God is Imaginary but Logic Fails to Address Imagination

[Gimpy]

Right, because I don't think that. I'm just saying that the universe put imagination here, not me, so the recipe is in the same box where it keeps 'gravity a la timespace' and 'matter with energy sauce'.

Okay, so now we are clear. Whenever you make what appears to be solid statements of fact (like the underlined above), you are REALLY just speculating and not positing a fact. Because the implication in that underlined portion is that "the universe" is somehow functionally, cognitively aware, i.e., a being of some kind, that "it" would someone "create" something called imagination, or even gravity for that matter. . . . as a conscious action of some kind, on purpose. So when I take from that statement that you are engaging in anthropomorphism with the "universe" or even "nature" in some way, you really aren't. Right?

Funny, you sound personally offended.

Again, you appear to be projecting onto me (and others) what you might do/feel in such a conversation. Because the fact is it's inherently impossible to determine such a thing without key communication cues that  this format (written word, even with smilies   ) cannot convey. In other words, I can't "sound" anyway in text only. The person on the other end would be the one adding that non-verbal layer, and that would, understandably, create a huge gap in communication.

Subtle cues, like body language or other non-verbals, such as the chuckling I make when I read some of the assertions you make, would be helpful to you so that you would understand that when someone chuckles at your comments, they are not offended. Entertained maybe, but not offended.

The universe is nothing but patterns. Some of them seek negative electrical charge, some of them seek chocolate. The universe is all entity, living or non, essential or existential. Hello, it's the ENTIRE UNIVERSE.

Here we go again. Some of "them" what seek? Some "patterns" seek things? The universe is not a living entity. We know that a very small portion of the universe, extremely small portion, has living entities in it, but that does not then make the universe as a whole a living entity that "seeks" anything. Anthropomorphism.  

Anyway, carry on. You have an interesting mind, but it's still beholden to woo. Sorry.

Edited to add PS:
PS: I have no problem acknowledging when something offends me. I have recently done so in another thread when someone made the claim that non-theists are immoral, unethical, and dishonest.

[Immediacracy]

Whenever you make what appears to be solid statements of fact (like the underlined above), you are REALLY just speculating and not positing a fact.

Yes, I'm not presuming to have factual knowledge of how imagination in the universe works.

Here we go again. Some of "them" what seek? Some "patterns" seek things? The universe is not a living entity. We know that a very small portion of the universe, extremely small portion, has living entities in it, but that does not then make the universe as a whole a living entity that "seeks" anything. Anthropomorphism.  

Living entities are composed of non-living entities that 'seek' to live. Not claiming awareness, but why would that make a difference? The behavior we observe is that the universe is governed by forces of attraction and repulsion. Attraction, direction, behaving in a manner consistent with the perpetuation of... I call seeking.

[kindred]

You guys should define terms and set a common goal for this thread(prove/disprove one thing at a time). Its not getting anywhere.

[kin hell]

You guys should define terms and set a common goal for this thread(prove/disprove one thing at a time). Its not getting anywhere.

Not meaning to butt heads, but why?
If the conversation is unfolding organically, subjecting it to further restrictions or guidelines may miss evolutionary quirks.
And if you are not enjoying it, or contributing to it, then one would have to ask, who are you to attempt to make demands from the sidelines?

I don't know if a complex universe needs an initial consciousness to create consciousness.

No, I don't either exactly. I can see why everyone might be getting that out of what I'm saying, but the model I'm trying to get at is a universe which contains the underpinnings of interior consciousness from the start as a property of order itself. Said another way, I propose that the cosmos has to innately be able to make sense before we can make sense of it.

Truthfully bloke that last sentence didn't make a particular sense to me.

but further

Large snowflakes are all different (supposedly)  complex beautiful unique(in some aspects) and not requiring anything but basic start point rules to achieve their "purpose?".

I understand that you are not positing a god entity self aware and manipulative for this universe.
But you are positing a inherent knowledge or purpose blueprint, a universal resonance.
I can see it from the sci-fi conjecture, ....so as conjecture, why not? 
I do see what you are saying, but really you are just describing a natural universal rule book that requires no supra-nature.
 I see it as little more than the shape of this particular snowflake universe, it perhaps could've had a different architecture, but it had this set, and everything follows requiring no precursor imaginings.
Perhaps there was no choice. Perhaps pre-BB to BB gave no leeway, and the dice fell where they did and brief ephemeral monkey mind antenna was an inevitable eventual side-product, not made-to-order the universe, not made to read the dice eventually. Just made, purposeless but with abilities.
But in reality bearing one characteristic alone ....to be named Eddy. A complex chaos fractal offshoot requiring no further raison d'etre than "shit! now that we are here we may as well make the best-ial of it." And bugger the teleological wishful thinking of.....

It fails to explain how or why the universe would go to the trouble of generating these illusions of self we all share when all of our mechanical functions could be executed quite automatically in the same way that a computer continues to run with the monitor turned off. Why have a monitor if there's nobody to use it? Why have a monitor port of consciousness and a teleological keyboard and mouse port built in to the great teleonomy machine?

Come on bloke, you are attributing deliberate effort on the part of the universe to create us. Please look at this and acknowledge it.
It is one-small-step-for-mankind to generate a god from that position.

Neither am I at all certain conscious antenna are necessary for the sound of one thunderstorm's clapping to exist.
I understand the philosphical position, but the black cat in the coal mine will still eat the canary even if the canary cannot perceive initially it.

For the first part I'd say that the sound of thunder doesn't need an antenna to exist, but that it needs an antenna that converts to sound to exist as sound. The thunder itself is a multi-layered text - an event of energized matter changing form in space over time, which our particular antenna reads and projects to us ordinarily as sound. If you had a particular kind of synesthesia you might see or taste the thunder.

The black cat example, sure, I'm not saying that what we don't perceive doesn't exist, I'm sort of saying the opposite that we know for certain that there are things which exist which we cannot perceive directly and things which must be inferred logically, and so maybe there are also things which also exist which are difficult to define because they are too close, too far infra to be visible to the mind but they are part of the defining process behind our I's (oof).

OK just because there are more things in heaven and earth Horatio than are dreamt of in our(sic) philosophy doesn't mean the universe is filling(for itself) any need/want/desire/.

Conjecture is great, imagination is great, but anthropomorphising a universe somehow needing us to give it rite of existence, or even

even need coral reefs or ocean planets blooming with algae

below, seems to be a yearning for there to be an underlying reason as opposed to just an architecture.
I know you seem to shy from this, but you do still return to this.

It's the greatest practical example of where does the god delusion come from that I have yet witnessed here.
No don't get me wrong, I am not saying you are subject to that delusion, nor that you are describing a god the creator (although you do seem to attribute much to the universe, that if accurate, would imply a godlike scale, if nothing else)

What I am saying, that the need for a reason (from some knowledge/over-view) as opposed to the reason (because that's just how it's structured >sound of dice clattering to the ground<) for everything, drives monkeys mad. And so onto god invention.
Self-referencing antenna wasn't necessarily the happiest by-product.

I just want the 'oo' part of woo to be recognized as a method of examining a group of interesting patterns which can be observed throughout the conscious and unconscious universe. By insisting that all phenomena be categorized as absolutely real or unreal, scientific empiricism misses out on a whole continuum of patterns which may in fact be neither real nor unreal but change according to the kind of attention we pay to them. These kinds of patterns, I believe, are sort of the missing base of the cosmic transistor which may tie together subjective meaning with objective substance.

And again I say Immed   the practitioners of woo have been doing it for however long, when they get some useful information, then hopefully they'll present it.
Until then, there is obviously no such thing as scientific mysticism, and scientific empiricism (which is all we've got that is of use) is doing OK.

Somehow it seems mysticism is suffering the same ignominious diminishing positioning as god of the gaps.

Conjecture is great, imagination is great,  science is not lacking in either of them, it is woo that is failing to present anything useable. This in itself doesn't disprove the existence of worthy woo, it just makes it impossible to get further than pretty.

[Immediacracy]

Not meaning to butt heads, but why?
If the conversation is unfolding organically, subjecting it to further restrictions or guidelines may miss evolutionary quirks.
And if you are not enjoying it, or contributing to it, then one would have to ask, who are you to attempt to make demands from the sidelines?

Actually I can see kindred's comment as a serendipitous 'proof' of the second clause of the title of my thread . "Logic Fails to Address Imagination, aka "You guys should define terms and set a common goal for this thread (prove/disprove one thing at a time). Its not getting anywhere." That is a crumb of gold right there. This is why science cannot find consciousness - cannot recognize 'I' or 'we' or 'us' staring 'it' in the face.

In it's most narrow (and often most powerful and welcome) parsimony the S.E.W. (Scientific Enlightenment Worldview) demands that anything that cannot be readily recognized as completely definable, contributing to a common goal, proved or disproved conclusively is not worth consideration in a serious way. In explorations concerning subjectivity, the presumption of it 'not getting anywhere' is seen to be a negative.

Indeed, the unintended collateral damage of this aspect of SEW determinism as applied to subjectivity and society is the demand that it's faithful kin   abandon all hope of finding a link between subjective meaning and objective material circumstances.

In fateful irony, through the unintended but inevitable consequence of SEW founder and Rosicrucian alchemist René Des-Cartes' genius, the very Cartesian cogito is turned upside down, evaporated into the thinnest air of neurology we can conjure, superlatively fragile and so stained with illusion, delusion, deception, coincidence...non existence that the immutable and doubtless fact of a conscious subject becomes an unwanted poltergeist in a pristine mechanistic world model, a crucial omission which ironically flips the ordinary teleonomy/teleology bias of the SEW so that source of all human meaning must be zeroed out to fit in with the rest of the logical-teleological construct of the Grand SEW equation. The only recognized source of meaning and purpose in a meaningless purposeless cosmos becomes itself an illogical illusion within a logical and purposed theory of the universe (theory from theos, heh).

Through an 'organic unfolding' however (going back to Kin vs Kin) it actually may end up 'going somewhere' after all..hopefully in a syntropic direction, toward increasing subjective order and greater understanding. This is the point of my suggestion that science replace woo rather than simply denounce it's kin (sorry). The denouncing is a good start, because that's important, but some of us are ready to take a next step into a view of a universe which may or may not go anywhere.

I propose that the cosmos has to innately be able to make sense before we can make sense of it.

Truthfully bloke that last sentence didn't make a particular sense to me.

I've gotten that response from others, but I think it's an interesting thing to say, and to me at least, a thing which expresses a rather simple, uncomplicated truth. I'm not sure if I'm not seeing some obvious problem with it, or it simply exposes the fact so nakedly that people don't want to look at it? It goes back to the flipping teleology thing. How can astrophysics claim a cosmos governed by an invented human logical construct, but at the same time claim that just such a constructing logic cannot possibly exist outside of human consciousness? How does every particle of the cosmos follow every one of it's own rules if nobody but us knows that there can be a such thing as rules?

Large snowflakes are all different (supposedly)  complex beautiful unique(in some aspects) and not requiring anything but basic start point rules to achieve their "purpose?".

And what I'm saying supports that fully.

Far be it for me to speculate on the interiority of something trillions of times less complex than our own neurology, (and if such a thing did exist it would have no overlap with our own interiority - humans don't have a great record of being able to recognize the humanity in each other, let alone a hypothetical entity comprising the inside of a drop of water) *but* the snowflake example (not an individual snowflake as but our apprehension of snowflakes in general) can say something important to us on an alchemical level.

To me it expresses the teleos within matter very nicely. It suggests that when you slow down water enough, it's inner order or potential for order pops like popcorn.  A snowflake is like an 'inside out' water droplet, exposing it's inner crystalline mandala of fractal symmetries. Giving clues to it's essential mathematical nature. It's like a multiply self-referential self-extracting archive - an existential surface isomorphically mapped to it's iconic essence. An avatar - not necessarily of H₂0 or it's mechanics, (and this was the presumption that cleaved progressive astronomy and chemistry from orthodox alchemy and astrology) but of an important part of it's meaning to us. Life giving water. The indivisible source of what we are - paradoxically the most precious substance and yet most common to us of all.

I imagine that is what all that alchemical woo about the Philosopher's Stone and Mercurius was about - precious universal Truth manifested in ordinary common appearances (again, makers of Philosopher's Stone brand products cannot be held liable for damages caused by delusions, ideas of reference, messianic identification, or awful syrupy instrumental music. Use responsibly and do not operate heavy machinery.)

I'm suggesting that human consciousness is one small but highly complex of example the cosmos expressing it's essential potential inner order in a terrestrial, biological, anthropological, and psychological context. Maybe the snowflake cliche is apt as a metaphor for human individuality for this reason.

Both snowflake and person come from a seed indistinguishable from the naked eye. The SEW focuses on the existential granular distinction of something like DNA vs H2O, while my proposed (call it Reinlightened Scientific Worldview or RSW) retains the critically important existential differences while recognizing the homocentric alchemical/essential morphological commonality. In other words, just because the universe is a heartless purposeless cannibal in one sense doesn't mean that it can't sometimes speak to you in unexpected ways which can't always be excised and put in a bag for a biopsy.

I do see what you are saying, but really you are just describing a natural universal rule book that requires no supra-nature.

Not so much a rule book as a recipe book work in progress. Supra-cosmic nature no, but nature infra or super to our own limited perspective of the cosmos - well why not, but that's not important. The main action is here and now, in the dining room, our dining room. What goes on in the kitchen or our kitchen may be inside/outside/opposite of timespace, in an 'essence hub' of an existential mobius loop where we are 'taking place'. The nucleus of the mandala, the seed of the snowflake.

Come on bloke, you are attributing deliberate effort on the part of the universe to create us. Please look at this and acknowledge it.
It is one-small-step-for-mankind to generate a god from that position.

I'm using the monitor port metaphor to point out what I see as a necessity for consciousness to interface with matter at a deep, mutually ontologically intertwined level and not to suggest that consciousness had to be designed by an outside agent. I'm saying that the universe didn't create us deliberately, but that we are in fact an ordinary part of and an expression in the universe. I'm not arguing against the commonsense apprehension of the special case of human consciousness on Earth, but that's only because human civilization appears, so far, to be the biggest morphic Jenga game in town, and it's conceivable that it may seem more unique than it is because we are part of it.

Not trying to say that 'ants might have their own cell phones, we just don't see them' or something, just that if you were an ant, your society would seem unique too and something like the human internet would seem like a lot of wired woo inside warm plastic. The crushing of an ant should not be considered a human tragedy, and neither should it be presumed to be an ant tragedy. Small life forms = less nerves = less pain. Maybe whether they live or die isn't as much of a big deal to them as our own lives are to us. That's how it seems.

seems to be a yearning for there to be an underlying reason as opposed to just an architecture.
I know you seem to shy from this, but you do still return to this.

I'm suggesting that reason and architecture are essentially the same thing, but existentially big-banged apart.

