It's time for science to move on from materialism
Submitted by Bob-45 on Fri, 02/03/2012 - 14:17[For those of you still objecting to Ron Paul's questioning of evolution, take a gander at the amount of time it would take for natural evolution to take place.]
The rigid 19th-century orthodoxy should be challenged to allow broader interpretations, as Rupert Sheldrake argues
Mark Vernon
Mark Vernon
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 28 January 2012 07.00 EST
Article history
Werner Heisenberg, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, once observed that history could be divided into periods according to what people of the time made of matter. In his book Physics and Philosophy, published in the early 60s, he argued that at the beginning of the 20th century we entered a new period. It was then that quantum physics threw off the materialism that dominated the natural sciences of the 19th century.
Of materialism, he wrote:
"[This] frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concept of mind, of the human soul or of life. Mind could be introduced into the general picture only as a kind of mirror of the material world."
Today we live in the 21st century, and it seems that we are still stuck with this narrow and rigid view of the things. As Rupert Sheldrake puts it in his new book, published this week, The Science Delusion: "The belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology."
read morehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/28/science-move-away-materialism-sheldrake#start-of-comments
Exactly!
Rationalism is a beautiful thing. A rationalist is a terrible sight to behold.
Yes, the mind is necessary, but it can't do everything.
Yes, the mind is receptive, but reason is not our only antenna.
We need our bodies, our emotions, our hearts, our nose, our years, our eyes, our taste, and our souls.
Yes, the mind can acheive great things, but through overcontrol, it can also limit what we can know.
Yes, the mind can think great thoughts, and also bad and limiting ones. The mind can be a gift and a curse.
Yes, the mind can discern consistency, logic, and fairness, but it seldom puts these into practice.
Yes, the mind can serve the world, but in fact it largely serves itself.
It is a fatal flaw to not develop the reason of man, or to not go beyond the mere physical pleasures and basic ideas to question the way the world is. However, the belief that reason is the only faculty, or the chief faculty which should lord over all the rest, is just as much a flaw. The greatest things in life can be neither seen nor felt, and which are not comprehensible by the mind. Faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance offer for us a chance to push aside the veil and to get at the essential nature of things which we, in our overthinking, tend to push aside.
The modern world has fallen into a trap of materialism, one where even the faculties of reason, which it so applauds, are being thrown away for the baser pleasures. By not understanding the proper place of the mind and the reason, in conjunction with the other faculties of man...which do include the spiritual...we have placed reason so high that we can no longer teach the populace why they should not do drugs, get divorced, expect endless pleasure and material wealth without consequence. And our society and its laws are thus a reflection of this immorality and lack of balance, not a cause.
At the same time, science looses out. When one looks at physics in the proper sense, one can see the interconnectedness of all things. I'm not talking spirituality but mysticism here, but a fundamental physical truth; all of existence is essentially made up of the same (relatively interchangeable) building blocks, and many of the differences between things we see are facets of our perception, how we choose to define things. You can expand your systems ever outwards, describe the whole universe as an endless sea of subatomic particles if you wish.
You can see that all of the laws necessary for the universe to work can be found working upon and by studying a single grain of sand. Without the universe, the grain of sand could not exist. And yet, you could not generate the universe we live in without also generating grains of sand!
Its all very beautiful, and we miss out on so much.
your analogy is not apt
and ignores accelerated returns essential in programming (and fundamental to capitalism), be it active or passive.
"You underestimate the character of man." | "So be off now, and set about it."