Between Science and Spirituality

The Chronicle of Higher Education ^ | Nov. 29, 2002 | John Horgan

[beckett]

Between Science and Spirituality

By JOHN HORGAN

Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason? To paraphrase the mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, is the East's version of enlightenment compatible with that of the West? If so, what sort of truth would a rational mysticism give us? What sort of consolation?

There are many claimed convergences between science and mysticism. Cognitive psychology supposedly corroborates the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion. Quantum mechanics, which implies that the outcomes of certain microevents depend on how we measure them, is said to confirm the mystical intuition that consciousness is an intrinsic part of reality. Similarly, quantum nonlocality, which Einstein disparaged as "spooky action at a distance," clinches mystics' perception of the interrelatedness, or unity, of all things. I see a different point of convergence between science and mysticism: Each in its own way reveals the miraculousness of our existence.

The more science learns about the origin and history of the cosmos and of life on earth and of Homo sapiens, the more it reveals how staggeringly improbable we are. First there is the fact of existence itself. The big-bang theory represents a profound insight into the history and structure of the cosmos, but it cannot tell us why creation occurred in the first place. Particle physics suggests that empty space is seething with virtual particles, which spring into existence for an instant before vanishing. In the same way, some physicists speculate, the entire universe might have begun as a kind of virtual particle. Honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing. After all, what produced the quantum forces that supposedly made creation possible? "No one is certain what happened before the Big Bang, or even if the question has any meaning," Steven Weinberg, the physicist and Nobel laureate, wrote recently.

Next questions: Why does the universe look this way rather than some other way? Why does it adhere to these laws of nature rather than to some other laws? Altering any of the universe's fundamental parameters would have radically altered reality. For example, if the cosmos had been slightly more dense at its inception, it would have quickly collapsed into a black hole.

A smidgen less dense, and it would have flown apart so fast that there would have been no chance for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. Cosmologists sometimes call this the fine-tuning problem, or, more colorfully, the Goldilocks dilemma: How did the density of the universe turn out not too high, not too low, but just right?

The odds that matter would have precisely its observed density, the physicist Lawrence Krauss has calculated, are as great as the odds of guessing precisely how many atoms there are in the sun. Some physicists are so troubled by the arbitrariness of the cosmos that they espouse a quasi-theological concept known as the anthropic principle. According to this notion, the universe must have the structure we observe, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe it. The anthropic principle is cosmology's version of creationism.

The next improbability is life. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once declared that life "is a mystery no longer," because Darwin solved it with his theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet life is as mysterious as ever, in spite of all the insights provided by evolutionary theory and more-recent biological paradigms, such as genetics and molecular biology. Neither Darwinism nor any other scientific theory tells us why life appeared on earth in the first place, or whether it was probable or a once-in-eternity fluke.

Many scientists have argued that life must be a ubiquitous phenomenon that pervades the universe, but they can offer precious little empirical evidence to support that assertion. After decades of searching, astronomers have found no signs of life elsewhere in the cosmos; a 1996 report of fossilized microbes in a meteorite from Mars turned out to be erroneous. Researchers still cannot make matter animate in the laboratory, even with all the tools of biotechnology. In fact, the more scientists ponder life's origin, the harder it is to imagine how it occurred. Francis Crick once stated that "the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going." In his book Life Itself, Crick offered the speculation that the seeds of life might have been planted on earth by an alien civilization.

Once life on earth started evolving, many scientists have contended, it was only a matter of time before natural selection produced a species as intelligent as Homo sapiens. But for more than 80 percent of life's 3.5-billion-year history, the earth's biota consisted entirely of single-celled organisms, like bacteria and algae. So not even the simplest multicellular organisms were inevitable. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has estimated that if the great experiment of life were rerun a million times over, chances are that it would never again give rise to mammals, let alone mammals intelligent enough to invent negative theology and television. Similar reasoning led the eminent evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to conclude that the SETI program -- the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which scans the heavens for radio signals from other civilizations -- is futile.