It's the greatest practical example of where does the god delusion come from that I have yet witnessed here.
No don't get me wrong, I am not saying you are subject to that delusion, nor that you are describing a god the creator (although you do seem to attribute much to the universe, that if accurate, would imply a godlike scale, if nothing else)

Which is why I'm saying that the God delusion needs to be completely replaced and not left merely disproved. The ancients got it half right. Not the half about human beings having direct existential relationships with essential potentialities (Gods) but the half about the universe being something that lies as much within consciousness as outside consciousness. The reason why the god-delusion is so nearly-universally compelling to this day, in spite of the manifest superiority of objective empiricism to homocentric solipsism is because the human I objects strongly to being written out of the story.

The polar opposite of delusion is not clarity, it's cynicism. Midway between overbalanced subjectivity (solpsism/woo) and overbalanced objectivity (materialism/rigidity) we may find a balanced, intersubjective gnosis which honors both interiority and exteriority in both their separation and complementarity without having to crush one and flatten it into the other.

What I am saying, that the need for a reason (from some knowledge/over-view) as opposed to the reason (because that's just how it's structured >sound of dice clattering to the ground<) for everything, drives monkeys mad. And so onto god invention.
Self-referencing antenna wasn't necessarily the happiest by-product.

Not sure if I'm picking up everything here, but I think that our core disagreement stems from how I might have expressed my view that God delusion and the Science anti-delusion were both steps toward a greater, and desperately needed worldview. I don't see God as a complete mistake (at the time, it was the best 'science' they had), it's just that the model has been radically improved through abandoning that primitive model which only addresses the interior of the psyche and projects it outward, presumptively, onto the world (and tragically, onto other people).

In fact, from what little history I have been able to absorb, it's my understanding that even though the dark ages exposed the horrific folly of religion and contributed to the spread and suffering of the plague, it was the monastic tradition itself which ultimately fostered the quiet discipline and careful observation required to re-birth of classical thought as modern science and the European praxis of 'immaculate inspection', which has come to permeate the critical institutions of our society, from schools and colleges, prisons and hospitals, to manufacturing, farming, defense, police, sports, and high technology.

This Christian monastic influence of humane reverence for people and the natural world, despite whatever f*cked up self-mortifying, religio-fraternal perverted s**t that was probably also going on on a daily basis inside those medieval dormitories, there was born a fantastic, Anti-Christian side effect of the Christ delusion we know as modernity, just as the alchemical serendipity of Newtons angioseminal discovery provided the ironic deathknell for the alchemy he was looking for.

Until then, there is obviously no such thing as scientific mysticism, and scientific empiricism (which is all we've got that is of use) is doing OK.

Is it doing OK though? And for how much longer? Science doesn't need to become mystical, it just needs to address the kinds of phenomena (I, we, us) that mysticism tries to address but in a mature, fully enlightened way.

Somehow it seems mysticism is suffering the same ignominious diminishing positioning as god of the gaps.

I'm ok with gaps. Like Yin as opposed to Yang? Isn't the Big Bang nothing but a fast implosion of gaps?

it is woo that is failing to present anything useable. This in itself doesn't disprove the existence of worthy woo, it just makes it impossible to get further than pretty.

It seems to me that inventing new forms of pretty is 'pretty' close to the purpose of the universe. Worthy woo doesn't need to be proved or disproved, it is both the prover and the audience of the proof - inside or outside of a homo sapien neural cortex in a sane, waking, adult, post-Copernican condition.

Good stuff, man. I feel like we're getting somewhere interesting, no?

[Noman Peopled]

What I can say is that by divesting itself of the moral dimensions and subjective context of universal truths, science has actively or contributed through negligence to many regressive technologies and practices including, but not limited to:

Science has divested itself of these matters because they are not accessible to the scientific method. It has rid itself of the notion of universal truth quite a while ago, too.
Science has contributed to dangerous technologies, oppression, etc. Notice how there's so many people being kept alive by scientific progress that that itself has become a problem; all war technology combined hasn't even begun to reach the combined number of deaths that illnesses, poisoning, starvation, and other factors caused. Not even remotely.
Besides, it's not like science can choose what to research and what not. If you want an atomic theory, you're gonna be able to produce electricity for hundreds of millions of people and build an atomic bomb.

First you're complaining about the hammer that is science not also being a screwdriver, and then you complain about how that hammer can be used as a weapon.

The misdirection of civilian resources towards the costly manufacture and ongoing maintenance of weapons of mass destruction.

This is nothing new. It's been done since written history, and probably before. The only new thing is the power of these weapons. As I said, you can't separate the bad science from the good science. So either we forget about all that science stuff ... or we attempt to use it responsibly. I'm all for the latter.

The stifling of innovation and individuality through the perpetuation of fetishized academic formalism.

That has nothing to do with science, even if it were true. Fact is, western scienctific productivity has created a world in which you have more possibilities to express innovation and individuality than, well, ever.

The dismantling of public services and common wealth in favor of privatization and the withering of shared aesthetic environments in the service of productivity for the sake of productivity.

And that has to do what with science? That's been true since mercantilism.

The persecution of people involved with alternative medicine, paranormal, occult, and parapsychological studies.

Falsifying =/= persecution. Besides, "persecution" is used way too loosely around here. Persecution is organized suppression or elimination of thought. That's not what's going on; hell, people with no medical experience whatsoever are allowed to sell their stuff as medicine as long as it doesn say "medicine" on the packaging. And that's persecution?

The rise of depression, mental illness, obesity, and the coarsening of culture.

The tripling of our life expectancy, the extinction of laughable plagues once threatiening the existence of entire countries, a billion people being fed by a single invention, going to the other side of the world within fourty-eight hours, people with mental defects no longer being held in prisons.
Your list isn't invalid; but I'll take obesity over starvation any day. What's the coarsening of culture and how does it have to do with science? Previous cultures were also pretty coarse.

So many of the ills of modern society can be traced back to the failures of science to accomplish it's mandate of serving humanity as a whole, rather than as a whore to the commercial and political systems which it pretends to inform.

Science does not serve humanity as a whole. It's simply a method of arriving at a practicable moment of some aspect of the world. What one does with it is not the issue of science; it's an issue of ethics.

Better at explaining the material universe and making predictions of what it deems predictable, but scientific models fail to address many of the ordinary circumstances that ordinary people encounter in their lives.

No. Just ... no.
First of, science tries to describe the physical universe, "physical" being defined as that which we can perceive directly or indirectly, quantify, and objectify. That's not because it's narrow-minded, it's because the whole scientific method ceases to work without it.
Second, scientific models does not "predict what it deems predictable". If nothing else, it wouldn't become appearent to anyone that something is not predictable until they've tried to predict it. Since prediction is one key part of a hypothesis becoming a theory, scientists actually have a great interest in predicting things that are deemed unpredictable. It's not like they start out with "I can't predict X" to end up with "X is ridiculous and irrelevant".
Third, if you can make those ordinary circumstances accessible to the scientific method, scientist will be all over them. In fact, wherever acces is possible (such as through statistics) science is all over it.

People's lives have improved in measurable ways but have lapsed in many qualitative senses. We still do use Astrology and divination, in fact I've heard that there are far more Astrologers than Astronomers.

And a sad thing that is.

The whole hemisphere of cognition represented by the question 'Why' and 'Who' we are collapsed into a maze of Hows and Whats, reducing the concrete universe of our own experience to a sterile mechanism of purposeless replication.

Nobody said that an accurate description of the universe is something we'd like.
Besides, what you said is not in any way a part of science itself. It's an interpretation of it on a an ethical level, which science could not do under its own terms, because ethics is not accessible to scientific methodology other than as an object of study.

Science has to embrace human existence, inform it and be informed by it, not merely reinforce the orthodoxy of evolutionary functionalism. Currently we have most educated people walking around believing that beauty was conjured as a solution to a problem of motivating genetic agents to replicate.

Which is, like, the explanation that currently seems most likely. So we should not believe it because it might make us sad?
How exactly would science - a method of quantifying and objectifying - embrace values it can neither quantify nor objectify? Science is a logical construct, and approach to describing the world, a way of finding things out. Nothing more. Saying it should embrace human values is like saying my math book should love me.

This offers no explanation as to how the idea of beauty itself was conceived - that bit of staggeringly important magic is left off the table in favor of some disenchanting story about how the obviously significant aspect of beauty is not important, but it's utility somehow called it into being out of nowhere.

As I said in the other thread, what makes you think people aren't trying? We can't predict the movement of three bodies in an abstract mathematical system governed by one equation, what makes you think science can just decide to find things out about why purple is purple?

It's like consciousness. If that can evolve from cellular processes, why not time travel?

Because they're nothing like each other? (Plus, several cosmological models include particles that do travel backwards in time.)

Why is the potential for life and consciousness to exist supported by the laws of physics but not teleportation?

Teleportation has actually been demonstrated over a distance of several kilometres.
In what way does "I don't know" equal to "I' m not even trying to find out"?

Science seeks to reverse engineer the universe but it fails to include itself - order, and the seeking of order as a fundamental principle of nature. It's a form of reverse solipsism: the universe is real, but what I think and feel really is not.

If that were true, and science stated that (although, again, this is actually your interpretation of scientific conduct), what of it? We are irrelevant to everyone and everything except us and other people, because relevance is a human concept. The universe doesn't care about you. Everything you ever do will find its irrevocable irrelevance as soon as humanity dies out, at the very best.
If the above is true, how would it help us to ignore that knowledge?

To me a true science would be one that is committed to seeking explanations and models for all phenomena, subjective and objective.

I guess it doesn't matter if I tell you again, that science is a method that works only by objectifying stuff? If science can make an accurate model, its subject was objectifiable. If it is subjective, science can deal with it statistically at best, which is probabilistic objectifiation.
The truly subjective is not subject to science because science by its design deals with objectivity. It's like complaining that math can't help you understand English.

I would like to see the rise of a new generalism which synthesizes the essential truths of the multitudes of scientific specialties into a coherent, pocket sized set of perspectives that encourage people to live more fully self actualize lives and reduce the level of oppression and suffering in the world while remaining authentic and true.

Sigh. Again:
Science. Has. Nothing. To. Do. With. Morality.

We are still moving around in essentially the same cars and planes despite the realization that it is beginning to threaten our civilization, same basic medical approaches, same houses, same manufacturing - no fundamental new cures of old diseases, no real progress in repealing the religious superstition and intolerance...

So basically you're complaining that scientisits are still studying the same universe and that technologies stay economically feasibly for, what, a mere hundred years?
No real progress? Are you kidding? Astronomy is very popular, but politicians don't usually use them any more. The pope is a sad old man running a mafia family instead of half of Europe. Hodge-podge charlatanery has been replaced by imperfect but completely workable science - if someone goes to a random guru to get healed and dies, it makes news.

mainly we've gotten a lot of promises and reworking of old ideas in order to justify popular investment. I'll take 20th century scientific progress over 21st century progress any day. Let's see, automobiles, electric lights, recorded music, motion pictures, and powered flight vs Facebook, Twitter, and Viagra spam.

And you were expecting what? "Something else?" What are they supposed to do, build a bias drive for your car (which they would in a flash btw if they knew how to)?
Besides, technology - again - is what some people make of science. It is not identical to science.




Also, just because this rant was serious doesn't mean I can't have fun or be human or humane or ethical or anything else you said science is eroding.

Also, wasn't there another thread pretty much exactly like this to which I responded?

Would you mind telling us what exactly it is what you want science to do and how? The more specifics the better. What methodology. How to find things out. How to actually know something about subjectivity rather than just surmise/guess. You've been rather fuzzy on that point.

[Immediacracy]

Science does not serve humanity as a whole

Then humanity as a whole can hardly be blamed for turning to non-scientific sources for guidance. It's either that or identify themselves with scientific agenda that is literally amoral.

Science has divested itself of these matters because they are not accessible to the scientific method.

Which is why it needs to utilize new scientific models to address or even examine non-objective phenomena - not to replace existing methodology but to expand their reach into new territories.

"There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases. This is virtually a tautology, yet we seldom consider the corollary: Work to achieve higher intelligence is work to achieve all of our other goals..." - Robert Anton Wilson

Sigh. Again:
Science. Has. Nothing. To. Do. With. Morality.

Again: That's the problem.

Notice how there's so many people being kept alive by scientific progress that that itself has become a problem

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Overpopulation and life extension beyond enjoyable duration have become issues that science now needs to begin to address, if it is to be of use to the species that created it.

It has rid itself of the notion of universal truth quite a while ago, too.

Except for it's own universal truths.

First you're complaining about the hammer that is science not also being a screwdriver, and then you complain about how that hammer can be used as a weapon.

I'm only bring in these negative examples to not to say that 'science is bad because it causes problems as well as solves them', but just to suggest the possibility that there is room for improvement and that an updated worldview could be just such an improvement.

As I said, you can't separate the bad science from the good science. So either we forget about all that science stuff ... or we attempt to use it responsibly. I'm all for the latter.

Might that no go a bit smoother if we were using responsibility within in science itself?

Fact is, western scienctific productivity has created a world in which you have more possibilities to express innovation and individuality than, well, ever.

I completely agree, but I observe that the quality and number of innovations has not kept pace with the it's expression of disinnovation and conformity over the last 30 years. Our culture of progress has run out of gas and we're spiraling off into an echo chamber of derivative commercial junk. Sure, there is still some amazing innovation, but there is relatively little which ripples through to ordinary people. Mobile phones and the internet mainly.

And that has to do what with science? That's been true since mercantilism.

Mercantilism is an expression of the same objectifying worldview as the other great advancements of the Enlightenment era. Mercantilism is perhaps scientific empiricism's most concrete and enduring manifestation. A fantastic innovation at the time, but now it's threatening the world.

What's the coarsening of culture and how does it have to do with science? Previous cultures were also pretty coarse

.
Someone I know posted recently "Back from the Giants game..the guy's sign read " too ugly to get laid, need money 4 a hooker" So glad my 7 year old is such a good reader and could read it to me and ask about it."

I don't think you would have seen a sign like that in public even 10 years ago. Just saying that when the underlying worldview of a civilization emphasizes materialism exclusively, all non-commercial values begin to atrophy. (see Idiocracy) Previous cultures were worse in their own ways, but they too suffered from incomplete worldviews, biased typically in the other direction of course.

It's simply a method of arriving at a practicable moment of some aspect of the world. What one does with it is not the issue of science; it's an issue of ethics.

Again, the commercial consequences of the SEW (Scientific Enlightenment Worldview) relegate ethics to a purely theoretical status. Corporations do not employ ethical philosophers to inform them, they employ attorneys, accountants, and marketing analysts who rely on scientific empiricism (and it's inherent freedom from morality) to extract the maximum profit possible and minimize costs from any situation.

First of, science tries to describe the physical universe, "physical" being defined as that which we can perceive directly or indirectly, quantify, and objectify. That's not because it's narrow-minded, it's because the whole scientific method ceases to work without it.

Pure science isn't concerned with the physical universe at all, but rather with intellectual abstractions such as mathematics which can be applied to certain observations of certain aspects of the objective side of the universe. No it's not narrow minded, and you're absolutely right that it's objectivity is what makes it work - never said we should throw that away, but it should acknowledge that there is a whole other half of the cosmos which is just as important, if not more important at this moment in history.

And a sad thing that is.

