the very same approach which the glowbull warmers, use (and which all leftists use in any thoughts they think), they put the first and most importance test of truthfulness to be "Am I able to clearly and distinctly conceive this to be true?", and if you answer to yourself that, yes, you are right, then... you are right, and all that remains is to find the 'facts' that will 'support' your position. They don't start from facts to conclusions, but from unexamined conclusions, to newly conceived conclusions, and then snatch whatever data is at hand that puts it into a good light - the Truth of the matter is already assumed, any contradictory facts are probably just a conspiratorial plot against the Truth that they've already discovered, by people who are necessarily opposed to your truth.
In their minds they don't need facts to be properly gathered, consistent, or orderly (or if they do, only to the extent that they meet some arbitrary criteria), and it doesn't matter if other facts contradict yours - those are obviously wrong facts!... and it doesn't matter if your own facts are cherry picked, the important thing to the leftist mind is that the 'truth' which they "clearly and distinctly conceive", is accepted by you as being True... not because of facts, or their relevance to reality (pshaw! We can't really know reality! How provincial!) but because they "clearly and distinctly conceive" it to be so.
It really is a mental virus.
This BS starts at the uni-versity (school for sea urchin). I did my lab work in science by starting with the answer and working backward because I wanted to get the hell out of there and do something constructive. I would do the experiment first to try to arrive at the conclusion but when that didn't work I would work backward from the conclusion. This is not science. This is cheating.
The AWG crowd did the same thing. They started with a premise and when their data didn't fit the premise, they worked backward and massaged the data to come to the desired conclusion.
I don't know why so many people fall for this BS or why they fell for Obama's BS. That's my quantum story and I'm sticking to it.
From the excellent Dr. Sowell interview (thanks Julie!):
Do you think intellectuals come up with these ideas because they don’t have any accountability for them? They can put them out there and they're never going to pay any price for being wrong?
"Oh, absolutely. In fact, one of the biggest advantages of an economic market place is that people pay a price for being wrong. When the government steps in to protect them, you take that away and it's simply a subsidy for irresponsibility."
Govt. subsidized irresponsiblity can only result in more irresponsibilty.
It's no wonder we have so many "elitist intellectuals" who make their living by preempting reality.
Such a quantum disconnect from what is real and true without any consequences produce "spiritually insane" (excellent term, NB!) people like Obama who in tirn indoctrinate and lead the "spiritually retarded."
For when radical secularists horizontalize the vertical, nature becomes their new absolute. The real Absolute is, of course Infinite. So what happens to the soul who convinces himself that he has reached the end of his absolute -- who really believes, for example, that Darwinism presents the last word on human existence? A spiritual crisis, really, for one gains a false absolute at the cost of one's very soul."
And that's a price to pay that is never right. Great post, Bob!
I had some quantum tequila once.
Instead of a worm there was a wormhole.
I don't recoonmend it for those prone to motion sickness.
Skully, renowned expert in quantum spirits.
In my experience strong desires clearly and repeatedly visualized do manifest; the "Secret" as it were, which seems idioticat first blush, indeed functions in arranging happenstance, albeit not reliably.
Experiment with it and you will see that this is so.
So how else to explain it? Intention must have an effect happenstance.
I open the floor to opinions.
To modify my preceding atatement: visualizing certain specific desires strongly/repeatedly over a sustained peroid of time, and in addition asking God for same, in a heartfelt and sincere manner, has been reliable.
What does this have to do with quantum physics? I am not sure. Perhaps those of you with similar observations could chime in.
It has nothing to do with quantum physics, since there are no quantum effects above the quantum level. You are committing a category error -- using level one (the material eye) to try to see level three (the spiritual plane).
Bob, as you know I've been hangin' out here for a long time. There is a question, or rather two realms on which I'd like some clarification: Ontology, and epistemology. I've looked up the terms on wiki, and done some reading around on the topics, but they still manage to hang just off the horizon of my comprehension. What questions fall under the category of epistemology, and what questions fall to ontology? As the guy in Dirty Harry said, "I gots ta' know..."
wv says: coment
JWM
Very simple. Ontology deals with what is, or being (or existence). But epistemology concerns what we may know, and how we may know it. Therefore, only if being and knowing ultimately coincide, as they do in Christian metaphysics, can we know the truth of being.
Descartes, for example, famously said "I think, therefore I am." But the Christian view would be more along the lines of "I AM, therefore I am too." In other words, the "AM," or being, is infused with the "I" of the absolute subject, i.e., God. We may understand God analogically through the mirror of our own miraculous subjectivity, because knowing and being are not radically separate, as they are, say, for the Kantian, who places a radical divide between being and knowing. For the Kantian, all we can really know are human categories of knowing, but we have no idea whether they actually reveal knowledge of reality in itself.
Back to today's post...
In other words, ontology is the study of isness, while epistemology is the study of knowing.
I think.
(I'm glad you asked, John - I tend to forget which is what, as well)
This BS starts at the uni-versity (school for sea urchin). I did my lab work in science by starting with the answer and working backward because I wanted to get the hell out of there and do something constructive. I would do the experiment first to try to arrive at the conclusion but when that didn't work I would work backward from the conclusion. This is not science. This is cheating.
The AWG crowd did the same thing. They started with a premise and when their data didn't fit the premise, they worked backward and massaged the data to come to the desired conclusion.
NIST did the same thing.
"... and who had grown accustomed to setting a higher value on the search for truth than on the possession of truth itself."
Ain't that the truth!
Or, perhaps more accurately, have placed a higher value in searching [period], or in "asking questions" (in the sense of "doubting answers"), than in possessing truth.
Bob,
I've coined an acronym...PISSIE.
PACIFISM IS SUICIDE, SUICIDE IS EVIL.
http://www.reversespins.com/pacify.html
Christians rely too much on Jesus for salvation while not realizing they are sons and daughters of God also capable of far greater things (as He said) by only increasing the God within.
Anyway, Zen has become too intellectual bordering on nihilistic. The focus is on the mind almost to the exclusion of the heart.
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