Multiply all of these improbabilities and they spike to infinity. As the psychologist Susan Blackmore has pointed out, we are bad at judging probabilities, hence prone to make too much of chance events; that is why we believe in ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other miracles. I do not believe in miracles, at least not defined in the conventional religious manner as divine disruptions of the natural order. But if a miracle is defined as an infinitely improbable phenomenon, then our existence is a miracle, which no theory natural or supernatural will ever explain.

Scientists may go much further in plumbing nature's secrets. They may decipher the neural code, the secret language of the brain. They may arrive at a plausible explanation of how life emerged on earth, and they may discover life elsewhere in the cosmos. They may find and verify a unified theory of physics, which will provide a more precise picture of the origin and history of the universe. Although there are good reasons for doubting the likelihood of such scientific advances, they cannot be ruled out. What can be ruled out is that science will answer the ultimate question: How did something come from nothing? Neither superstring theory nor any other of science's so-called theories of everything can resolve that mystery, any more than our supernatural theologies can.

Although we can never solve the riddle of existence, we can never stop trying. We must keep reimagining our relationship to the infinite. Skepticism alone --- and the cold, hard facts of science --- cannot serve as the basis for spirituality. Blackmore, a practicing Zen Buddhist, helped me reach that conclusion. She described Zen as a kind of rubbish-removal system that cleanses the mind of extraneous beliefs and emotions so that we can see reality as it truly is.

I found Blackmore's garbage metaphor appealing at first, because it provided a handy criterion for judging theories and theologies. The worst ones, I decided, distract us from the reality right in front of us by postulating parallel dimensions and universes, heavens and hells, gods and ghosts and demiurges and extraterrestrials. Too much garbage! Viewed this way, skepticism appears to be the ideal spiritual perspective. Skepticism clears away cumbersome beliefs on an intellectual level, just as meditation (ideally) clears away beliefs, emotions, and thoughts on a more experiential level. Skepticism can help us achieve mystical deautomatization, or so I wanted to believe.

My handling of real rather than metaphorical garbage gradually gave me a more complicated view of the matter. In my kitchen, we put garbage in bags that come in boxes of 20. After I yank the last bag from a box, the box itself becomes trash, which I put into the bag. Sometime after I interviewed Blackmore, every time I pulled the last bag from the box and stuffed the box in the bag, I intuited a paradox lurking within this ritual.

I went through more garbage bags than I care to mention before I solved the riddle: Every garbage-removal system generates garbage. Zen apparently works as an efficient garbage-removal system for Susan Blackmore. But as minimalistic as it is, Zen clutters more than it clarifies my mind. Once I started down this line of thinking, it was hard to stop. I began looking askance at skepticism, too. Maybe skepticism, instead of cleansing our vision, just substitutes one type of trash for another. Instead of belief in reincarnation, angels, ESP, extraterrestrials, parallel universes, and the Oedipus complex, the skeptic crams his mind with disbelief in reincarnation, angels, and so on.

The problem is that any truth or antitruth, no matter how initially revelatory and awe-inspiring, sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world. Ludwig Wittgenstein had this problem in mind when he described his philosophy as a ladder that we should "throw away" after we have climbed it. At its best, art -- by which I mean poetry, literature, music, movies, painting, sculpture -- works in this manner. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic. Like Wittgenstein's ladder, it helps us get to another level and then falls away. What better way to approach the mystical, the truth that cannot be told?

At a scholarly meeting on mysticism I attended in Chicago, one speaker warned that if we can't talk about mysticism, we can't whistle about it, either. In other words, all our modes of expression, including art, fall short of mystical truth. But unlike more-literal modes of expression, art comes closer to uttering the unutterable by acknowledging its own insufficiency. It gives us not answers but questions. That does not mean mystical insights cannot be expressed within other modes of knowledge, like science, philosophy, theology -- and, of course, journalism. But we should view even the most fact-laden mystical texts ironically when they turn to ultimate questions. Some mystical writers, notably the psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna, supply their own irony, but we readers can supply it even if the author intended none. We can read the Upanishads, Genesis, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the neurotheological suppositions of Andrew Newberg just as we read Blake or Borges or Emily Dickinson.