Sad maybe, but to me more of an indication of the failure of scientific curiosity to address questions that humanity as a whole has, such as Who they are and Why is their life the way it is.

Nobody said that an accurate description of the universe is something we'd like.

Seriously? 'We' don't give a crap about the actual universe anymore? Never did? We just like to do myopically pursue a teleology of disproving teleology.

Science has to embrace human existence, inform it and be informed by it, not merely reinforce the orthodoxy of evolutionary functionalism. Currently we have most educated people walking around believing that beauty was conjured as a solution to a problem of motivating genetic agents to replicate.

Which is, like, the explanation that currently seems most likely. So we should not believe it because it might make us sad?

Not because it makes us sad, but because the reason it makes us sad is that it's a catastrophic perversion of our plain-as-day ordinary experience and purpose as sentient beings. It's not just putting the cart before the horse, it's saying that the horse doesn't really exist and is only an optical illusion caused by the cart.

Should we believe that everything that means anything to us is an illusion in the service of meaningless purposeless processes so that science will be happy? So that our pointless existence in a vacuum of epistemological fascism deemed 'scientific' won't get in the way of our important work of exploiting the planet unto ecological exhaustion as rapidly as possible?

How exactly would science - a method of quantifying and objectifying - embrace values it can neither quantify nor objectify? Science is a logical construct, and approach to describing the world, a way of finding things out. Nothing more. Saying it should embrace human values is like saying my math book should love me.

It can begin to embrace them by positioning objectivity as one side of the cosmos and not the entire cosmos. It should recognize the vital role played by things like serendipity, intuition, imagination, and humor in scientific progress. It should study how it can identify and promote genius. Science should remain doing what it does best in the areas it does best but it should expand it's methodologies to allow for more subtle treatment of subjective and qualitative areas like morality and human potential. Science should stay scientific, but it should also replace religion with a viable set of tools that ordinary people, groups, and institutions can use to solve problems of an interior nature without resorting to the material hammer.

As I said in the other thread, what makes you think people aren't trying? We can't predict the movement of three bodies in an abstract mathematical system governed by one equation, what makes you think science can just decide to find things out about why purple is purple?

Science as a whole doesn't have to decide to do something, but it can promote a change in attitude which is more accepting of those who want to find out why asking why purple is purple is such a tall order.

It's like consciousness. If that can evolve from cellular processes, why not time travel?

Because they're nothing like each other? (Plus, several cosmological models include particles that do travel backwards in time.)
Name anything that we know to be impossible and consciousness would be just as impossible. Consciousness isn't like anything else in the cosmos, is it?

If that were true, and science stated that (although, again, this is actually your interpretation of scientific conduct), what of it? We are irrelevant to everyone and everything except us and other people, because relevance is a human concept. The universe doesn't care about you. Everything you ever do will find its irrevocable irrelevance as soon as humanity dies out, at the very best.
If the above is true, how would it help us to ignore that knowledge?

The universe too will find it's irrevocable irrelevance in it's own inevitable annihilation. On one level the universe doesn't care about me, but on another I AM the universe and everything outside of my own experience is actually what is an imaginary human concept. Objective and subjective reality are both absolutely real and both relatively unreal depending on what context you're using. Why only cling to the side reality which doesn't care about you?

It's like complaining that math can't help you understand English.

Google would be a good example of providing a Math innovation that helps us understand English. This is the future. Mapping consciousness. Finding out who we are. There really isn't much else to do with all these people.

So basically you're complaining that scientisits are still studying the same universe and that technologies stay economically feasibly for, what, a mere hundred years?

Progress is exponential. The mere hundred years of human evolution recapitulates probably the previous 1000 years before that. Taking a decade off at this point in the game is like dropping into the dark ages.

And you were expecting what? "Something else?" What are they supposed to do, build a bias drive for your car (which they would in a flash btw if they knew how to)?

I'm expecting that we start turning the highways and roads into parks and gardens, living in cheap solar yerts that are made of water purifying materials, growing our own food, I donno, get some nice lighter-than-air craft going, string all the old cars up on roller-coaster tracks for gravity powered mass transit.. at least somewhere. Ten cities devoted to developing experimental technologies and architecture instead of clear-cut, strip mall, suburban nowhere nightmares that specialize in empty office buildings all night and empty homes all day.

Besides, technology - again - is what some people make of science. It is not identical to science.

Yeah, not arguing with that. Still, the scientific worldview has replaced the religious worldview as the dominant secular ideology. Now it just needs to do what it needs to do to get rid of the vestigial need for religion by engaging it's quiet methodical curiosity in the areas which religious ideology has held sway. Disproving God is a great start, but if it refuses to even entertain the idea of questioning it's own anti-God, then it becomes a religion too.




Also, just because this rant was serious doesn't mean I can't have fun or be human or humane or ethical or anything else you said science is eroding.

Also, wasn't there another thread pretty much exactly like this to which I responded?

Would you mind telling us what exactly it is what you want science to do and how? The more specifics the better. What methodology. How to find things out. How to actually know something about subjectivity rather than just surmise/guess. You've been rather fuzzy on that point.
[/quote]

[kin hell]

Immed I have just hit a purple patch of creativity, and am too elsewhere  to be properly here.
Forgive this abruptness, but I have commissions to complete, and must allow them the time that I would normally spend here.

I will continue to watch, but will step back from participation now, as I think we've pretty much run our course anyway.

Have fun.

Just for interest sake, I just noticed this gem (considering our topic) in the Apple supplied dictionary under the definition of dichotomy.

the actual example they use to show the word dichotomy in use is....

 :  a rigid dichotomy between science and mysticism.   

[Noman Peopled]

Then humanity as a whole can hardly be blamed for turning to non-scientific sources for guidance. It's either that or identify themselves with scientific agenda that is literally amoral.

Nobody's blaming them. But science has the irksome ability to disprove stuff people hold sacred; and being unscientific in one's approach to life does not mean beaing irrational, un-empirical, or illogical as well.

Which is why it needs to utilize new scientific models to address or even examine non-objective phenomena - not to replace existing methodology but to expand their reach into new territories.

Again, what methodology do you have in mind? Science right now deals with what it can say that holds true for every observer. It's a thinking tool designed for exactly that. How, specifically, would it approach what holds true for only one observer, with anywhere near the same accuracy and thus practicability?

Again: That's the problem.

Only if you assume that it's sciences responsability to deal with morality.
As you yourself state, science-as-is has no tools to deal with morality. It is by its own self-definition a descriptive process. It can describe what people do, maybe even why, but not what should be done. It tells you how to build an atomic bomb, not whether or not you should do it; not because it doesn't want to but because it literally can't.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Overpopulation and life extension beyond enjoyable duration have become issues that science now needs to begin to address, if it is to be of use to the species that created it.

No, these are problem that people need to adress. Science might be helpful.
Overpopulation is a direct consequence of the use of science, not science itself; and just as much a consequence of economical and sociological achievements.
Life beyond enjoyable duration has always existed. Besides, there's always suicide.

Except for it's own universal truths.

No. Science presents models describing the universe. What we call the laws of physics are regarded as approximations by science.
A scientific theory will be regarded as true, but never as absolutely true. It is, at no point, considered proven. The universal truths, those which we know to some accuracy, can still be shaken, reinterpreted, or even abolished.

I'm only bring in these negative examples to not to say that 'science is bad because it causes problems as well as solves them', but just to suggest the possibility that there is room for improvement and that an updated worldview could be just such an improvement.

My proposed solution would be to deal with and use science more responsibly and with more forethought. If there are indeed valid methodologies that science can apply that would enable it to do what it can't atm, great! What are they?

Might that no go a bit smoother if we were using responsibility within in science itself?

Depends on how you mean that. Atomic theory could be used more responsibly, for example, by scientist, developers, and people using the product. But in no way can that responsibility be inherent to science because dealing with what can be done and what is - as opposed to what should be done and should be - is exactly why science is so efficient at what it does.

I completely agree, but I observe that the quality and number of innovations has not kept pace with the it's expression of disinnovation and conformity over the last 30 years. Our culture of progress has run out of gas and we're spiraling off into an echo chamber of derivative commercial junk. Sure, there is still some amazing innovation, but there is relatively little which ripples through to ordinary people. Mobile phones and the internet mainly.

That's your subjective interpretation, and while I won't claim it has no merits, what does it have to do with science rather than economics and culture, and what could science do to remedy it? (Again, specifics please.)
How much of the problems you list are genuinely new, anyway? Art has always been derivative, for instance; and the notion that every general approach to art has already been used is an old one.
The amount of innovation reaching ordinary people is staggering. You have Google maps, GPS, mobile phones, music genres with literally three-hundred adherents worldwide reaching you. Sure, one might argue that air travel has had a bigger impact, but it's not like you can expect a ground-shaking application of technology to appear every few dozen years (although telecommunication alone is quite ground-shaking enough for me). With the amount of stuff that's within our grasp comes the possibility to pick and choose - or distribute our own innovations through the same channels.

Mercantilism is an expression of the same objectifying worldview as the other great advancements of the Enlightenment era. Mercantilism is perhaps scientific empiricism's most concrete and enduring manifestation. A fantastic innovation at the time, but now it's threatening the world.

I agree to a point; however, Western people have been materialists (in the sense of "greedy") for hundreds of years before that except when they contented themselves with waiting for a nonexistant afterlife.
And again, while mercantilism and capitalism both can apply science to their ends, the scientific method was nowhere near developed at the time mercantilism took off. It's a socio-economical issue that can be exacerbated, modified, or mitigated using science, much like all other issues.

I don't think you would have seen a sign like that in public even 10 years ago. Just saying that when the underlying worldview of a civilization emphasizes materialism exclusively, all non-commercial values begin to atrophy. (see Idiocracy) Previous cultures were worse in their own ways, but they too suffered from incomplete worldviews, biased typically in the other direction of course.

Again, this may be a consequence of one admissible interpretation of science, but one that does not directly follow.
Besides, have you ever read popular books and/or stories from the end of the middle ages (or before that, for that matter)? One part is biblical drivel, and most of the rest is coarse, often to the extreme.
A hooker does offer non-commercial value btw. You're not investing or even buying a product/service you need. Getting laid is very non-commercial.

Again, the commercial consequences of the SEW (Scientific Enlightenment Worldview) relegate ethics to a purely theoretical status. Corporations do not employ ethical philosophers to inform them, they employ attorneys, accountants, and marketing analysts who rely on scientific empiricism (and it's inherent freedom from morality) to extract the maximum profit possible and minimize costs from any situation.

Which has to do with economical issues as applicable within our political system. Which is vastly superior to anything that's come before, but nowhere near perfect.
Ethics needn't be relegated to theoretical status, it's a matter of choice. In your example, it has to do with the fact that corporations expect potential financial damages from breaking the law, not acting immorally. It's a simple matter of wanting more money, a well-documented human desire after and before science.
Scientifically minded people are just as outraged in the face of amorality as people who are not. Appearently, they can live with ethics not being a part of science without immediately discounting it as purely "theoretical". We have the UN, we have the geneva convention, we have human rights, we have Unicef, Amnesty International, a myriad of non-profit organisations offering help for people in need ... Nothing works perfectly, but I don't see much in the way historical precedent either.

Pure science isn't concerned with the physical universe at all, but rather with intellectual abstractions such as mathematics which can be applied to certain observations of certain aspects of the objective side of the universe. No it's not narrow minded, and you're absolutely right that it's objectivity is what makes it work - never said we should throw that away, but it should acknowledge that there is a whole other half of the cosmos which is just as important, if not more important at this moment in history.

First off, your first sentence seem to be a contradiction in itself. Abstraction as applied to observations aren't concerned with the physical universe? Please explain; if you mean that science only deals in models rather than relity, sure.
Second, science does not limit other disciplines except in potentially falsifying or supporting them where they overlap. Very few scientists are going to say that science is all that's important, and if they do they're expressing their own view that is not arrived at through scientific methodology.

Sad maybe, but to me more of an indication of the failure of scientific curiosity to address questions that humanity as a whole has, such as Who they are and Why is their life the way it is.

It's not a failure, it's an inability.

Nobody said that an accurate description of the universe is something we'd like.

Seriously? 'We' don't give a crap about the actual universe anymore? Never did? We just like to do myopically pursue a teleology of disproving teleology.[/quote]
Pray tell, how exactly does "we don't like the truth we found out" translate to "we don't give a crap about the actual universe"?
If the universe is purely deterministic cause and effect, then it is cause and effect. What else did you expect to find employing science? Should that be ignored once found out? Should science limit itself to what it can find out that doesn't have adverse effects? How could it even attempt to do that?

Not because it makes us sad, but because the reason it makes us sad is that it's a catastrophic perversion of our plain-as-day ordinary experience and purpose as sentient beings. It's not just putting the cart before the horse, it's saying that the horse doesn't really exist and is only an optical illusion caused by the cart.

And if the horse is in fact an optical illusion?
Plain-as-day is very much like common sense; workable merely in everyday life. A means to an end. Seeing the cheetah observing you and your fellow monkeys intently.
Science is a concept to go way beyond common sense and plain-as-day. Newtonian mechanics is plain-as-day in everyday life. The distinction between the material and immaterial is plain-as-day. The existence of the soul is plain-as-day. The distinction of the colors is plain-as-day.
That's mere empricism. Scientific rigor has supplanted common sense wherever applicable exactly because it's more accurate where applicable than common sense and observations.
You're presupposing the existence of something that can't be proven or disproven by science (yet, possibly). And demanding of science that it should presuppose the same thing. We just don't have the data to support the existence of consciousness (which is far from saying it doesn't exist), despite many forays. Doing that would render science not science.

Should we believe that everything that means anything to us is an illusion in the service of meaningless purposeless processes so that science will be happy? So that our pointless existence in a vacuum of epistemological fascism deemed 'scientific' won't get in the way of our important work of exploiting the planet unto ecological exhaustion as rapidly as possible?

Again. It's not that science just works around morality or anything else because the scientists want to by happy with their alleged science-induced nihilism. It's because it can't work with it, for some reason or other.
The very amorality of science you lament would indeed favor every scientific discovery with the least chance of being applied in warfare, marketing, the market, or anwhere else. What do you mean by epistemological fascism? What is science, a giant conspiracy?
Our existence is objectively pointless. That's hardly news, and in no way related to science. We die. Everybody who remembers us will also die or forget.

It can begin to embrace them by positioning objectivity as one side of the cosmos and not the entire cosmos. It should recognize the vital role played by things like serendipity, intuition, imagination, and humor in scientific progress.

These are not methods.

Serendipity is acknowledged.
Intuition has led to some astonishing discoveries that were consequently supported by evidence.
Imagination is the key to interpreting evidence, constructing models, formulating rhought experiments, and coming up with hypotheses. They have to be substantiated by evidence.
Humor is ... what? What do you mean? How could humor help science to find out anything? I mean, a scientist can be humorous, but that's about it.
Science deals with what it can deal with. Most scientists acknowledge the existence and importance of that which they can't objectify. It's just that they can't objectify it and thus can't adress them scientifically.

