| From: | Max Rible slothman@*********.org |
|---|---|
| Subject: | [OT] Mysticism [Was: Re: On Cybereyes] |
| Date: | Mon, 13 Sep 1999 18:08:15 -0700 |
>Yes, science, the study of facts, of reality, an ever-changing,
>self-correcting set of observable or "provable" data, does, all the time,
>choose not to believe things. Generally, the things it chooses not to
>believe are not real.
"Not real" is a little strong. "Not repeatable in a laboratory" will
cover the problem nicely. As a physicist (well, computer programmer
with physics degree, anyway :-) ) with an interest in the
mystical side of things, I might have a useful perspective...
>> Tell me, have you ever tasted a photon? Experinced the time-space
>> dialtaion of supralight travel? Witnessed the Big Bang?
>
>No. And neither have you. But I've seen an atom,
With your own eyes? Or on the screen of a scanning tunneling microscope?
And we all taste photons all the time. Taste is really an electromagnetic
sense, after all. :-)
> watched a mole of deuterium
>smear across the target wall of the CERN accelerator.
In person, or on a detector screen?
>You should read that book, by that wheelchair guy, as Homer Simpson says.
Have you read Jung's "Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle"?
Some interesting data in there.
> Or
>maybe get a degree in quantum maths. Either way, you'll most likely end up
>with a greater respect for the reality of science, and a lesser respect for
>the intentional blindness of mysticism.
Theodore Sturgeon's Law says "90% of everything is crap." That's
when you have crap filters like Nielsen ratings around. In the occult,
the filters pass a lot more crap-- you get more like 98% or 99% in your
average "New Age" (rhymes with sewage) bookstore, and the ratio is probably
even worse on the Internet.
The presence of noise, however, does not remove the possibility of a
signal. What is the proper response of a scientist when confronted
with phenomena that are highly improbable, yet incredibly difficult
to reproduce under laboratory conditions or even subject to statistical
analysis? Rejecting the phenomena as random is a perfectly valid
response-- you have to get hits on the far end of the distribution
*sometime*-- but doesn't get you anywhere if there *is* something going
on that correlates with the extreme phenomena.
My own reaction has been to try to learn to produce some of the
phenomena, and then see if I can get anything that's easy enough
to measure that I can repeat it. Thus far I've had some interesting
experiences but nothing I can publish...
> It's simply that I no
>longer have time in my life for drugs or self-delusion.
I won't argue that self-delusion is a common occurrence in mystical
matters; it may be *required* in order to produce some phenomena.
(Talk about making it difficult to do a controlled study...)
However, I've experienced enough odd phenomena that I don't
think it's *all* self-delusion and/or projection of order onto
random events (e.g., seeing faces in the clouds).
>I do not hold opinions unless I believe they are fact. Therefore, I would be
>doing a grave injustice to myself if I did not represent them as such.
I don't follow that logic there... how is it unjust? If *you*
believe they're a fact, what does it matter what anyone else thinks?
> I
>hate all this namby-pamby "Everything's an opinion, no one's more right than
>anyone else" garbage. One of the things I've come to learn is that people
>are either right or wrong in a given viewpoint. They're not both, or maybe,
>or anything else.
>
>Some days I'm wrong. Sometimes I'm right. But I'm never "maybe."
In "not yet proven one way or the other" cases, there are
polite circumlocutions one can use to avoid provoking flamewars.
I'm sure you've heard all the "absence of evidence does not equate to
evidence of absence" rhetoric. Do you have any friends who work in
law enforcement? Ask them how divergent the accounts of witnesses
to an accident are, mere minutes after it happens. Sometimes, you
just can't get hard data.
--
%% Max Rible %%% max@********.com %%% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "Ham is good... Glowing *tattooed* ham is *bad*!" - the Tick %%