Viewed ironically, even the most fantastical ghost stories, including the old stories of religion, can serve a purpose. Whether they postulate superintelligent clouds of gas, insectoid aliens in hyperspace, a demiurge with multiple-personality disorder, or a loving God who for inscrutable reasons makes us suffer, well-told ghost stories can remind us of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things. Our creation myths and eschatologies, our imaginings of ultimate beginnings and ends, can also help us discover our deepest fears and desires. But even the most sophisticated theologies and theories should never be mistaken for ultimate truth. What Voltaire said centuries ago still holds, and will always hold: "It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."

ther than art, is there any method particularly suited to evoking mystical awe without the side effects that so often attend it? In Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, first published in 1979, Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar suggested that the chief benefit of psychedelics is "enriching the wonder of normality" -- that is, enhancing our appreciation of ordinary consciousness and ordinary life. That is the spiritual value cited most often by advocates of psychedelics. But those compounds can have the opposite effect. This world may seem drab in comparison to the bizarre virtual realms into which LSD or DMT propel us. Instead of opening our eyes to the miraculousness of everyday reality and consciousness, psychedelics can blind us.

All mystical technologies that induce powerful altered states pose this risk. One mystical expert who has reached this conclusion is Jean Houston. A pioneer of the human-potential movement, she works as a kind of spiritual psychotherapist, usually for large groups rather than individuals. She seeks to rejuvenate her clients' psyches through dance, song, chanting, guided imagery, and role-playing, often with a mythological dimension. She and her husband, the anthropologist Robert Masters, proclaimed in 1966 that investigations of LSD and similar drugs could help human consciousness expand "beyond its present limitations and on towards capacities not yet realized and perhaps undreamed of."

Houston subsequently became quite critical of the via psychedelica. "l am by nature not pro-drug," she told me. Timothy Leary was one of the most charming people she had ever met -- and one of the most irresponsible. Too many people lured onto the psychedelic path by this Pied Piper suffered breakdowns and ended up in mental hospitals, Houston said. "If I were to take the American pragmatic tradition and say, 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' then I'd have to say I haven't seen too much evidence" that psychedelics promote a healthy spirituality. "Some might say it is a shortcut to reality. But the fact is, it doesn't seem to sustain that reality."

Houston's disillusionment with psychedelics led her to seek safer means of self-transcendence. In the early 1970s, she and Masters devised what they called the altered states of consciousness induction device, or ASCID. It consisted of a suspension harness in which blindfolded subjects could spin around in three dimensions. The contraption worked so well that Houston and Masters discontinued its use. "People would get addicted to it and even refuse to explore their inner states without first taking a ride," Houston recalled. The experience reinforced her suspicion that any spiritual practice or path -- particularly those emphasizing altered states -- can become an end in itself, which leads us away from reality rather than toward it.

Anything that helps you see --- really see --- the wondrousness of the world serves a mystical purpose. According to Zen legend, when a visitor asked the 15th-century master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." Irritated, the visitor asked, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention." Fortunately, life itself is so wildly weird and improbable that sooner or later it is bound to get our attention. And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will. Whenever death intrudes upon our lives, we feel the chill of the deep space in which we are suspended.

Spiritual seekers have employed mementos mori, like a human skull, to keep themselves mindful of death. An extreme version of this technique, used in certain Buddhist sects, involves sitting next to or on top of a rotting corpse. It seems that this practice may merely desensitize you to death rather than sensitize you to life. Moreover, dwelling on death, the abyss, nothingness, may convince you that it is the only abiding reality, and that all finite, time-bound phenomena, including our mortal selves, are ephemeral and hence, in some sense, unreal. To be enlightened, Ken Wilber once wrote, is "to snap out of the movie of life." This is perhaps the greatest danger posed by mysticism -- that you will be left with a permanent case of derealization and depersonalization.

If you are lucky, your glimpse of the abyss will make this life seem more real, not less. You will feel what Albert Hofmann -- the chemist who, in 1943, discovered the psychotropic properties of LSD -- felt after emerging from the psilocybin trip in which he had found himself all alone in a ghost town inside the earth. When he returned from this hellish solitude, back to the world and his dear friends, he felt "reborn," and he was overcome with gratitude and joy at the "wonderful life we have here."