Science should remain doing what it does best in the areas it does best but it should expand it's methodologies to allow for more subtle treatment of subjective and qualitative areas like morality and human potential. Science should stay scientific, but it should also replace religion with a viable set of tools that ordinary people, groups, and institutions can use to solve problems of an interior nature without resorting to the material hammer.

What I get out of this is that you are not content with what you interpret science to say. You can't just demand of science to find out what's true (to the best of anyone's abilities), but only if it's also good. You can't demand prescriptive guidelines from a system that only works because it's strictly descriptive.

Science as a whole doesn't have to decide to do something, but it can promote a change in attitude which is more accepting of those who want to find out why asking why purple is purple is such a tall order.

Where are people discouraged to do so, provided they follow scientific guidelines or at least subject themselves to the same review? Psychology and anthropology deals with these questions on a scientific basis wherever it can. Where it can't, it'd be eager to hear out anyone coming out with a methodology deserving of the name that would render it capable of doing so.

Name anything that we know to be impossible and consciousness would be just as impossible. Consciousness isn't like anything else in the cosmos, is it?

"I don't know how" =/= "impossible"
Consciousness isn't like anything else in the cosmos that we know of. Considering we don't know how to quantify consciousness or even compare one to another except through the actions of individuals, science has a hard time. What we do know objectively about consciousness we have found out through science, though.

The universe too will find it's irrevocable irrelevance in it's own inevitable annihilation. On one level the universe doesn't care about me, but on another I AM the universe and everything outside of my own experience is actually what is an imaginary human concept. Objective and subjective reality are both absolutely real and both relatively unreal depending on what context you're using. Why only cling to the side reality which doesn't care about you?

These are exactly the kind of subjective interpretations that science can't deal with. In a way, the universe is my mother. In another, it's a barren wasteland through which I'm driven by forces beyond my control. In another, it's a precious gift.
All good and well until you start stating that these things are in any way true; if they are, you gotta come up with something to support that scientifically; or else propose a comparable valid methodology.

Google would be a good example of providing a Math innovation that helps us understand English.

Exactly. Math is a tool that is employed by a technological innovation in order to get you what you actually want - a book about English, containing no trace of math whatsoever. Math was in no way essential. It's mere infrastructure in place of another infrastructure.
Math can, statistically, help you understand how English works, strictly descriptively. Just how science can understand you how morality works, strictly descriptively.

Progress is exponential. The mere hundred years of human evolution recapitulates probably the previous 1000 years before that. Taking a decade off at this point in the game is like dropping into the dark ages.

No, it isn't. Science slows down where a very accurate descriptions has already been concocted, it can slow down due to economic factors, and some discplines may be favored over others in terms of expected return value.
The dark ages are a very clear example of this (although they didn't have science, strictly speaking, they could've gone way further with mere empiricism and trial-and-error).
Also, how does exponential growth (measured by what metric?) relate to the emergence of fundamentally new theories, let alone technologies?

I'm expecting that we start turning the highways and roads into parks and gardens, living in cheap solar yerts that are made of water purifying materials, growing our own food, I donno, get some nice lighter-than-air craft going, string all the old cars up on roller-coaster tracks for gravity powered mass transit.. at least somewhere. Ten cities devoted to developing experimental technologies and architecture instead of clear-cut, strip mall, suburban nowhere nightmares that specialize in empty office buildings all night and empty homes all day.

Subjective aestheticism.
Ethical issues.
Economical factors. People build old-school cars because they expect more money that way. They expect more money because the infrastructure doesn't yet exist. The infrastructure doesn't yet exist because it costs money. Research into new-school cars is slow because people already have a cheaper alternative. Research is still being done because it's expected that it might one day become the more lucrative alternative. Where is science's failure in this?

Yeah, not arguing with that. Still, the scientific worldview has replaced the religious worldview as the dominant secular ideology.

If it has, it's because it's efficient, not because it tells you to do so in any way.

Disproving God is a great start, but if it refuses to even entertain the idea of questioning it's own anti-God, then it becomes a religion too.

From what I can gather, that anti-god being what you call the failure and I argue is the inability to objectify the unobservable and quantify the arbitrary?
Science hasn't disproven god because of the same difficulty.

[Immediacracy]

How, specifically, would it approach what holds true for only one observer, with anywhere near the same accuracy and thus practicability?

Just as QM observations have led to the Quantum Uncertainty Principle, human observations should lead to a principle which science recognizes that accuracy and practicability are only one end of a continuum which necessarily includes meaning and values on the other end. It doesn't have to change how bridges are built, it just has to begin to acknowledge that the universe isn't only about the behavior of matter.

Proponents of this worldview do not have to figure out for science what and how it will conduct itself for the next 500 years, we just have to demonstrate the superiority of the model. Like the post-Copernican shift from monotheism to empiricism, the recognition of subjective meaning as the very essence of the cosmos while remaining existentially separate will be difficult to accept for most, and most people alive today will probably live out the rest of their lives believing that they don't 'really exist', but I predict that as technologies like Google team up with advanced brain imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation, we are going to find the 17th century approach to consciousness to be too limiting.

Just as micro-characteristics of speed and direction, particle and wave are inseparable (essentially) and mutually exclusive (existentially), our cosmos is to us both objectively particulate, dichotomous, provable-disprovable and subjectively meaningful, mysterious, and precious. This is just a proper accounting of our situation as human beings, not some sentimental wish. Science will recognize the reality sooner or later or it will be reformed into something that will.

Except for it's own universal truths.

No. Science presents models describing the universe. What we call the laws of physics are regarded as approximations by science.
A scientific theory will be regarded as true, but never as absolutely true.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not referring to the scientific method (and I love the scientific method), I'm referring to contemporary science's presuppositions about itself. Science views itself as an agency of reason and that mechanistic reason determines that determinacy constitutes existence. That is it's universal truth - even in the face of it's own proof of indeterminacy, of Heisenberg's Uncertainty, of Gödel's Incompleteness, of Einstein's Relativity, it proceeds by and large to ignore the challenge which full-spectrum reality presents and idle in the comfort of it's own complacency, blameless as a child and as blind as a judge - so like it's ecumenical predecessor, mired in Byzantine self-interest, selling corporate indulgences.

If there are indeed valid methodologies that science can apply that would enable it to do what it can't atm, great! What are they?

We're not anywhere near the stage of methodologies. We're at the stage of getting scientists to look through the spyglass and behold the new world. You want me to blueprint corn, tomatoes, potatoes, coffee, cocoa, distilled spirits, tobacco, etc. to make it worth science's attention? I don't know what we'll discover when we get there, I just know that if we go far enough across the ocean, we may find ourselves in a new way and that it may be well worth it.

what could science do to remedy it? (Again, specifics please.)

Start by establishing a triangular trade route between genetics, internet-augmented reality, and neurofeedback to create alchemically informed intersubjective experiences which will largely replace the need for industrial production. Help the world transition from an economy modeled on material scarcity to one of participatory value.

How much of the problems you list are genuinely new, anyway? Art has always been derivative, for instance;

I think that the stagnation of art is just another manifestation of the stagnation of the SEW. Change the worldview, and the art will change at the same time. (As you can see if you correlate the qualitative nature and synchronization of the work of early modern artists and jazz musicians with early 20th century physics, Renaissance masterpieces of literal and figurative depth with the Copernican/Lutheran reformation, and Dutch representational genius and pinnacle of classical music with the rise of the SEW. Do we need to put training wheels on these kinds of correlations for science to be able to extract meaning from them? (That was rhetorical...I'm trying to avoid adding new questions )

First off, your first sentence seem to be a contradiction in itself. Abstraction as applied to observations aren't concerned with the physical universe? Please explain; if you mean that science only deals in models rather than relity, sure.

I was just trying to point out that the soul of science is mathematics - which is a pure Platonic teleological abstraction, which, like Jesus, is in the world but not of it.

Sad maybe, but to me more of an indication of the failure of scientific curiosity to address questions that humanity as a whole has, such as Who they are and Why is their life the way it is.

It's not a failure, it's an inability.

The purpose of science is to inform curiosity. It has no other purpose. When it becomes unable to muster a curiosity boner then it ceases to be science.

If the universe is purely deterministic cause and effect, then it is cause and effect. What else did you expect to find employing science? Should that be ignored once found out? Should science limit itself to what it can find out that doesn't have adverse effects? How could it even attempt to do that?

The SEW is what is determining that the universe is deterministic, not the universe. The universe presents a full-spectrum continuum of subjective and objective phenomena - even the objective phenomena is turning out to be a rat's nest of probabilities which are, by there very nature, indeterminate. We are discovering that the universe and consciousness are essentially the same thing (but existentially very different, of course). I'm saying that science is right now ignoring what it has found out, and it is limiting itself (like any entrenched politicized institution) to what it can find out which doesn't have adverse effects on itself.

And if the horse is in fact an optical illusion?

Then we learn that optical illusions are more real than carts and in fact are their sole source of locomotive power.

We just don't have the data to support the existence of consciousness (which is far from saying it doesn't exist), despite many forays. Doing that would render science not science.

We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
beep.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
nothing can go wrong.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.

It's not that science just works around morality or anything else because the scientists want to by happy with their alleged science-induced nihilism. It's because it can't work with it, for some reason or other.

Who says that science has a choice in what it can work with? (Rhet again) Consciousness is what we have. Science MUST work with it sooner or later (or something else will - something torch bearing with a fondness for pitchforks I imagine).

The very amorality of science you lament would indeed favor every scientific discovery with the least chance of being applied in warfare, marketing, the market, or anwhere else. What do you mean by epistemological fascism? What is science, a giant conspiracy?
Our existence is objectively pointless. That's hardly news, and in no way related to science. We die. Everybody who remembers us will also die or forget.

I'm not projecting the need for the current revolution backward. I think that the SEW has done a superb job of transforming civilization up through the last 30 years, it's just that now it needs an upgrade.

The SEW isn't a conspiracy but it's contemporary denial of the plain facts of meaning in our own lives and the life of our civilization, how that meaning works, who we are and why we exist has become an obstacle for humanity which must be overcome with or without science. Epistemological fascism is a good phrase to describe a set of criteria which disqualifies all sources of knowledge which it deems weak - great for bridge building, but flawed as a principle of general understanding.

Humor is ... what? What do you mean? How could humor help science to find out anything? I mean, a scientist can be humorous, but that's about it.

Scientific geniuses ARE humorous. Ridicule and wit are instructive tools to reveal self-evident truths, to arrest recursive and non-productive neurological processes which can bog down insights in trivial distraction, they can assist in statements of the problem and conclusion aspects of the scientific method in particular. Science has to be able to grow up and get the cosmic joke - otherwise it's just Rain Man reciting Who's On First and counting toothpicks.

Also, how does exponential growth (measured by what metric?) relate to the emergence of fundamentally new theories, let alone technologies?

Robert Anton Wilson made up a measurement:

   The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon

Our psychic universe is expanding even more rapidly than the physical universe. Let us define the measurement of known scientific facts in the year 1 A.D. as "one jesus," using the name of the celebrated philosopher born that year.

Before going any further, let us ask how long it took to arrive at one jesus. One way of estimating is to take the estimated age of homo sapiens, in which case it took 40,000 to 100,000 years.

How long did it take to double this accumulation of knowledge, to achieve two jesuses? It required 1500 years - until 1500 A.D. How long did it take to double again and obtain four jesuses? It required 250 years, and we had four jesuses in our larder by 1750.

The next doubling took 150 years, and by 1900 A.D. humanity had eight jesuses in our information account. The next doubling took 50 years, and by 1950 we had 16 jesuses. The next, ten years, and by 1960 we had 32 jesuses. The next doubling took seven years, and by 1967 we had 64 jesuses. And the next doubling took 6 years; by 1973 we have 128 jesuses.

There is no reason to imagine that the acceleration has stopped. Thus, we almost certainly reached 256 j around 1978-79 and 512 j in 1982.

In short, we are living in a mental transformation space; that is, an omnidimensional halo expanding toward infinity in all directions. And the electronic center of this halo of mentation is possibly everywhere. It is all available to you right where you are sitting now. Just plug in a terminal. The machine doesn't care who or what you are.

Casual, but you get the idea, and for this kind of thing casual is all you need.

Where is science's failure in this?

The failure is in it's lack of curiosity to look beyond itself, which, as I said earlier, is and should be the one and only defining principle of science: truth seeking. The methodology of scientific consensus is important, sure but before there can be consensus, there is curiosity. Cynicism of subjective, intersubjective, and collective meaning was expected in the 17th-19th centuries, but we know better than that now.

Yeah, not arguing with that. Still, the scientific worldview has replaced the religious worldview as the dominant secular ideology.

If it has, it's because it's efficient, not because it tells you to do so in any way.

The reason it has is not important. What matters is that science is driving this bus and it has become fixated on the sound of the engine rather than the screaming passengers and the pieces of tire flying on to the highway.

From what I can gather, that anti-god being what you call the failure and I argue is the inability to objectify the unobservable and quantify the arbitrary?
Science hasn't disproven god because of the same difficulty.

Consciousness is neither unobservable nor arbitrary, it is the precise opposite. Consciousness is the agent of all observation and all meaning - according to science, the inexplicable and virtually unmentionable source of all-that-is-Not-arbitrary.

Not saying that anything that science wants to prove it shouldn't try to prove, but it should also recognize that meaning and proof are both equally valid, but they need to be treated differently. The anti-God of the SEW is the towering observation hub of the panopticon of modern life. Like God and religion, it holds itself exempt from all ethical circumscription and stands in judgment of all phenomena.

It's rigid bias toward the mechanical and inanimate side of nature is the mirror image of deity. Freewill is subsumed, not in the name of incomprehensible divine will but in the name of a completely comprehensible but meaningless universal will that is literally the automated absence of will - a projection of the self's opposite.

It's the same view as religion but seen from the other end of the camera. Instead of seeing ourselves projected onto the universe as God, we deny the existence of the self and let the universe project us as illusion. We may be illusion to the universe, but who cares, we don't have a universal perspective, we're just human beings. We care if we live or die - we can't help it, we shouldn't help it, it's all that we are.

[Grimm]

How, specifically, would it approach what holds true for only one observer, with anywhere near the same accuracy and thus practicability?

Just as QM observations have led to the Quantum Uncertainty Principle, ... (snipped for length) about the behavior of matter.

And so do I, Qixotically, wade back into this one, for the sheer fun of it.

The difference between this worldview you espouse and, say, your co-opting of the Uncertainty Principle for it is one of results.  Fuzzy good feelings are not exactly equivalent to the very quantum principle that explains how stars burn.

You see, if it weren't for the reality exposed by the Uncertainty Principle, and all that that entails, hydrogen nuclei (held together by forces that repel other nuclei!) would never actually be able to touch.  The principle describes the quantum 'truth' that expresses that all quantum particles exist not in one place, but as a cloud of potential places.  Probabilities.  Since some of their probable positions allow for nuclei to touch, Fusion is possible - every once in a while the probabilities align and atomic nuclei fuse.  

