Re: Mind's Eye Re: Science and religion in modernity

It's true. The two disiplines- science and humanities (including
religion)- are unable to communicate and satisfactorily define common
terms and goals. But even within each disipline this is a major
problem (Berkeley). So I think we each make a choice during our lives-
if we are fortunate to have the freedom to do so. Some are able to
form an alliance of both disiplines in rather a hodge-podge way. But
science lacks ethics as much as religions/myths have lacked reason
versus faith in the history of mankind. Beneath the surface of outward
manners and appearances, remains the interior soul and character of
each individual known by acts and memories to many or to few- to the
person him-herself or to God-gods. Modern science is as much a trap as
religion once was and still is to some. It's a predicament.

On Oct 20, 3:50 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We travel at 60k plus miles an hour in the solar system and 500K
> through the galaxy in our system.  I tend to believe we can measure
> this kind of thing and that we are always left with questions like
> Allan's about before after and beyond.  Hitch-hikers' Guide probably
> gets to the irony.  Quite a few of us discount priests and text-
> authority without giving up on spirit.  Spinoza remains the clearest
> example.
>
> Creation stories end up in infinite regress - scientific and otherwise
> - and beg the question of 'what came before that' by positing a
> fiction of something that needs no creator or origin.  I don't believe
> god whipped up the Grand Canyon, but in the limits of our thinking
> something whipped up something that led to the evolution of our planet
> etc.  I tend to think science rather than literature may lead to a
> different way of seeing this and surviving until this is possible.
> Literature is generally bland and lacks depth - though there are great
> moments.  I suspect one of the key issues is raised by Gabby a lot of
> the time - we need to replace current authority and know the irony is
> such attempts just produce the same old business as usual (WB Yeates
> was good on this).
>
> The stuff on thermodynamics above is very similar in method to
> Einstein and what we might now term Wittgensteinian deconstruction -
> trying to find the common elements and mistakes in various competing
> arguments and readdress the apparent conflict.  Molly has some words
> on this too.
>
> On 20 Oct, 20:37, Molly <mollyb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > google books had a copy up online, it may still be there.  Used book
> > outlets like Alibris will allow you to put in the book you are searching
> > for and notify you when a copy becomes available for sale by a store that
> > uses their service.  Other than that, you may find some good articles about
> > it with excerpts online.  for Einstein fans, it is a favorite.
>
> > On Saturday, October 20, 2012 10:14:03 AM UTC-4, Allan Heretic wrote:
>
> > > how does a person get a hold of the original text..??
> > > Allan
>
> > > On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Molly <moll...@gmail.com <javascript:>>wrote:
>
> > >> The Einstein "The World As I See It," originally began as his ponderance
> > >> of something greater than science, and acknowledgement of spirit in action.
> > >>  The original edition is the best, as his editors put together texts with
> > >> lectures for him under the same name, and those books have an entirely
> > >> different flavor.
>
> > >> From my view, "knowing" is not the end of it, but the beginning.
>
> > >> On Saturday, October 20, 2012 8:09:19 AM UTC-4, gabbydott wrote:
>
> > >>> Honestly, Vam, I don't think that it was Einstein's lack of knowledge
> > >>> that made him pose such a daft (in the sense of limited) question. I read
> > >>> this as a description of the state of occidental science at his time - the
> > >>> conflict between the ontological and the constructivist explanatory models
> > >>> of the nature of knowledge.
>
> > >>> On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 8:41 AM, Vam <atewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >>>> You spoke of Einstein, about his " only " interest being whether God<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God> had
> > >>>> any choice in manifesting the universe and this observed creation.
>
> > >>>> My own suggestion is that if we do not know enough we will always think
> > >>>> along those lines.
>
> > >>>> To the uninitiate, the desktops of today would seem to be thinking
> > >>>> entities ...
>
> > >>>> *So, do we know enough ?*
>
> > >>>> <https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-EBJSz8MhWQU/UIJGzwpvR3I/AAAAAAAAB0...>
>
> > >>>> On Saturday, October 20, 2012 6:36:45 AM UTC+5:30, rigsy03 wrote:
>
> > >>>>> I took a course on the Snow-Leavis(1959-1962) controversy in the
> > >>>>> mid-'70's. Perhaps we should then conclude scientists do not
> > >>>>> understand humanism? Other works involved included various essays and
> > >>>>> books by Aldous Huxley ("Literature and Science") and Bronowski
> > >>>>> ("Science and Human Values"). Not sure that "incomprehension and
> > >>>>> dislike"(Snow) between the two groups has changed at all when
> > >>>>> considering the gap between rich and poor nations, smart weapons, etc.
> > >>>>> as science and militarism promote the self-interest of various
> > >>>>> nations/
> > >>>>> political theories and practices. Should we quibble that Nazi
> > >>>>> scientists propelled the USA moon landing? At least the moon survived.
>
> > >>>>> On Oct 19, 1:37 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>>>> > The below is rather long, but physics is returning to some of the
> > >>>>> > ideas of James Maxwell.  My dog is named after him.  Years ago, we
> > >>>>> > were told their were two cultures ( CP Snow) - one knew the 2nd law
> > >>>>> of
> > >>>>> > thermodynamics and the other did not (literary types).  The 2nd law
> > >>>>> > involved was a straw man.  The following, as Max needs his walk, is
> > >>>>> > paraphrased from last week's New Scientist.
>
> > >>>>> > A few decades after Carnot, the German physicist Rudolph Clausius
> > >>>>> > explained such phenomena in terms of a quantity characterising
> > >>>>> > disorder that he called entropy. In this picture, the universe works
> > >>>>> > on the back of processes that increase entropy - for example
> > >>>>> > dissipating heat from places where it is concentrated, and therefore
> > >>>>> > more ordered, to cooler areas, where it is not.  That predicts a
> > >>>>> grim
> > >>>>> > fate for the universe itself. Once all heat is maximally dissipated,
> > >>>>> > no useful process can happen in it any more: it dies a "heat death".
> > >>>>> A
> > >>>>> > perplexing question is raised at the other end of cosmic history,
> > >>>>> too.
> > >>>>> > If nature always favours states of high entropy, how and why did the
> > >>>>> > universe start in a state that seems to have been of comparatively
> > >>>>> low
> > >>>>> > entropy? At present we have no answer, and there is an intriguing
> > >>>>> > alternative view.
>
> > >>>>> > Perhaps because of such undesirable consequences, the legitimacy of
> > >>>>> > the second law was for a long time questioned. The charge was
> > >>>>> > formulated with the most striking clarity by the Scottish physicist
> > >>>>> > James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. He was satisfied that inanimate matter
> > >>>>> > presented no difficulty for the second law. In an isolated system,
> > >>>>> > heat always passes from the hotter to the cooler, and a neat clump
> > >>>>> of
> > >>>>> > dye molecules readily dissolves in water and disperses randomly,
> > >>>>> never
> > >>>>> > the other way round. Disorder as embodied by entropy does always
> > >>>>> > increase.  Maxwell's problem was with life. Living things have
> > >>>>> > "intentionality": they deliberately do things to other things to
> > >>>>> make
> > >>>>> > life easier for themselves. Conceivably, they might try to reduce
> > >>>>> the
> > >>>>> > entropy of their surroundings and thereby violate the second law.
> > >>>>> > Such a possibility is highly disturbing to physicists. Either
> > >>>>> > something is a universal law or it is merely a cover for something
> > >>>>> > deeper. Yet it was only in the late 1970s that Maxwell's entropy-
> > >>>>> > fiddling "demon" was laid to rest. Its slayer was the US physicist
> > >>>>> > Charles Bennett, who built on work by his colleague at IBM, Rolf
> > >>>>> > Landauer, using the theory of information developed a few decades
> > >>>>> > earlier by Claude Shannon. An intelligent being can certainly
> > >>>>> > rearrange things to lower the entropy of its environment. But to do
> > >>>>> > this, it must first fill up its memory, gaining information as to
> > >>>>> how
> > >>>>> > things are arranged in the first place.
>
> > >>>>> > This acquired information must be encoded somewhere, presumably in
> > >>>>> the
> > >>>>> > demon's memory. When this memory is finally full, or the being dies
> > >>>>> or
> > >>>>> > otherwise expires, it must be reset. Dumping all this stored,
> > >>>>> ordered
> > >>>>> > information back into the environment increases entropy - and this
> > >>>>> > entropy increase, Bennett showed, will ultimately always be at least
> > >>>>> > as large as the entropy reduction the demon originally achieved.
> > >>>>> Thus
> > >>>>> > the status of the second law was assured, albeit anchored in a
> > >>>>> mantra
> > >>>>> > of Landauer's that would have been unintelligible to the
> > >>>>> 19th-century
> > >>>>> > progenitors of thermodynamics: that "information is physical".
> > >>>>> > James Joule's 19th century experiments with beer can be used to
> > >>>>> > illustrate this idea. The English brewer, whose name lives on in the
> > >>>>> > standard unit of energy, sealed beer in a thermally isolated tub
> > >>>>> > containing a paddle wheel that was connected to weights falling
> > >>>>> under
> > >>>>> > gravity outside. The wheel's rotation warmed the beer, increasing
> > >>>>> the
> > >>>>> > disorder of its molecules and therefore its entropy. But hard as we
> > >>>>> > might try, we simply cannot use Joule's set-up to decrease the
> > >>>>> beer's
> > >>>>> > temperature, even by a fraction of a millikelvin. Cooler beer is, in
> > >>>>> > this instance, a state regrettably beyond the reach of physics.
>
> > >>>>> > The question is whether we can express the whole of physics simply
> > >>>>> by
> > >>>>> > enumerating possible and impossible processes in a given situation.
> > >>>>> > This is very different from how physics is usually phrased, in both
> > >>>>> > the classical and quantum regimes, in terms of states of systems and
> > >>>>> > equations that describe how those states change in time. The blind
> > >>>>> > alleys down which the standard approach can lead are easiest to
> > >>>>> > understand in classical physics, where the dynamical equations we
> > >>>>> > derive allow a whole host of processes that patently do not occur -
> > >>>>> > the ones we have to conjure up the laws of thermodynamics expressly
>
> ...
>
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