This is by far the greatest gift that mystical experiences can bestow on us: to see -- really see -- all that is right with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, compassion, fun. Never forget the problem of fun.

John Horgan writes about science. This article is adapted from his book Rational Mysticism: Dispatches From the Border Between Science and Spirituality, to be published in January by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 2003 by John Horgan.

[betty boop]

Though not conclusive, the phenomenon fits my contention that knowledge is assembled apart from the transceiver-brain, i.e. in a non-temporal consciousness.

That's what it looks like to me, too, Alamo-Girl. And testing this postulate might be awfully difficult for traditional science. Seems a whole lot of the most brilliant minds in physics, for instance, have just decided to "take a pass" on the problem. Heck, they deny there even is a problem.

Yet it seems to me precisely this problem is what constitutes the "measurement problem" of QM.

It all boils down to the basic epistemological questions: What does man kow? How does he know it? And how does he know he knows it?

If science is determined to leave "man" out of its equations -- that is, human consciousness (not even to mention the unconscious)-- then, what purpose does it serve?

[cornelis]

You must be thinking of T-U-L-I-P or the Grim Snipper.

[betty boop]

Alamo-Girl, thanks so much for asking for the elaboration on the Lockean-Berkeleyan “dispute.” I’m going to have to go by memory here. The main thing is, I can’t lay my hands on Berkeley!! (so to speak). Yet I held him in my hands, not three months ago. I just don’t remember where I put him down.

But this will be my best recollection of their dispute, which IMHO should be a lot more “famous” than is recognized today.

John Locke, esteemed British Empiricist philosopher, among other things forayed into the thorny field of epistemology.

He thought that the reality of “objects” of experience could be validated by means of human sense perception; and because the sensory apparatus of human beings was assumed not to vary very much from one individual to the next, then if you got “consensus” that a thing exists on the basis of shared perceptions, then you’ve proved its existence. Such that, if you had two guys sitting around a black table, the following reasonable discourse might ensue:

“A: So here we are, sitting around this table. You do see this table, don’t you?

B: Well, sure. There it is.

A: Well, just to be sure, why don’t you try knocking on it?

B: Okay. Yep, I’ve knocked on it. That’s a table all right.

A: Q.E.D.!!!! Now, surely you’ve noticed the table is black.”

B: Huh??? What’s ‘black?’”

IMHO, B’s last response was the death of Locke’s argument, even before QM burst into the human imagination.

As mentioned earlier, a certain Irish philosophical Idealist by the name of Berkeley took issue with the Lockean model.

As an Idealist, Berkeley should have been opposed in this debate by a Realist; but I gather there wasn’t one to be had, in his day and age. That being the case, I further gather he decided to settle for the best Empiricist he could find at the time -- and that would be Locke – against whom to mount his challenge.

Which boils down to this: The Truth of reality isn’t what’s “in your eyes,” as mediated by the sense apparatus and ultimately by the brain. There is no particular “thing” about which human beings can be relied upon always to agree, presumably after having consulted with the operations of their sensory processing taking place in them somewhere. There is, in fact, absolutely nothing material in the world at all.

For all the “objects” you see are in their essence the immaterial “signs” of the activity of the divine Mind. The Lockean postulate rests on the assumption that there is little variability in the way human individuals process information. QED, the “object” must be “real,” if you can get at least two people to agree on its validating criteria.

To which Berkeley said: This is not about “objects” of “sense perception.” This is about “acts” of “pure” cognition. This is about something closely analogous to language: these objects you “see” are not physical things; they are “signs” in a system of significance directly analogous to the “words” of human language. There is little or nothing “physical” about the object in view. It merely stands either as a discrete “word,” or perhaps a part of speech, in a discourse – the discourse being God’s. Reasoning further, God’s speaking this discourse – or at least thinking about it maybe -- is what upholds the universe, in the end. Berkeley being Berkeley – he started out as a philosopher, but ended up taking religious orders – the “discourse,” of course, had to be God’s.

And he assumed man was tuned to God’s language, man being “made in the Image.” Or at least, any man could tune in, if he troubled himself to learn the language.