Thus, the Uncertainty Principle reveals not just some fuzzy logic about how observation changes reality (though that is a very cool aspect of the Principle!), it also reveals how irregularities occur in computer NAND/NOR gate calculation as well as how stars work and how quantum foam can potentially violate thermodynamics without actually violating thermodynamics.  By our understanding of it, we come to deeper understandings about the very mechanics of the universe.

I disagree with your continuum.  Mechanics and Meaning are separate; philosophical questions are not addressed by physics.  Rather, philosophy, meaning, and all those other neato fuzzy things come out of biological and sociological adaptation and imperitive.  We know that damaging the brain damages aspects of consciousness.  Heck, m'friend, just a half-year back a researcher was able to alter moral decisions by applying magnetic fields in a way that inhibited neural function.  The basic implication for the philosopher is that consciousness, morality, and meaning are all derived in the brain, not in some fuzzy universal sense.

It's an exciting time, honestly.  Our understanding of us is leaping forward in ways that even a decade ago would have been unthinkable.

Proponents of this worldview do not have to figure out for science what and how it will conduct itself for the next 500 years, we just have to demonstrate the superiority of the model.

For a model to be superior it must offer concrete benefit or explanation.  In what way does your model do this, especially given that you have yet to define this model?

Just as micro-characteristics of speed and direction, particle and wave are inseparable (essentially) and mutually exclusive (existentially), our cosmos is to us both objectively particulate, dichotomous, provable-disprovable and subjectively meaningful, mysterious, and precious.

I simply disagree.  The two-slit experiment, for instance, shows that wave and particle natures are not only not exclusive, but dependent on probabilities expressed over time.  Speed and direction are inseparable, yes, but energy states are not - and that does include kinetic energy states; the very definition of speed requires motion, while energy states simply require .. well.  Energy states.  What does that have to do with 'our cosmos is to us both objectively particulate, dichotomous, provable-disprovable and subjectively meaningful, mysterious, and precious' having something to do with our situation as human beings?  You do realize that you're not saying anything meaningful here?

... I'm referring to contemporary science's presuppositions about itself. Science views itself as an agency of reason and that mechanistic reason determines that determinacy constitutes existence. That is it's universal truth - even in the face of it's own proof of indeterminacy, of Heisenberg's Uncertainty, of Gödel's Incompleteness, of Einstein's Relativity, it proceeds by and large to ignore the challenge which full-spectrum reality presents and idle in the comfort of it's own complacency, blameless as a child and as blind as a judge - so like it's ecumenical predecessor, mired in Byzantine self-interest, selling corporate indulgences.

Er.  I disagree wholeheartedly with your assertions, and request that you offer evidence of this fact.  In what way does science ignore 'full-spectrum' reality?  What is 'full-spectrum' reality?  What in the world are you talking about?

If there are indeed valid methodologies that science can apply that would enable it to do what it can't atm, great! What are they?

We're not anywhere near the stage of methodologies. We're at the stage of getting scientists to look through the spyglass and behold the new world. You want me to blueprint corn, tomatoes, potatoes, coffee, cocoa, distilled spirits, tobacco, etc. to make it worth science's attention? I don't know what we'll discover when we get there, I just know that if we go far enough across the ocean, we may find ourselves in a new way and that it may be well worth it.

If you can offer no methodology, then you are offering nothing.  That is to say, without any sort of definition, this 'new world' of yours is rhetoric.  Define!  What is supposed to be on the other side of the spyglass?

what could science do to remedy it? (Again, specifics please.)

Start by establishing a triangular trade route between genetics, internet-augmented reality, and neurofeedback to create alchemically informed intersubjective experiences which will largely replace the need for industrial production. Help the world transition from an economy modeled on material scarcity to one of participatory value.

*snerks*

Genetics, internet-augmented reality, and neurofeedback to create alchemically formed intersubujective...

Really?  How would you propose to do this? How would you replace industrial production with alchemy?  How would you propose not-building this equipment (as we won't have industrial production) required to enter this world of utopia where magically all things exist?

I am envisioning a dozen people  in couches with brains wired into a fantasy world whilst their bodies are minimally cared for.  This would certainly fill the role, but is that really what you're proposing, or are you just stringing buzzwords together?

How much of the problems you list are genuinely new, anyway? Art has always been derivative, for instance;

I think that the stagnation of art is just another manifestation of the stagnation of the SEW. Change the worldview, and the art will change at the same time. (As you can see if you correlate the qualitative nature and synchronization of the work of early modern artists and jazz musicians with early 20th century physics, Renaissance masterpieces of literal and figurative depth with the Copernican/Lutheran reformation, and Dutch representational genius and pinnacle of classical music with the rise of the SEW. Do we need to put training wheels on these kinds of correlations for science to be able to extract meaning from them? (That was rhetorical...I'm trying to avoid adding new questions )

Art and science are not exclusive, however one seeks to express the world and the other to define it - that is to say, art evokes emotion, and science defines how stars move.  It isn't true that science isn't artistic, or art cannot have scientific merit, but the two disciplines are separate disciplines for a reason.

Subjectivity is antithetical to the understanding of the world around you; on the other hand, it can be a great deal of use in expressing your feelings about the world around you.  Art is subjective.  Science must not be subjective.

Do you actually see the difference?  You posit there should be no difference, but there is no subjective sublime truth.  The mere concept is an impossibility.

I also wholly disagree that art is stagnant.  This is a subjective assertion on your part - I find art to be very vital and exciting, currently.  This is my subjective assertion.  In what way does yours have more merit?

I was just trying to point out that the soul of science is mathematics - which is a pure Platonic teleological abstraction, which, like Jesus, is in the world but not of it.

... incorrect.  mathematics is linguistic, not teleological.  It is descriptive, not relevatory.  Math is a language, sir, and a human invention.  Talk to any theoretical physicist.

The problem with physics is that it speaks 'math' - and where the language is not truly descriptive of reality, it must be thrown away.  That is, your mathematical solution, no matter how elegant, is wrong if it does not somehow describe reality.  This is not a Platonic ideal, it's a failure of the language we have to describe the reality of which we are a part.

String Theory, for instance, is mathematically elegant, and thus holds appeal - but if the LHC finds the Higgs Bosun, it is utterly and completely wrong.  If it doesn't, then it has potential to be right, as the Standard Model will be wrong.  Math is not special somehow - it is a way for us to speak of reality, nothing more.

The purpose of science is to inform curiosity. It has no other purpose. When it becomes unable to muster a curiosity boner then it ceases to be science.

Mmm.  Not wholly.  The impetuous of science is to inform curiosity.  The purpose of science is to describe reality.  These things are not the same.

If the universe is purely deterministic cause and effect, then it is cause and effect. What else did you expect to find employing science? Should that be ignored once found out? Should science limit itself to what it can find out that doesn't have adverse effects? How could it even attempt to do that?

The SEW is what is determining that the universe is deterministic, not the universe. The universe presents a full-spectrum continuum of subjective and objective phenomena - even the objective phenomena is turning out to be a rat's nest of probabilities which are, by there very nature, indeterminate. We are discovering that the universe and consciousness are essentially the same thing (but existentially very different, of course). I'm saying that science is right now ignoring what it has found out, and it is limiting itself (like any entrenched politicized institution) to what it can find out which doesn't have adverse effects on itself.

Yet that indeterminisim is necessary to the functioning of the universe as a whole - it is not somehow different.  And... your last assertion is incorrect.  We are not discovering the universe and consciousness are somehow 'the same thing'; rather, we are discovering that the complex interweaving of neurons in that three pounds of jelly in your head is more and more likely the seat of your consciousness, and the 'experience simulator' contained therein.. your imagination.. is an evolutionary adaptation enabling us to build on prior knowledge and probability.

It is also often very wrong, while still being very useful.

Check out Dan Gilbert at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html - the thing I'd point out here is that decisions we make result in real changes of our perceptions of the world, whether we are conscious of them or not.  Imagination is very important to our adaptation.

And if the horse is in fact an optical illusion?

Then we learn that optical illusions are more real than carts and in fact are their sole source of locomotive power.

Or perhaps you're looking in the wrong place for power, and need to start looking elsewhere.  

We just don't have the data to support the existence of consciousness (which is far from saying it doesn't exist), despite many forays. Doing that would render science not science.

We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
(et.al)

...... ?  Huh?   And.. to the original poster, we're getting there.  'Consciousness' is a fuzzy term, regardless.

It's not that science just works around morality or anything else because the scientists want to by happy with their alleged science-induced nihilism. It's because it can't work with it, for some reason or other.

Who says that science has a choice in what it can work with? (Rhet again) Consciousness is what we have. Science MUST work with it sooner or later (or something else will - something torch bearing with a fondness for pitchforks I imagine).

What, precisely, is consciousness?

I'm not projecting the need for the current revolution backward. I think that the SEW has done a superb job of transforming civilization up through the last 30 years, it's just that now it needs an upgrade.

Ah.  In what way?  How so?  

The SEW isn't a conspiracy but it's contemporary denial of the plain facts of meaning in our own lives and the life of our civilization, how that meaning works, who we are and why we exist has become an obstacle for humanity which must be overcome with or without science. Epistemological fascism is a good phrase to describe a set of criteria which disqualifies all sources of knowledge which it deems weak - great for bridge building, but flawed as a principle of general understanding.

I disagree.  Who we are and why we exist is self-defined, not group-defined.  Philosophically, the greatest meaning-of-life is the search for its meaning; in doing so we become masters of our own destiny, captains of our own fate.

It is when that search for meaning is subverted by those who declare to have that meaning that growth stops.  Witness the current middle-east, or the dark ages of european Christianity, and, yes, the medical dark ages of the seventeenth century.

Subjective meaning is not universal, and must not be lest it stunt us.

Humor is ... what? What do you mean? How could humor help science to find out anything? I mean, a scientist can be humorous, but that's about it.

Scientific geniuses ARE humorous. Ridicule and wit are instructive tools to reveal self-evident truths, to arrest recursive and non-productive neurological processes which can bog down insights in trivial distraction, they can assist in statements of the problem and conclusion aspects of the scientific method in particular. Science has to be able to grow up and get the cosmic joke - otherwise it's just Rain Man reciting Who's On First and counting toothpicks.

There are no self-evident truths.  But yes, humor's hella useful for refining ourselves; rediculousness is a wonderful tool.  Srious cat is srious.

Also, how does exponential growth (measured by what metric?) relate to the emergence of fundamentally new theories, let alone technologies?

Robert Anton Wilson made up a measurement:

   The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon

Our psychic universe is expanding even more rapidly than the physical universe. Let us define the measurement of known scientific facts in the year 1 A.D. as "one jesus," using the name of the celebrated philosopher born that year.

Define the 'psychic universe'.  Show it to exist.  There is no reason to assume this is at all credible.

Where is science's failure in this?

The failure is in it's lack of curiosity to look beyond itself, which, as I said earlier, is and should be the one and only defining principle of science: truth seeking.

Science is not a philosophical truth - there are no philosophical universal truths.  On the other hand, science is a tool used for increasing our understanding of the reality of the universe around us.

that's all.  that's all it is, does, and can be.  I do not see how this is a failing of science, only in your assumption that it is something more.

The reason it has is not important. What matters is that science is driving this bus and it has become fixated on the sound of the engine rather than the screaming passengers and the pieces of tire flying on to the highway.

While the analogy is definitely quite fun visually, I disagree that it is true.  What do you mean by it?

From what I can gather, that anti-god being what you call the failure and I argue is the inability to objectify the unobservable and quantify the arbitrary?
Science hasn't disproven god because of the same difficulty.

Consciousness is neither unobservable nor arbitrary, it is the precise opposite. Consciousness is the agent of all observation and all meaning - according to science, the inexplicable and virtually unmentionable source of all-that-is-Not-arbitrary.

Mm-hmm.  That's not a definition - that is, however, stringing words together in an attempt at one. Do you refer to imagination?  That has evolutionary meaning and utility.  Do you refer to emotion?  That does as well - we are social creatures, and that social adaptation requires that we be have connections to each other.  Emotions assist us in that, as well as a dozen other things beyond it.  They're not at all mysterious.  

Not saying that anything that science wants to prove it shouldn't try to prove, but it should also recognize that meaning and proof are both equally valid, but they need to be treated differently. The anti-God of the SEW is the towering observation hub of the panopticon of modern life. Like God and religion, it holds itself exempt from all ethical circumscription and stands in judgment of all phenomena.

You assume universal truth where there is (and must not be!) none.

It's rigid bias toward the mechanical and inanimate side of nature is the mirror image of deity. Freewill is subsumed, not in the name of incomprehensible divine will but in the name of a completely comprehensible but meaningless universal will that is literally the automated absence of will - a projection of the self's opposite.

In what way is nature animate save that we wishfully hope it to be so? (I assume you mean in the context of animus rather than 'mobile'.)

In what possible way does science subsume free will?  That seems to be an impossibility.  Inquiry and curiosity are impossible without free will, assuming a nondeterministic universe.

It's the same view as religion but seen from the other end of the camera. Instead of seeing ourselves projected onto the universe as God, we deny the existence of the self and let the universe project us as illusion. We may be illusion to the universe, but who cares, we don't have a universal perspective, we're just human beings. We care if we live or die - we can't help it, we shouldn't help it, it's all that we are.

I disagree.   I'm not even sure how you draw this conclusion.

[Immediacracy]

The difference between this worldview you espouse and, say, your co-opting of the Uncertainty Principle for it is one of results.  Fuzzy good feelings are not exactly equivalent to the very quantum principle that explains how stars burn.

It's not about feelings, it's about meaning, of which astrophysical explanations are a subset and not the other way around. Within the context of the SEW, and through it's lens, we can view it the other way around - we can imagine that we aren't really a 'we' but an it -  and there is enormous power to that because existentially we are an 'it' also and therefore we care about the rest of 'it' out there.
 

By our understanding of it, we come to deeper understandings about the very mechanics of the universe.

By our misunderstanding of it we lose the deeper understandings about the very meaning of our universe.

I disagree with your continuum.  Mechanics and Meaning are separate; philosophical questions are not addressed by physics.  Rather, philosophy, meaning, and all those other neato fuzzy things come out of biological and sociological adaptation and imperitive.  We know that damaging the brain damages aspects of consciousness.  Heck, m'friend, just a half-year back a researcher was able to alter moral decisions by applying magnetic fields in a way that inhibited neural function.  The basic implication for the philosopher is that consciousness, morality, and meaning are all derived in the brain, not in some fuzzy universal sense.

If mechanics and meaning are separate, then we are their living synthesis.

Philosophy and Physics originate from the same human curiosity.

It doesn't matter what meaning comes out of or where it is located. It's a part of our cosmos every bit as real and crucial as all of matter, energy, time, and space. There is nothing fuzzy about meaning - it's just not rooted in existence but rather essence. Once we can plug one person's brain into another, there consciousness will no longer be merely subjective.

For a model to be superior it must offer concrete benefit or explanation.  In what way does your model do this, especially given that you have yet to define this model?

I'm calling this model a Re-enlightened Scientific Worldview.

The explanation is that when we understand the cosmos as an interplay between essential teleology and existential teleonomy, we are able to easily reconcile the paradoxes of and transcend the limitations seen in both the archaic magical worldview (Interior Gods on the loose in the universe) and the SEW (Exterior measurements of the universe replacing the Self).

The concrete benefit is to accurately locate the observer in properly projected relation to the observation. It allows us to understand and integrate meaning and the Self in it's truthful role in our cosmos and not exclusively through the narrow, anti-apologetic lens of materialist cynicism which believes itself to be impartial.

I simply disagree.  The two-slit experiment, for instance, shows that wave and particle natures are not only not exclusive, but dependent on probabilities expressed over time.

It allows us to infer that, but we have no ability to concretely imagine a particle which is a wave. They are ontologically opposite in the psyche, and so physically identical in Quantum.

What does that have to do with 'our cosmos is to us both objectively particulate, dichotomous, provable-disprovable and subjectively meaningful, mysterious, and precious' having something to do with our situation as human beings?  You do realize that you're not saying anything meaningful here?

You do recognize your not 'hearing' my meaning here?

Our cosmos (I say Our because Our cosmos is all the cosmos we can experience, directly or indirectly - so no hypothetical observerless universe)

is to us both:

objectively
particulate (filled with hard physical objects and particles)
dichotomous (Cartesian dualism)
provable/disprovable (conclusively deterministic)

and

subjectively
meaningful (worthy of conscious attention)
mysterious (incomplete, inconclusive)
precious (we care about things. a lot. unlike the hypothetical observerless cosmos)

What's hard about that? Pretentious and wordy, sure, but why lacking meaning? My point is that list A is no more real to us than list B, and that the dismissal of list B is only possible by conjuring the Hypothetical Observerless Cosmos and choosing to see our observations through that abstract perspective. You need both lists to get the complete picture.

Er.  I disagree wholeheartedly with your assertions, and request that you offer evidence of this fact.  In what way does science ignore 'full-spectrum' reality?  What is 'full-spectrum' reality?  What in the world are you talking about?

If you aren't seeing this yet I doubt that you are going to get it. Maybe you should try arguing my side for a while just to see if it becomes more clear. Full spectrum meaning the continuum from pure logical, objective physicality to pure intuitive, subjective imagination.

If you can offer no methodology, then you are offering nothing.  That is to say, without any sort of definition, this 'new world' of yours is rhetoric.  Define!  What is supposed to be on the other side of the spyglass?

Yes my new world is rhetoric. The new economy is digital. There is not going to be a future for humanity in outer space in the near future - it's going to be collective inner spaces. What is on the other side of the spyglass? Virtual Godhood I suppose.

Really?  How would you propose to do this? How would you replace industrial production with alchemy?  How would you propose not-building this equipment (as we won't have industrial production) required to enter this world of utopia where magically all things exist?

I'm being asked to give specific examples of things which might exist should civilization choose to awaken to the full truth of it's essence as well as existence. I never said anything about not having industrial production, just that it won't be so dominant if we can reclaim leadership from the forces of SEW automation.

I am envisioning a dozen people  in couches with brains wired into a fantasy world whilst their bodies are minimally cared for.  This would certainly fill the role, but is that really what you're proposing, or are you just stringing buzzwords together?

We have that already. I'm thinking more of a harmonious juxtaposition of mobile permacultural communities and metropolitan arcologies. Augmented reality to exteriorize the souped up internet to deliver a geographically extended and collectively shared experience on tap. We should be able to take a walk in the forest and grow our dinner while G??gle and ?witter keep track of everything.

But I'm not a futurist. I'm just giving you wild speculations because that's what your asking for. What is your vision of the future exactly? How do you propose a world of 9 billion people fighting over the last decade of petroleum will look?

Art and science are not exclusive, however one seeks to express the world and the other to define it - that is to say, art evokes emotion, and science defines how stars move.  It isn't true that science isn't artistic, or art cannot have scientific merit, but the two disciplines are separate disciplines for a reason.

They are existentially different but a casual correlation of historical flowerings will show that they express similar essential meanings at roughly the same times.

Subjectivity is antithetical to the understanding of the world around you; on the other hand, it can be a great deal of use in expressing your feelings about the world around you.  Art is subjective.  Science must not be subjective.

Do you actually see the difference?  You posit there should be no difference, but there is no subjective sublime truth.  The mere concept is an impossibility

.
Do you not think that I see the difference? I'm not trying to propose anything extraordinary - not trying to say that one thing is another, or undo anything which has been established. I'm just organizing the whole picture in a different way which makes more sense. Like using the Mollweide Projection in addition to (not instead of) the Mercator Projection.

I also wholly disagree that art is stagnant.  This is a subjective assertion on your part - I find art to be very vital and exciting, currently.  This is my subjective assertion.  In what way does yours have more merit?

I would agree with you that it's vital and exciting, but that it is also stagnant. What revolutionary artist of masterpieces can you name in the last 30 years who would commonly be recognized? Compare that to
the early 20th century.

... incorrect.  mathematics is linguistic, not teleological.  It is descriptive, not relevatory.  Math is a language, sir, and a human invention.  Talk to any theoretical physicist.

Teleology just means purposeful, which mathematics and linguistics both are. They are not unconscious products of human physical evolution, they are the encoded manifestation of individual human conscious intent.

Teleological (function driven by purpose),
immaterial, abstract
artifacts to be transmitted through semiotic media
but whose persistence is not limited to a specific physical object
but to a conscious subject.
 -not-
a teleonomic (de facto purpose driven by function),
material, concrete
natural objects composed of physical matter
which depend on transportation rather than transmission
and are independent of a conscious subject

Mmm.  Not wholly.  The impetuous of science is to inform curiosity.  The purpose of science is to describe reality.  These things are not the same.

Definition semantics. I don't go there. Words are interpretive, your interpretation of the word 'science' is different from mine.

And... your last assertion is incorrect.  We are not discovering the universe and consciousness are somehow 'the same thing'; rather, we are discovering that the complex interweaving of neurons in that three pounds of jelly in your head is more and more likely the seat of your consciousness, and the 'experience simulator' contained therein.. your imagination.. is an evolutionary adaptation enabling us to build on prior knowledge and probability.

To me this is like listening to someone from the 19th century hanging on to the billiard ball hypothesis. Of course the brain is the seat of consciousness but it's me - I who sits in that seat. Imagination is a great adaptation, but it requires first that consciousness can make sense of the world enough to generate a simulation of it. It can't just be summoned into being out of an objective material universe..it's not like growing bigger teeth or something, it's a phenomenon whose behavior is wholly dissimilar from anything we've observed in the material universe, yet, like life itself, remains quite ordinary and ubiquitous close to home.

Or perhaps you're looking in the wrong place for power, and need to start looking elsewhere

lol, you can look elsewhere, I'll ride the horse.

We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.
(et.al)

...... ?  Huh?   And.. to the original poster, we're getting there.  'Consciousness' is a fuzzy term, regardless.

Yo, we ARE the data to support the existence of consciousness. What do you want, a note from the Existence Wizard?

What, precisely, is consciousness?

For starters, it's the thing that's asking the question and the thing that's answering it. It's everything that disappears when you die - everything you will ever know while you live. Consciousness isn't everything, but it is everyone. Without it, your body is just meat, your home just debris, and your family and friends just strangers. What do you think you experience that isn't consciousness?

I'm not projecting the need for the current revolution backward. I think that the SEW has done a superb job of transforming civilization up through the last 30 years, it's just that now it needs an upgrade.

Ah.  In what way?  How so? 

In the truthful way. In the same way that Copernicus and Luther saw that their worldview needed an upgrade.

I disagree.  Who we are and why we exist is self-defined, not group-defined.

Egads. Really? Masai tribesman consciously decided not to be Wall Street Bankers? Do you not realize the extent to which cultural conditioning shapes your identity. Naturally we have individual character as well, but now you are disowning culture as well as consciousness? What's left? Wal Mart?

Philosophically, the greatest meaning-of-life is the search for its meaning; in doing so we become masters of our own destiny, captains of our own fate.

Talk about wishful thinking. Do you have some evidence for this? Do you think the universe is a vending machine which puts out whatever you feel like putting into it?

Subjective meaning is not universal, and must not be lest it stunt us.

Not all subjective meaning is universal, but there are a lot of universal and near universal themes.

There are no self-evident truths.

Do you have any evidence of this assertion? Do you have a methodology by which consciousness could begin to understand it's surroundings without them?

Science is not a philosophical truth - there are no philosophical universal truths.  On the other hand, science is a tool used for increasing our understanding of the reality of the universe around us.

that's all.  that's all it is, does, and can be.  I do not see how this is a failing of science, only in your assumption that it is something more.

I'm talking about the Scientific Enlightenment Worldview, but I sometimes say science for short. All I'm saying is that science needs to punch a hole in the airless, obsolete SEW and put what it already knows and what we already know on the map.

While the analogy is definitely quite fun visually, I disagree that it is true.  What do you mean by it?

How can you disagree with it if you don't know what I mean by it?

Mm-hmm.  That's not a definition - that is, however, stringing words together in an attempt at one. Do you refer to imagination?  That has evolutionary meaning and utility.  Do you refer to emotion?  That does as well - we are social creatures, and that social adaptation requires that we be have connections to each other.  Emotions assist us in that, as well as a dozen other things beyond it.  They're not at all mysterious. 

Just because something has a function doesn't tell you anything about what it is. Yes emotions assist us, but so what? What emotions do to evolution are their business, what they do to us is our business. It's so screamingly obvious to me that to pretend that the universe we experience every waking moment isn't dripping with meaning, perception, qualia - but that all of it was somehow conjured into existence - in strict defiance of all known physical laws, to accomplish...what again? Reproducing peptides? Whatever. You're going to believe what you want.

You assume universal truth where there is (and must not be!) none.

Hmm, sounds suspiciously like a declaration of universal truth. It's just an arbitrary authoritative truth though, and not one with any evidence though.

In what way is nature animate save that we wishfully hope it to be so? (I assume you mean in the context of animus rather than 'mobile'.)

In the way that we are nature and that we are animate.

In what possible way does science subsume free will?  That seems to be an impossibility.  Inquiry and curiosity are impossible without free will, assuming a nondeterministic universe.

Not science, but the SEW. Free will is the antithesis of mechanistic objectivity.

It's the same view as religion but seen from the other end of the camera. Instead of seeing ourselves projected onto the universe as God, we deny the existence of the self and let the universe project us as illusion. We may be illusion to the universe, but who cares, we don't have a universal perspective, we're just human beings. We care if we live or die - we can't help it, we shouldn't help it, it's all that we are.

I disagree.   I'm not even sure how you draw this conclusion.

If you disagree with every observation and point I make, then it would make sense that you would disagree with the conclusion. If you want to know how I draw that conclusion, you have to redraw your map of the cosmos so that the person doing the drawing is part of the cosmos. You have to let go of the hypothetical observerless universe as your primary epistemological anchor and let it be just what it is - an understanding of how matter, energy, time, and space works. Once you do that, you can bring the reality of our very human subjective experience of sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting into focus.

Sorry if I seem sniping in here - I'm really not down on science, I love science. I just want to see it break through to the next level.

[Noman Peopled]

Just as QM observations have led to the Quantum Uncertainty Principle, human observations should lead to a principle which science recognizes that accuracy and practicability are only one end of a continuum which necessarily includes meaning and values on the other end. It doesn't have to change how bridges are built, it just has to begin to acknowledge that the universe isn't only about the behavior of matter.

First off, it's not matter we're talking about. Matter is just a form of energy physics and science deals with matter, energy, and forces.
QM is vastly different from human behavior, and far away from subjective. QM deals with statistics and probability, lacking the ability to (even in principle) predict the behavior of, say, a photon. The same has been done in gas kinets, and is being done with subjective behaviors in sociology as well.

Accuracy and predictability are one end of a spectrum which necessarily includes meaning on values? Pleas show that that's true, rather than arbitrary. Besides, why would science, a method for efficiently excluding meaning and values, be capable of covering both ends of the posited spectrum?

Like the post-Copernican shift from monotheism to empiricism, the recognition of subjective meaning as the very essence of the cosmos while remaining existentially separate will be difficult to accept for most, and most people alive today will probably live out the rest of their lives believing that they don't 'really exist', but I predict that as technologies like Google team up with advanced brain imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation, we are going to find the 17th century approach to consciousness to be too limiting.

Well duh. We find brain-mapping from ten years ago limiting. In no way did they change their mothedological approach, though.
Please explain your first sentence; it seems to me that you have an insufficiently supported premise. Plus, what's difficult is irrelevant. Nobody believes they don't exist. Maybe they don't imagine consciousness in a similar way to your concept of it, and maybe they're wrong but so what?

Just as micro-characteristics of speed and direction, particle and wave are inseparable (essentially) and mutually exclusive (existentially), our cosmos is to us both objectively particulate, dichotomous, provable-disprovable and subjectively meaningful, mysterious, and precious. This is just a proper accounting of our situation as human beings, not some sentimental wish. Science will recognize the reality sooner or later or it will be reformed into something that will.

I'm sorry but aaargh.
Yes, the first sentence is a nice illustrative analogy which fails because we actually have data indicating that the indeterminacy princinple is an accurate model derived from observation, deduction, experimentation. While subjectivity is solely and demonstrably only within us. You can't call the universe X (meaningful etc) just because seeing the universe as X is important or even constitutive for humans.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not referring to the scientific method (and I love the scientific method), I'm referring to contemporary science's presuppositions about itself. Science views itself as an agency of reason and that mechanistic reason determines that determinacy constitutes existence. That is it's universal truth - even in the face of it's own proof of indeterminacy, of Heisenberg's Uncertainty, of Gödel's Incompleteness, of Einstein's Relativity, it proceeds by and large to ignore the challenge which full-spectrum reality presents and idle in the comfort of it's own complacency, blameless as a child and as blind as a judge - so like it's ecumenical predecessor, mired in Byzantine self-interest, selling corporate indulgences.

Okay, so its a problem with scientific conduct you have? Science, to me, means "scientific method", and I have been using the terms interchangeably. Sorry for any confusions. I still disagree. You yourself cited well-know limits to reason itself, and there may be others. Of course, what scientists do is what people do, not what science does. Scientists are arrogant, egotistical jackasses to the same degree as everyone else and don't always adhere to scientific method.
What are they to employ other than reason? Where do they claim that all that is not or not easily thought about rationally is irrelevant?

We're at the stage of getting scientists to look through the spyglass and behold the new world. You want me to blueprint corn, tomatoes, potatoes, coffee, cocoa, distilled spirits, tobacco, etc. to make it worth science's attention?

Again, vague descriptions. My entire point is that when scientists look through our current spyglasses, they can't choose what they see. If they don't see consciousness, then they simply don't. If they do, yay! Cool stuff indeed.
I didn't want any blueprints, just a suggestion as to how to modify/enhance the principles of science; falsifiability, experimentation, observation, prediction, repetability, degrees of certainty, etc. I'm not going to change the method with such a record unless I at least see a good reason to do so, and neitheer will anyone else.

A very simplified version would be:
Any scientific model must:
- be falsifiable in principle
- be consistent with repeated observations
- make observable predictions that would not have been possible without it
That's already extremely simplified. Now a scientist can come up with a model in any way: intuition, guessing, consulting an oracle. Logic and math have proven particularly useful yet - as you said - limited. Now that model  has to run the gauntlet in order to be scientific; failure of falsifying, its predictions tested, comparison with observations, and only finally applicability.
Don't get me wrong, this methods aren't necessarily perfect (just like democracy), and there is no reason whatsoever to change it until the method can be demonstrably improved or there's at least a good reason to think it could (I won't change democracy until I have at least a concept of a system that might work better, even if it's only a single law).
My question about methodology pertains to the one above: how would we adapt that methodology to things that are not repeatable? How to deal with things that aren't consistent/deterministic in themselves other than through statistics? How would we make observable predictions? Without you presenting a clearer other than basically "science should be more open", I maintain that changing science to deal with such things would necessarily change it to something altogether different.

Start by establishing a triangular trade route between genetics, internet-augmented reality, and neurofeedback to create alchemically informed intersubjective experiences which will largely replace the need for industrial production. Help the world transition from an economy modeled on material scarcity to one of participatory value.

That, again, is the application and economic viability of technology, and has nothing to do with scientific methodology.
Wouldn't intersubjectivity be just a way to view that which seems subjective now objectively, i.e. improve the microscope?
I'm still fuzzy on what you mean by alchemy, unless it's a metaphor.

I think that the stagnation of art is just another manifestation of the stagnation of the SEW. Change the worldview, and the art will change at the same time.

I don't see how the pace at which art progresses is any indication of science rather than culture, including science, but also politics, economy, social structures, etc.
Also, the sheer amount and diversity of art produced is staggering. If popular culture seems limited, dull, and generic, it's because of economic aspect; people consume what they want, and they mostly want what they already know. Newly developed distribution channels facilitate the process; but that's technology again.
Have you seen what passed for art in the middle ages?

I was just trying to point out that the soul of science is mathematics - which is a pure Platonic teleological abstraction, which, like Jesus, is in the world but not of it.

The soul of science? I would be thankful if you stopped using such vague metaphors.
I'd argue that math is of the world (a descriptive tool developed by humans) but not in it (the reality that said tool describes).
In any case, what follows from that? It can still very much be applied to the real world, and if it doesn't it'll be reinterpreted or scrapped. Much like Jesus.

The purpose of science is to inform curiosity. It has no other purpose. When it becomes unable to muster a curiosity boner then it ceases to be science.

The purpose of science is the production of models which serve as accurate analogies to reality. It is used to inform curiosity just as much as it's used to sell shampoo or win a war.
I don't get your last sentence. I just informed you that it's not that scientists don't want to deal with consciousness and the like, it's that it's hard, and there are technological as well as mathematical limits to what can be done, as well as self-imposed ethical limits to experimentation. If Columbus didn't have his expedition paid for (or if he had missed the new world, or it hadn't been there at all) would it have been for lack of trying?
Research into consciousness is underway. it's just that it's freaking hard, and I have heard nothing from you to suggest you know how to accelerate it. Sure, that's not your responsability, but then what are we arguing about? "Make science better?" Sure, I can get behind that. "Make it espouse alchemy?" Sure, if it works.

The SEW is what is determining that the universe is deterministic, not the universe.

What? If everything in science points to the universe being deterministic (which is not actually proven), then what of it? Science didn't set out to find determinism and interpret all the data in such a way that allow for determinism. It would have violated its own guidelines.

The universe presents a full-spectrum continuum of subjective and objective phenomena - even the objective phenomena is turning out to be a rat's nest of probabilities which are, by there very nature, indeterminate.

The latter is actually a property of the current scientific models, not necessarily of the universe. Probabilistic determinism is still determinism.

We are discovering that the universe and consciousness are essentially the same thing (but existentially very different, of course). I'm saying that science is right now ignoring what it has found out, and it is limiting itself (like any entrenched politicized institution) to what it can find out which doesn't have adverse effects on itself.

Where, and when has science (as opposed ot individual scientists) even remotely asserted that universe and consciousness are the same thing? Where is the basis, the evidence, the hypothesis/theory, especially since you yourself are saying that science can't adequately deal with consciousness?
What, specifically, has science found out that would even be consistent with such a statement other than conjuring magic/alchemy/Jesus?

Then we learn that optical illusions are more real than carts and in fact are their sole source of locomotive power.

So I see something which I have no proof for and conclude that it's more real than everything I have proof for?

We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.

Yes. Your point?

Who says that science has a choice in what it can work with? (Rhet again) Consciousness is what we have. Science MUST work with it sooner or later (or something else will - something torch bearing with a fondness for pitchforks I imagine).

My point exactly. Science will and does work with consciousness. But you can't jump from taxonomy to genetic manipulation in a few years.
It will work with anything that it's given, even subjectivity (although with complex systems and questionable evidence it'll only get so far). Again: scientists are not failing to try. They do not ignore data that isn't yet there, they'd be happy to work with bionic intersubjectivity. They would love technology that allows the mapping of brains ten times more precise that what they have to work with.
But the data isn't there (yet). What makes you think the're not trying (and partially succeeding) in gathering it?

The very amorality of science you lament would indeed favor every scientific discovery with the least chance of being applied in warfare, marketing, the market, or anwhere else. What do you mean by epistemological fascism? What is science, a giant conspiracy?
Our existence is objectively pointless. That's hardly news, and in no way related to science. We die. Everybody who remembers us will also die or forget.

I'm not projecting the need for the current revolution backward. I think that the SEW has done a superb job of transforming civilization up through the last 30 years, it's just that now it needs an upgrade. [/quote]
Please explain how that pertains to my paragraph.

The SEW isn't a conspiracy but it's contemporary denial of the plain facts of meaning in our own lives and the life of our civilization, how that meaning works, who we are and why we exist has become an obstacle for humanity which must be overcome with or without science.

The existence of meaning is not a fact.
Our use of the concept of meaning is.
The latter is accessible to scientific methodology (descriptively), while what you want science to do seems to be to deal with the former (prescriptively).

Epistemological fascism is a good phrase to describe a set of criteria which disqualifies all sources of knowledge which it deems weak - great for bridge building, but flawed as a principle of general understanding.

On which basis would you decide which sources of knowledge aren't weak? "Epistemological fascism" is the reason why science works at all. Filtering out all that crap. Sometimes it's falsely applied, and it needn't have the perfect set of criteria, but it's not like it's done without a clearly understood reason, and in fact often very loosely applied to scientists' pet theories/hypotheses.

Scientific geniuses ARE humorous. Ridicule and wit are instructive tools to reveal self-evident truths, to arrest recursive and non-productive neurological processes which can bog down insights in trivial distraction, they can assist in statements of the problem and conclusion aspects of the scientific method in particular.

Yes, and that has nothing to do with scientific methodology. As I stated above, you can throw dice to come up with a new model, as long as you test it. You can ask the stars, and then compare the predictions to reality. That's been done, in fact.

The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon

How does that pertain to my question? Specifically, how does that support your opinion rather than mine? YIf you have exponential growth of Jesuses, you still only have Jesuses. You don't suddenly wind up with Richard Nixon.
Likewise, the amount of knowledge accumulate every year can be vast without necessarily providing fundamentally new technology. Much of it will "just" be minimizing error margins.

The failure is in it's lack of curiosity to look beyond itself, which, as I said earlier, is and should be the one and only defining principle of science: truth seeking.

As stated, science is hard. Scientists are not all over neurology but somehow disinterested in consciousness.

The methodology of scientific consensus is important, sure but before there can be consensus, there is curiosity.

I am unaware of the methodology of scientific consensus. Please explain.

The reason it has is not important. What matters is that science is driving this bus and it has become fixated on the sound of the engine rather than the screaming passengers and the pieces of tire flying on to the highway.

Another vague analogy. What's the screaming, what's the tires? What's the reason for thinking science is not the bus, with politics and economics at the wheel?

Consciousness is neither unobservable nor arbitrary, it is the precise opposite. Consciousness is the agent of all observation and all meaning - according to science, the inexplicable and virtually unmentionable source of all-that-is-Not-arbitrary.

I was actually referring to morality here. Consciousness is indeed observable, just not directly, and as I said previously, describing a complex system is just hard.
Just because consciousness perceives doesn't mean it's the source of what it perceives. Also, please not that there's a definite distinction between me seeing a ball fall to the ground everytime I throw it and thinking it right to do so. One's a non-arbitrary and objectifiable perception, the other my interpretation made by a mind/brain shaped for survival, not enlightenment.

Not saying that anything that science wants to prove it shouldn't try to prove, but it should also recognize that meaning and proof are both equally valid, but they need to be treated differently.

No, they're both equally important. To us, subjectively.

The anti-God of the SEW is the towering observation hub of the panopticon of modern life. Like God and religion, it holds itself exempt from all ethical circumscription and stands in judgment of all phenomena.

If it does, at least it has something to back it up.
And for the last time: science only works because it's amoral, like math, the English language, logic, empiricism, trial-and-error. Ethics has to be applied after the fact.

It's rigid bias toward the mechanical and inanimate side of nature is the mirror image of deity. Freewill is subsumed, not in the name of incomprehensible divine will but in the name of a completely comprehensible but meaningless universal will that is literally the automated absence of will - a projection of the self's opposite.

So ... a rigid bias toward what seems to be true? Let's assume that free will exists and go from there instead?

It's the same view as religion but seen from the other end of the camera. Instead of seeing ourselves projected onto the universe as God, we deny the existence of the self and let the universe project us as illusion.

Yeah, you know, I haven't met one of these people who deny their own self, let alone posit that we're less real than the universe.

We may be illusion to the universe, but who cares, we don't have a universal perspective, we're just human beings. We care if we live or die - we can't help it, we shouldn't help it, it's all that we are.

What we should and shouldn't do is in no way connected to what can and cannot be done. I don't want to die. That has to do with science how?

[Immediacracy]

Matter is just a form of energy physics and science deals with matter, energy, and forces.

I know. I'm just using 'matter' to encompass quantifiable, exterior, physical phenomena. Matter as opposed to Meaning.

QM is vastly different from human behavior, and far away from subjective.

I know. I'm trying to tell you that QM is the polar opposite of subjectivity, and thus, bears a particular symmetry, thus similarity to it. QM is anti-meaning. It seems to me that QM is asymptotically approaching the limit of exterior observation. It's the mirror image of throwing chicken bones. Note that I say mirror image - as in, reversed.

By seeking answers exclusively outside ourselves, we seek to use the universe as an anti-oracle, relieving ourselves of the task of making voluntary judgments in a similar way that using occult divination relieves us of the task of making logical observations. The SEW swaps observation for intuition, but what is observation other than exteriorized, consensus intuition?

Accuracy and predictability are one end of a spectrum which necessarily includes meaning on values? Pleas show that that's true

I don't need to show that that's true, I'm just saying that if you model the continuum that way then you get more truth. You get life and consciousness that are not strangers to the cosmos. Science doesn't need to cover both ends, but humanity needs a new worldview that does one way or another.

Nobody believes they don't exist. Maybe they don't imagine consciousness in a similar way to your concept of it, and maybe they're wrong but so what?

That sounds like an argument for Theism, no?
But sure, people can and do keep their own existence in a separate imaginary box if they want to. I'm just trying to put a map of the cosmos that doesn't require such foolishness.

I'm sorry but aaargh.
Yes, the first sentence is a nice illustrative analogy which fails because we actually have data indicating that the indeterminacy princinple is an accurate model derived from observation, deduction, experimentation. While subjectivity is solely and demonstrably only within us.

Observation, deduction, and experimentation are great - they are one end of the continuum. They are useless without interpretation, understanding, and imagination. Utterly useless.

You can't call the universe X (meaningful etc) just because seeing the universe as X is important or even constitutive for humans.

Not if you are working with the Hypothetical Observerless Cosmos Model (HOCM). Which is a fantastic tool for mapping exterior physical phenomena but it falls apart when we try to look at observation itself.

Okay, so its a problem with scientific conduct you have? Science, to me, means "scientific method", and I have been using the terms interchangeably. Sorry for any confusions. I still disagree.

No, I think that it's the obsolescence of the worldview, which, like the music industry, has grown a corrupt protein coat so to speak. Scientific conduct in this case is just human nature - monkeys defending their source of power and security. I don't blame scientists or their conduct, it's simply signs that the worldview is no longer vibrant and progressive and needs to be transcended.

What are they to employ other than reason?

More reason. Intuitive reason. Common sense reason. Emotive, poetic, artistic reason. Fully conscious reason and not arbitrarily partitioned.

Where do they claim that all that is not or not easily thought about rationally is irrelevant?

You don't have to claim it. You just have to not support it in universities, schools, museums, documentaries, etc. If you don't relate to something, you make it irrelevant to your view. You shun it. Just as the church does to science.

My entire point is that when scientists look through our current spyglasses, they can't choose what they see.

They choose to look at things they know can't choose not to see and presume that the universe has no capacity for choice.

If they don't see consciousness, then they simply don't.

If you deliberately aim the spyglass in the opposite direction of consciousness, you can't be surprised if you find the opposite of consciousness.

I didn't want any blueprints, just a suggestion as to how to modify/enhance the principles of science; falsifiability, experimentation, observation, prediction, repetability, degrees of certainty, etc. I'm not going to change the method with such a record unless I at least see a good reason to do so, and neitheer will anyone else.

No, I'm not about changing the method, I'm saying add new methods. Turn science on itself and experiment with different methods. I'm stating the problem. Someone else can Gather Information, Hypothesis, and Experiment. Or not. I don't care about anything after stating the problem to be honest.

Now that model  has to run the gauntlet in order to be scientific

What gauntlet does it have to run in order to just be true?

how would we adapt that methodology to things that are not repeatable?

You're not getting my point that this worldview isn't to assist science in being scientific, it's to help humanity reclaim meaning in it's worldview in a powerful and fundamental way that happens to be true. It's not about an external authority which chews your food for you and presents observable causes and answers, it's about finding our internal, shared, and collective wisdom. It's to search for and present meaningful subjective truths that map to some combination of exterior existence, interior essence, or...something else?

Wouldn't intersubjectivity be just a way to view that which seems subjective now objectively, i.e. improve the microscope?

Improving the microscope is great, but unless you expect to see what water feels like through it, it won't help get at these features of our human experience which we intuitively know to be universally human. They don't have to be universal, but that evokes an even crazier universe where each brain creates it's own idiosyncratic simulation of the cosmos out of thin air.

I'm still fuzzy on what you mean by alchemy, unless it's a metaphor.

Before the Copernican revolution, ordinary consciousness was very different. Before we came to view it as superstition, people walked around all day 'knowing' that God was dictating the events of the world. They assumed that omens, signs, foreshadowings were as concrete as electomagnetism is understood to be today - not because of experimental demonstration, but because it made sense intuitively. People still understand this today 'things happen for a reason'. Today we have replaced superstition successfully with substition or hypostition. Our SEW tells us 'nothing happens for a reason'. Material cause is all there is.

Alchemy is the attempt to bridge interiority to exteriority - to find 'rhymes' between the psyche and physical existence. It's too slippery and archaic to be of formal contemporary use, but it contains essential truths to meaningful to discard entirely. Alchemy is just conscious and deep awareness of subjective phenomenon and seeking their larger connection, where applicable.

I think that the stagnation of art is just another manifestation of the stagnation of the SEW. Change the worldview, and the art will change at the same time.

I don't see how the pace at which art progresses is any indication of science rather than culture, including science, but also politics, economy, social structures, etc.

Once science began to replace monotheism during the Enlightenment era. Science Became Culture. Monotheism corresponds to Feudalism, for obvious reasons. Science corresponds to Mercantilism. In the former, the King creates money, in the latter Money creates kings (really more anti-kings, since privitization carries with it no public responsibility, wealth itself becomes the king while the possessor of it kneels to it's authority as an automatic, inanimate, digital emptiness - pure observation, no meaning.)

Have you seen what passed for art in the middle ages?

To me flat, dark, religious, repetitive - gilded dullnes. Just like the worldview at the time.

The soul of science? I would be thankful if you stopped using such vague metaphors.
I'd argue that math is of the world (a descriptive tool developed by humans) but not in it (the reality that said tool describes).

By 'not of the world', I'm talking about being composed of matter and energy in time and space - which math is not. It is not an object, it's a subject.

In any case, what follows from that? It can still very much be applied to the real world, and if it doesn't it'll be reinterpreted or scrapped. Much like Jesus.

I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of the SEW insisting that everything be objectively real when it, at it's core, are based on abstract principles.

The purpose of science is to inform curiosity. It has no other purpose. When it becomes unable to muster a curiosity boner then it ceases to be science.

The purpose of science is the production of models which serve as accurate analogies to reality. It is used to inform curiosity just as much as it's used to sell shampoo or win a war.

Selling shampoo or winning a war is an existential application of science but science, I would say, is essentially methodical, honest curiosity. It's not only that, but that's a description of what I would say is it's 'highest' and most general purpose.

The SEW is what is determining that the universe is deterministic, not the universe.

What? If everything in science points to the universe being deterministic (which is not actually proven), then what of it?[/quote] See spyglass analogy. If you only look at what's in front of the spyglass and not what's behind it (observer), you only get half the story. The observed, deterministic half.

Science didn't set out to find determinism and interpret all the data in such a way that allow for determinism. It would have violated its own guidelines.

It didn't intend to choose that, but in the words of Geddy Lee 'If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice'.

Where, and when has science (as opposed ot individual scientists) even remotely asserted that universe and consciousness are the same thing? Where is the basis, the evidence, the hypothesis/theory, especially since you yourself are saying that science can't adequately deal with consciousness?
What, specifically, has science found out that would even be consistent with such a statement other than conjuring magic/alchemy/Jesus?

I'm saying they are not the same thing at all existentially - but that they have the same essence. The are both composed of mere order. No actual indivisible substance that appears as matter appears to us on a human scale. Matter, like the psyche is a function of charged emptiness - more like an idea than ideas are like molecules

Then we learn that optical illusions are more real than carts and in fact are their sole source of locomotive power.

So I see something which I have no proof for and conclude that it's more real than everything I have proof for?

No, we dump out the evidence that we experience with our own senses and pledge blind faith to our interpreted proof, regardless of whether or not it's comprehensible. I'm kidding. That's not what I do anyways. I keep what I see and what I have proof for, and if I can't reconcile them, then I consider them to different views of the same thing - until I get more information. I would definitely question any proof that contradicts the epistemological validity of my own experience so deeply though. Which leads us to...

We don't have data to support the existence of consciousness.

Yes. Your point?[/quote]
We ARE the data. This conversation is the data. You are observing yourself voluntarily choosing to try understand and interpret this, but you're not having to re learn English or figure out how to use your eyes to see the screen. This is consciousness. The fact that these letters make sense to you without you having to make sense of them 'yourself' necessitates the existence of an agency of interpretation beyond automatic involuntary processes. Your ability to consciously understand this sentence rests upon the ability of your brain to subconsciously deliver decoded visual symbols to your conscious mind, which is predicated on your body's unconscious ability to focus photon streams (substance) into your brain as visual images (meaning).

My point exactly. Science will and does work with consciousness. But you can't jump from taxonomy to genetic manipulation in a few years...

Meh. "Science will provide".

Please explain how that pertains to my paragraph.

Well you were saying that if the SEW was hogtied to morality we wouldn't have had these great advances, and so I'm agreeing, and saying that the split from morality was entirely necessary, and that there will continue to be science separate from morality - but there must also be a new thing: Science with morality. Science that discovers meaning as well as material.

The existence of meaning is not a fact.
Our use of the concept of meaning is.
The latter is accessible to scientific methodology (descriptively), while what you want science to do seems to be to deal with the former (prescriptively).

Fact is a category of meaning. Meaning doesn't exist as a substance, it informs substance it is the interior essence of substance. Can't be observed from outside of substance, you have to be substance to experience it's meaning (as evidenced by our own meaningful experience as a substance configuration).

Not sure what you're getting at about our use of the concept being a fact. Are you saying that using something doesn't imply that it exists? Nvm. I don't want to know. Semantics.

"Epistemological fascism" is the reason why science works at all.

Science works great for those objective phenomena it deems worthy of considering. I'm just saying that by only considering objective phenomena, you lose half of our universe. Not saying science has to change, but our worldview does in my estimation have to change or we inevitably run out the axiomatic course of the SEW - Wal Mart, Wall Steet, and wall to wall monoculture.

Yes, and that has nothing to do with scientific methodology.

How do you know that?

How does that pertain to my question? Specifically, how does that support your opinion rather than mine? YIf you have exponential growth of Jesuses, you still only have Jesuses. You don't suddenly wind up with Richard Nixon.

He's using jesuses as a measure of progress. You asked me for a metric to measure exponential growth of progress, so I gave you one. It's not about jesus at all, it's just named after him like 'degrees Kelvin'.

Likewise, the amount of knowledge accumulate every year can be vast without necessarily providing fundamentally new technology. Much of it will "just" be minimizing error margins.

Maybe? Speculation. I mean I think that this period is like the Dark Ages, and that there is a lot of progress behind the scenes, but not in the established structures of the society, but in less obvious ways.

The methodology of scientific consensus is important, sure but before there can be consensus, there is curiosity.

I am unaware of the methodology of scientific consensus. Please explain.

It's not a method, it's a gradual process by which scientific discoveries are integrated into it's canon of accepted observations.

What's the reason for thinking science is not the bus, with politics and economics at the wheel?

Because the SEW underlies politics and economics. They are behavioral responses to the worldview.

I was actually referring to morality here. Consciousness is indeed observable, just not directly, and as I said previously, describing a complex system is just hard.

I don't think that it's hard to describe because it's complex, it's hard because it's subjective. Pain is simple. Can you describe it to something which has never experienced it?

Not saying that anything that science wants to prove it shouldn't try to prove, but it should also recognize that meaning and proof are both equally valid, but they need to be treated differently.

No, they're both equally important. To us, subjectively.

Is there any other way of anything being important other than subjectively?

If it does, at least it has something to back it up.
And for the last time: science only works because it's amoral, like math, the English language, logic, empiricism, trial-and-error. Ethics has to be applied after the fact.

Science, maybe, but truth no. The fact that it has something to back it up is all it has. That is the totality of it's validity is cross-referencing with other observations.

Without something to balance it ontologically, it succeeds only in nullifying all meaning, all purpose, all sense, all value, all forms of attachment of ourselves to the cosmos. We are absent. The immortal worldview lives on without us. Just another trick of the ego. Possibly it's best. Without the recognition of the observer, the self, the humanity behind the human, science is not much better than an anti-religion, substituting theory for theos. It works great for a couple hundred years, but things are getting a little crowded here now.

So ... a rigid bias toward what seems to be true? Let's assume that free will exists and go from there instead?

A bias toward what can be seen to be true through exterior measurement and observation and away from truths within the psyche. Truths like color. Self-evident.

Yeah, you know, I haven't met one of these people who deny their own self, let alone posit that we're less real than the universe.

I don't meet any young Earth creationists who deny the existence of petroleum either, they just don't want to integrate it in their worldview.

I don't want to die. That has to do with science how?

Because science needs to take the observation of this simple, near universal experience or condition and integrate it in it's story of how life came to be. It's essential to what life is.

More

[/b] essential than it's molecular composition. It's easy to imagine how a molecule might replicate itself - but how does a molecular replication come to care whether it exists or not? This isn't some fancy poetic quest, this is us needing science to pull it's head out and define living consciousness as it actually is and not as it wishes it weren't. Life is not substance. Life uses substance - it needs substance, but life and consciousness are not made of it. They are made of memory.

Good lord, I had to edit this down to post it under the max char limit. Let's try not to go over the same territory again - at this point you must either get what I'm saying or we presume that our minds don't speak the same language.

[Noman Peopled]

I'm on a semi-vacation right now, but I will reply in a few days.

[Noman Peopled]

I know. I'm just using 'matter' to encompass quantifiable, exterior, physical phenomena. Matter as opposed to Meaning.

'kay.

I know. I'm trying to tell you that QM is the polar opposite of subjectivity, and thus, bears a particular symmetry, thus similarity to it. QM is anti-meaning. It seems to me that QM is asymptotically approaching the limit of exterior observation. It's the mirror image of throwing chicken bones. Note that I say mirror image - as in, reversed.

That sounds like an interesting point of view, certainly. Aren't we straying too much off-topic though? If not, I would appreciate a more in-depth explanation (as in, what's "meaning", where the symmetry is exactly, and what follows from it).

I don't need to show that that's true, I'm just saying that if you model the continuum that way then you get more truth. You get life and consciousness that are not strangers to the cosmos. Science doesn't need to cover both ends, but humanity needs a new worldview that does one way or another.

Does it have to be coherent?

That sounds like an argument for Theism, no?
But sure, people can and do keep their own existence in a separate imaginary box if they want to. I'm just trying to put a map of the cosmos that doesn't require such foolishness.

Not exactly. I was just making the point that a physical objectified view of the universe does not necessarily preclude belief in what can't be objectified. In fact, some of the most exciting fields of research are those deal with those things.

Observation, deduction, and experimentation are great - they are one end of the continuum. They are useless without interpretation, understanding, and imagination. Utterly useless.

What's the other end of the continuum? What's the continuum and what makes it a continuum?

You can't call the universe X (meaningful etc) just because seeing the universe as X is important or even constitutive for humans.

Not if you are working with the Hypothetical Observerless Cosmos Model (HOCM). Which is a fantastic tool for mapping exterior physical phenomena but it falls apart when we try to look at observation itself.[/quote]
I'm unfamiliar with that model. My point stands though, as your statement doesn't even seem to contradict it.

No, I think that it's the obsolescence of the worldview, which, like the music industry, has grown a corrupt protein coat so to speak. Scientific conduct in this case is just human nature - monkeys defending their source of power and security. I don't blame scientists or their conduct, it's simply signs that the worldview is no longer vibrant and progressive and needs to be transcended.

You have failed to present anything to "transcend towards". Yes, no matter what you look at, it's a legitimate wish that it be better. But so far I have a hard time understanding what this thread is even about, as it's very light on specifics; no clear idea what it should be replaced with.

More reason. Intuitive reason. Common sense reason. Emotive, poetic, artistic reason. Fully conscious reason and not arbitrarily partitioned.

Those are employed in many fields inside and outside science. They all have their limits. Intuition has brought many scientifice achievements; it is not a reliable method though, thus the need for testing.
I am unaware of unconscious reason, specifically as a method or world view.
What do you mean by "arbitrarily partitioned"? Science doesn't posit that X is outside its reach randomly. If it does, it has something to back that claim up; and even that doesn't prevent it from reexamining those topics from consciousness to efficacy of mumbling random words over a sick guy.

You don't have to claim it. You just have to not support it in universities, schools, museums, documentaries, etc. If you don't relate to something, you make it irrelevant to your view. You shun it. Just as the church does to science.

How is that science's problem/fault instead of a societal one?

They choose to look at things they know can't choose not to see and presume that the universe has no capacity for choice.

It is not a presumption if they have arguments. And the view you present is not by any means a universally accepted view among scientists.

If you deliberately aim the spyglass in the opposite direction of consciousness, you can't be surprised if you find the opposite of consciousness.

There is no such thing as the opposite of consciousness.
In what way do you suggest they tackle consciousness other than by what they're already doing?

No, I'm not about changing the method, I'm saying add new methods. Turn science on itself and experiment with different methods.

Science is not modular. An addition is a change.

What gauntlet does it have to run in order to just be true?

Who says such a gauntlet exists?

You're not getting my point that this worldview isn't to assist science in being scientific, it's to help humanity reclaim meaning in it's worldview in a powerful and fundamental way that happens to be true. It's not about an external authority which chews your food for you and presents observable causes and answers, it's about finding our internal, shared, and collective wisdom. It's to search for and present meaningful subjective truths that map to some combination of exterior existence, interior essence, or...something else?

I got that point. In fact, I already pointed out why I think science has no business doing that. It's a tool made specifically for doing something else entirely.
It's not a search for meaningful subjective truths; how would that even work, with science being a bunch of methods formulated specifically to eliminate the subjective as much as possible?

Improving the microscope is great, but unless you expect to see what water feels like through it, it won't help get at these features of our human experience which we intuitively know to be universally human. They don't have to be universal, but that evokes an even crazier universe where each brain creates it's own idiosyncratic simulation of the cosmos out of thin air.

Again, why is it or should it be science's business to help us understand the human experience which we think and believe are universal.
In no way does an idiosyncratic image of the universe forming out of "thin air" follow from a lack of universal human truths. Unles you mean cerebral architecture.

Before we came to view it as superstition, people walked around all day 'knowing' that God was dictating the events of the world. They assumed that omens, signs, foreshadowings were as concrete as electomagnetism is understood to be today - not because of experimental demonstration, but because it made sense intuitively. People still understand this today 'things happen for a reason'. Today we have replaced superstition successfully with substition or hypostition. Our SEW tells us 'nothing happens for a reason'. Material cause is all there is.

Things don't happen for a reason unless you mean "cause". Shit just happens. There is no good reason to assume otherwise; I consider this common sense.
Scientists don't view consciousness as a superstition. At all. Why would they even be trying to research it if they did ...

Alchemy is the attempt to bridge interiority to exteriority - to find 'rhymes' between the psyche and physical existence. It's too slippery and archaic to be of formal contemporary use, but it contains essential truths to meaningful to discard entirely. Alchemy is just conscious and deep awareness of subjective phenomenon and seeking their larger connection, where applicable.

Except that when I look at it, without using any scientific methodology at all, I merely find out that it's been wrong about everything except for lucky hits well within the plausible statistical distribution.
What exteriority? Everything we can perceive is a part of the physical universe by definition (although not necessarily accessible to science-as-is).

Once science began to replace monotheism during the Enlightenment era. Science Became Culture. Monotheism corresponds to Feudalism, for obvious reasons. