[beckett]

The cloud of unknowing beyond which we cannot see. Why is there something rather than nothing?

I realize Horgan seems to take sides on some contentious issues. It is not my purpose in posting the article to endorse them all. I just thought that for such a short piece he did an good job of presenting the problem, and of describing an approach to it that closely -- but not exactly -- coincides with my own.

[Gary Boldwater]

The real question is not "why is the universe is what it is?", but rather "how could it possibly be anything else?". The former is an attempt to refute the laws of identity and causality, that latter affirms it.

[Free the USA]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[Hank Kerchief]

The cloud of unknowing beyond which we cannot see.

All that matters is what you can see and what you can know. There is nothing else. It is exactly that, nothing, and to the extent one wastes their minds on what is not, they waste their lives.

Hank

[thinktwice]

what sort of truth would a rational mysticism give us?

Answer ... No truth whatsoever.

The author begins with a figure of speech in which opposite or contradictory ideas or terms are combined ... an "oxymoron."

Check your premises.

[D-fendr]

The Clouding of Unknowing is not about a boundary beyond which we cannot see, but about how to approach knowledge beyond other forms of mental conceptualization.

You find the same practice among all the major experiential religions.

As for Science and Spirituality: Science is by definition without value, without qualitative measurement. This limits it's abillity to be used beyond the subset of those things capable of being detected by the senses (and their extensions), beyond that which has specific location in time and space and that which can be numbered and quantified.

So, it can be helpful in increasing knowledge but, as with logic/reason, it is insufficient a tool for approaching the realm of religion - the absolute in terms of values, truth, purpose, etc.

As another put it: science can only describe what is, not what ought.

[taxed2death]

You need to read the book "The physics of consiousness".

Every time I finish it, I pick it up and start over again..I've read it 6-1/2 times so far. The first half is heavy into the history of physics, put into an amusing, yet not dumbed down, lay-mans terms, the second half ties into spirituality (Buddism in particular) although 95% of it can be related to Christianity.......because he delves into the "spirituality" of religions, rather than the dogma.

Truley facinating book, I highly recommend it to any FReepers who are inquisitive about either Physics and / or Spirituality and how they are related. His breakdown of quantum mechanics is an excellent read in itself.

[freedumb2003]

And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will.

Uh, yeah it will... but (assuming we are talking about the moment of demise), that moment of attention is pretty useless. It is like getting the license number of the bus that runs you over.

Lots of Fun post, but it goes from a useful thesis (the more scientific facts you uncover, the more it proves God) to psychobabble (there are things we can't know, but we don't know what they are... if we knew, we'd know, but we don't know so we can't know).

Trust me, if you drop an egg on the floor, it hits, splats, and makes a mess, no matter what mystical relativistic observational philosophical perspective you take. What greater truth can there be?

[freedumb2003]

And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will.

Uh, yeah it will... but (assuming we are talking about the moment of demise), that moment of attention is pretty useless. It is like getting the license number of the bus that runs you over.

Lots of Fun post, but it goes from a useful thesis (the more scientific facts you uncover, the more it proves God) to psychobabble (there are things we can't know, but we don't know what they are... if we knew, we'd know, but we don't know so we can't know).

Trust me, if you drop an egg on the floor, it hits, splats, and makes a mess, no matter what mystical relativistic observational philosophical perspective you take. What greater truth can there be?

[Sabertooth]

Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason?

Since science and reason are inherently agnostic, if practiced honestly,
why should anyone presume they are in conflict with spirituality?

[keri]

fyi

[Hank Kerchief]

I do want to thank you for this posting. Frequently in our discussion of philosophy there is a need good examples of bad reasoning. This posting has provided several very good ones. I will be saving it.

Here is a good example:

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?

This begins with the nihilisticly absurd notion that "nothing" is an alternative to "something." Of course, "honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing," because it is a question none of them would have thought of (they are scientist, they deal with what is, not with what is not) and only a crackpot pseudo-intellectual posing as a philosopher could suggest "non-existense" was a possibility. If we pretend to take the question seriously, always knowing that is not honestly possible, the answer is, "well, because there is something."

As for the rest, it just a list of variations of the same mistaken notion that anything can be other than what it is. In every case where one asks, why does X have quality A rather than quality B, it is because if X had quality B it would not be X. The universe has the laws it has, because it is this universe. If there were other laws, it would be a hypothetical "other" universe, but since there is no "other" universe, the question is meaningless.

All of this can be reduced to the logical fallacy which claims the universe could be both A (existense as it is) and non-A (existense as it is not). It is a simple logical error disguised as a philosophical question in an attempt to obfuscate the irrationality of mysticism.

As Gary Boldwater indicated, this whole thing is a defiance of the law of identity #2. As thinktwice suggested, this guy, and anyone who admires him, needs to check his premises. #5 Hank

[victim soul]

Time to read or reread Pope John Paul II's "FAITH AND REASON."

[Cicero]

I guess Christianity or Judaism are too traditional or jejune for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some of the writers and scientists he cites are worth knowing, but this passage strikes me as psychobabble. Too much LSD and Berkeley-style Buddhist dabbling (which is quite a different thing from classical Buddhist writings).

[PatrickHenry]

Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason?

I have to be in the mood for this stuff, and right now I'm not, so my answer is "no." However, in the immortal words of Rodney king: "Can't we all get along?"

[cornelis]

art comes closer to uttering the unutterable by acknowledging its own insufficiency

There was a time when "art" was burdened to paint the soul. They never came close. They tried again in the early part of the 20th century (Paul Klee, I think). Again, not any closer. Artists tried to paint motion. Again and again, the practitioners of art will strain to the point of abuse every limit as they despair for sufficiency

So let's drop the art part of that phrase, and instead recognize the last part "acknowledging insufficiency" is not an act that respects methods. Both the artist and the scientist can understand there's no squaring of the circle.

Plus, if the acknowledgment of insufficiency is honest, it is bound to create respect for Mr. Horgan's "trash." It makes one conservative. It can recognize that even a lie is burdened with truth (if for no other reason than that it comes from a liar). But that makes "trash" a very poor word choice which apparently Mr. Horgan and his editors perhaps saw, but did not make clear. Because it's worth is not in the dispensible, rather in what is retained in it. This attitude recognizes that Newton's physics, although displaced by a newer art, is a ladder still standing and much steadier than Descarte's physics.

It appears then (after our happiness for his "acknowledging insufficiency) that Mr. Horgan has promoted an slight infatuation with obsolescence, which is the peculiar disposition of the Marxist, in the physical sciences and history.

[beavus]

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

Here's a good flag to stop reading. Another rediculous pop interpretation of quantum mechanics.

[beavus]

Multiply all of these improbabilities and they spike to infinity.

There goes chance number two to not be absurd.

[beavus]

How did something come from nothing?

I guess I can forgive him for this false assumption. Let's give him another chance.

[Dec31,1999]

Cognitive psychology supposedly corroborates the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion.

So how are Liberals supposed to figure out who they are?

[Dec31,1999]

I've never heard anyone describe mystical experiences better than Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Even if he is a "fraud", he has clarified the distinction between the "gross" and "the absolute" in the Baghavad Gita (Penguin Classics) better than anything I've ever read.

It may also be quite interesting to read about the justification of war explained therein. It's unforgettable, timeless, and timely.