But whether or not he did, Berkeley’s insight “explains” why a tree could “factually” fall in the forest, even if there were “no one there” to hear the sound of the fall. For Berkeley’s theory did require there be a conscious mind to engage the “sign” in order to invest the “sign” with meaning; that is, with existence. So if a tree fell in the forest, with no man to see/hear the event, there would always be Infinite Mind, the Omniscient God Who sees and hears and knows everything, including a tree falling in a forest with no one around as witness to the event.

God sees it. And therefore, it is. It is His “active intervention” in the world of His Creation – what Christians call Divine Providence or Grace – that upholds all by itself the entire order of being and provides its constant sustenance, without which it would imminently, utterly perish. He is the One indisputable Source and Sustainer of Reality.

It all seems so simple as to be childish -- yet a “childishness” somehow more “sophisticated” than what Locke came up with.

Anyhoot, IMHO QM has nailed Locke to the barnyard door. Berkeley, as far as I can tell, is still “out there,” floating around in human consciousness, beckoning yet unresolved.

And unresolved because there is no way to “resolve” any original work of human experience, intellect, and spirit in terms of the scientific method. The method is supposed to be our tool, not our master.

It’s really just that simple. JMHO FWIW

[VadeRetro]

The Truth of reality isn’t what’s “in your eyes,” as mediated by the sense apparatus and ultimately by the brain. There is no particular “thing” about which human beings can be relied upon always to agree, presumably after having consulted with the operations of their sensory processing taking place in them somewhere. There is, in fact, absolutely nothing material in the world at all.

Here's where philosophy and science part company. I can see your fascination with this premise. It does spin the brain. Scientifically, this idea is useless. It doesn't take you anywhere or tell you anything. You mull it over, then just file it and go back to presuming that the black tables in your environment really are black tables.

That's all you can do.

[Kevin Curry]

A = A far beyond its utility. It's fine, but in the end it is a banal observation.

Sums it up about as well as I have ever seen it summed up.

[Kevin Curry]

Someday you really ought to try thinking instead of mentally knee-jerking your way to confirming your meager materialist biases and prejudices.

But that might frighten you. Better to stay safe.

[VadeRetro]

... confirming your meager materialist biases and prejudices.

Just keeping a nodding acquaintance with the real world. I'll tell it I heard from you.

[js1138]

Someday you really ought to try thinking instead of mentally knee-jerking your way to confirming your meager materialist biases and prejudices.

That's what I call a home run in philosophical discourse.

Well reasoned and crushing. Worthy of the azure coprophilia award.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing these different points of view!

Ortega's notice of the consiousness as relational helps me connect the dots: there is common confusion as to when we are speaking of the action or passion of the one, or the action or passion of the other. Even if we set aside the slip of the sinful moment when we did not make ourselves clear, there still remains the revolutionary jack in the box or the cameleon, the poikilos, who plays the game well, now preferring to talk about the one and now the other in an attempt to outwit existence as he wishes it.

This makes sense, but would you say that consciousness can also be self-contained in other situations?

[cornelis]

Yes, we can withdraw from actual relations (Ortega makes note of that).

Yet in the history of philosophy and science this withdrawal has occured to an extreme. Even Marx capitalized on this extreme when he engaged his jargon of alienation. And at least since him, a withdrawal has occured to such an extent that it has been raised to a "supreme virtue." Or, --with other words and another example-- when we recognize how an epistemology chosen in a state of withdrawal obliviates the primary relations, then we begin to see what Voegelin calls a "second reality." It is secondary because it is derivative. And when that first relation is ignored, and the second abstracted system is taken as primary through an "imaginative oblivion" then we can no longer call it a science or philosophy marked by integrity.

It would be helpful if in each instance we make clear and distinct the alienated conscious from the relational.

An important point to add is that this problem besets science and philosophy alike. An attempt to safeguard science (or philosophy) from the fault is merely another example of further self-alienation.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your post, Nebullis! Betty boop, I'm pinging you because you might be interested in some of these links.

I suppose someone could rig up a device that could receive this signal noise- and damage-free. Then it could be broadcast to everyone!

I suspect the signal is non-temporal to our perceived space/time coordinates, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look for it. After all, for a long time there was a question whether neutrinos had mass, and the question was answered by inference, e.g. rare collisions with electrons (as I recall.)

I am very keen on harmonics. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe harmonics is the mechanism underlying the big bang, which gave rise to fields, then geometry/dimension, particles, physical laws, etc.

I was encouraged when sound waves were found recorded in the cosmic background radiation at the moment photons decoupled and light went on its way. Likewise, I am encouraged by the super-string theories which include resonance. Super String Theory

Even now, in the quest for the Higgs boson, Fermilab may have a lot to tell us about super-symmetry: Supersymmetry Prospects at an Upgraded Fermilab Tevatron Collider

The basics on super-strings and super-symmetry

The basics on dimensions

The basics at inception

If harmonics are the mechanism at inception, as I suspect they are, the astronomers may hold the key - because they are uniquely able to look back in time. IMHO, there may be more imprintings found - or a projection of quantum activity to the astronomical scale - or an accumulative effect of resonance.

In sum, I expect all of these efforts to provide the clues to explore consciousness as existing apart from a transceiver brain.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your post and for your agreement!

Seems a whole lot of the most brilliant minds in physics, for instance, have just decided to "take a pass" on the problem. Heck, they deny there even is a problem.

Indeed, but as I just posted to you above - I suspect they are getting into the very same subject through the backdoor. LOL!

If science is determined to leave "man" out of its equations -- that is, human consciousness (not even to mention the unconscious)-- then, what purpose does it serve?

Sadly, many scientists are loath to broach beyond the known physical realm. This is particularly true in natural sciences.

Frankly I don't see how any progress could be made if scientists limited themselves to only exploring that which is already physically known to exist. And fortunately, they haven't. The biggest leaps, IMHO, have been made by the physicists and mathematicians who are not narrowly constrained.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you oh so very much for "taking us there" in the debate between Locke and Berkeley! Fascinating!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the further explanation!

It would be helpful if in each instance we make clear and distinct the alienated conscious from the relational.

I agree!

[betty boop]

I can see your fascination with this premise. It does spin the brain. Scientifically, this idea is useless.

I must protest, my strong and lovely dance partner -- BUT: My entire point is that, not only is "this premise" NOT scientifically "useless"; but that it is perhaps the problem that science most urgently needs to engage -- in order to advance a truly human future.

The daunting problem mitigating against any such easy scientific solution seems to be (IMHO) that science, in our time, overwhelmingly relies on the "instrumental consciousness."

Instumental consciousness essentially boils down to a theory of knowledge based on computation.

But just take a look at extant human culture and history, where you will find copious refutation of this hypothesis: in human language, art, music, literature, science, etc.

It's like I said before: If science is determined to leave "man" out of its equations, then what purpose does science serve?

Well, I don't know quite what to make of all this myself really, but I'm working on it. But it's time to go to bed.

Good Night, VadeRetro. May you have pleasant dreams.

[BraveMan]

Ecclesiastes 1

Everything Is Meaningless

1 The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."

3 What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
7 All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.
8 All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
9 What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
11 There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.

[Cvengr]

Here's a slightly different twist.

Let's say that the local fire inspector is touring facilities. He enters a building where an owner has recently installed a warehouse office using off-the-shelf components and nobody has ever really inspected the facility.

Those people who installed the facility really didn't know much about construction nor plumbing codes or fluid mechanics.

Over a period of years, a trend develops where warehouse components are built without properly designed fire protection water sprinkler systems. Year after year the problem is believed to exist by others and funds solicited to solve the problem. A contract is let to install fire sprinklers but in the mean time, more offices are installed without sprinklers.

So now the building has some temporary offices protected and others not protected, but a new owner arrives and contracts out to remove all the temporary offices.

The warehouse is secured with few visitors and those who do see the area have authority to be there, generally unguarded, but not so as to allow unauthorized work in the area.

Now the inspector comes along, looking at an office to be demolished along with new fire sprinklers which were just installed. Upon closer inspection, he discovers one of the offices had sprinklers installed below the ceiling and penetrating the ceiling, but above the ceiling, there was no connection to any fire main. In fact the piping had been cut, left in place, unconnected to any water source and none immediately available except maybe 30 feet away. The observation of the isolated pipe only comes after the inspector nearly cuts his back on the exposed sharp edges of the cut end of the pipe, not yet threaded, but which still had dust caked on the pipe indicating it had been left abandoned for some time.

The inspector even spends a little time thinking to himself as he departs that maybe it wasn't a big deal. Nobody ever used it, nobody else knew about it, the people who installed it didn't know what was involved to connect it to a main, the engineers weren't made aware of the installation and those removing it could care less and it wasn't ever used anyways.

The inspector departs puzzled a bit, but thinking how queer the observation was but that perhaps it was connected otherwise and leaving it alone. He departs for the weekend as the warehouse is locked up and placed under tight security.

The following Monday, the inspector decides to return to look again at the water system to see what it would take to connect to another water line which he remembered connected another part of the building.

Upon returning, he discovers the exact same line he nearly injured himself on previously, was now indeed reconnected to a nearby watermain. The pipe had caked on dust, had been in place for several years, and the exposed lateral nowhere to be found other than the connected system.

The inspector checks and nobody had entered the warehouse, only he was aware of the situation.

he now thinks to himself that even though he was quite convinced of his memory that the previous disconnected isolated piping was very real several days before, that the same situation could not be explained since nobody had either reason nor time nor access to correct the situation and the material evidence of the site indicated the pipe had always been connected. His only conclusion was that his memory was in error as he returned a bit puzzled to his office. As he sat to his desk, laughing at himself, that he could have been so convinced by a mistaken memory to actually believe somebody could have snuck in to change the piping,..he moves a set of drawings of his desk of the site. The same set of drawings, he had forgotten that he had taken with him on his first visit and had made a few measurements and notes of the cut pipe when he had previously noted the abandoned pipe originally.

Now in this situation, several quandries arise.

1) How could this have occured?
2) Perhaps Berkeley's argument about a tree falling in a forest without somebody around to think about it has further reaching physical consequences.
3) SciFi literature and some fiction touches upon simialr scenarios. Jouneys to Trafalmadore in Kurt Vonnegut novels touch perhaps upon the spiritual domain although perhaps not expressed as such.
4) Perhaps, the same phenomenon touches upon gnostic arguments. Not that I assert gnosticism is sound, quite the contrary, I assert some aspects might be valid but unsound, i.e. not true.
5) I've been led to consider the epistemilogical foundations of materialism and empiricism and science in general from this episode. What if the existence of that pipe was somehow implicit from man's reason, thought, belief, or even faith? Perhaps a little Twilight Zone corner of the world for a time and local place, hadn't experienced any work or thought by man that certain things needed to have been in place a certain way, yet upon their discovery nonchalently, the laws of the universe fell into place and the components fell back into existence.

A sort of 'Truman Show' made known only to the angels and God might account for some things not explicable otherwise.

Such incidents aren't that common, but not that uncommon either. I've encountered perhaps 5 over 30 years which I become cognizant about in various circumstances. No law of physics seems to explain, yet nonetheless real. The far vast realm of possible physical phenomenon always obeys the common laws of science we have observed, yet these handful periodically arise.

It would be as disingenous to disregard these isolated counterexamples to our understanding of reality as to accept them.

I happen to work in a more isolated remote area, where such anamolies are more obvious or less explicable than in a more metropolitan area. I have considered that perhaps the more people conceive or perceive a particular order in the world, the more likely it is established. In order to balance all the ideas, ideas such as nothing happens without hard work, then accordingly much of what we need must be produced from hard work.

Unanticipated events seem to act as a check and balance to such notions, but then again what drives those events other than what might seem the obvious?

Scripture takes on an even more powerful note after considering such possible worlds and then abiding by Scripture. One doesn't need to appeal to gnosticism to explain the events, but on the contrary, those who lack faith might errantly formulate gnostic doctrines in order to explain some very real things they have experienced.

I want to say that upon departing the area originally I had asked a simple prayer regarding Christ's ability to perform miracles associated with the loaves and the fishes and that perhaps the pipe was severed in similar vein since nobody else could perceive it, it wouldn't harm to place the issue under faith. However, I am also scarred enough in my soul, to not remember exactly how my prayers at the time were formulated. Interesting testimonial though,..it is indeed true.

[betty boop]

Pretty amazing, Cvengr. And totally inexplicable....

You wrote, "I have considered that perhaps the more people conceive or perceive a particular order in the world, the more likely it is established." I've considered that, too. It would help to explain why progressive ideologues do not brook competition to their ideas, and insist on controlling the institutions of popular culture -- e.g., the public schools, media, academe, etc. Let people see only the ideologue's view of reality, then just keep reinforcing it (propagandize), and pretty soon you get a "brave new world." It's a form of magic...the intentionalist consciousness of wizards at work....

Thank you for sharing a most perplexing experience. I credit it, but sure can't explain it.

[Phaedrus]

The method is supposed to be our tool, not our master.

The daunting problem mitigating against any such easy scientific solution seems to be (IMHO) that science, in our time, overwhelmingly relies on the "instrumental consciousness."

Instumental consciousness essentially boils down to a theory of knowledge based on computation.

But just take a look at extant human culture and history, where you will find copious refutation of this hypothesis: in human language, art, music, literature, science, etc.

It's like I said before: If science is determined to leave "man" out of its equations, then what purpose does science serve?

As a battle scarred veteran of the Evo Wars, I am acutely aware of the pernicious ends to which language can be put and so am not fond of the language analogy. It is instructive and hugely ironic, I think, that among the most effective and penetrating critiques of Darwinism were books written by lawyers, Norman MacBeth (Darwin Retried) and Phillip Johnson (Darwin On Trial). And yet, the most devastating treatment of Darwin's work was produced, IMHO, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution), a genius-class intellectual who makes clear in stunningly penetrating detail that almost the whole of Darwin's argument was an exercise in sophistry.

Language plus honesty will get you there, I suppose is the lesson, but honesty seems to be in short supply among the designated university intellectuals these days, at least insofar as their pronouncements reach the public. I also suppose their "out" is that one must know truth before one can express it, assuming that is the intent, and knowing truth is extremely difficult. But I think that their intent is suspect. I think that there is too much insecurity among the professoriate. I think they hide from reality and that this insecurity leads them toward materialism, bias, sophistry and a denial of God.

This is, I know, digression, but interesting digression, would you not agree?

If nothing else, the physicists have shown us that math works better as a tool to penetrate reality. It is a language with built-in integrity, and productive.

Enter QM. A century ago. We have been stuck on the horns of the "observer" dilemma for a very long while and every turn of phrase imaginable has been employed to circumscribe and explain away this deep mystery in material terms. In recent decades, math and experiment have fianlly and firmly established the fundamental reality of that mystery. At the micro level, we have indeterminacy, at the macro, hard reality. One becomes the other. How?

Well, if nothing else, we have established that materialist science doesn't have the answer and it is in headlong, fervent denial about it. And Yes, "The method is supposed to be our tool, not our master."

More observational irony: A few centuries ago, it was understood that science was the pursuit of understanding of God's design. That pursuit has been stunningly successful. Yet language has been tasked with turning this truth on its head, to deny the existence of God. But that's all it is, sophistry. Design is self-evident and it takes many volumes of treacly language to move us away, intellectually, from this truth. Let me repeat this: The Design Is Self-Evident.

I will stop now.

[js1138]

Sadly, many scientists are loath to broach beyond the known physical realm. This is particularly true in natural sciences.

Frankly I don't see how any progress could be made if scientists limited themselves to only exploring that which is already physically known to exist. And fortunately, they haven't. The biggest leaps, IMHO, have been made by the physicists and mathematicians who are not narrowly constrained.

Being "known to exist" requires a handle. Althouth QM is the weirdest phenomenon ever approached by science, it is the result of experimental data, collected by equipment designed for research. It is the obligation of anyone hypothesizing a previously unknown phenomenon, to invent the equipment needed to study it.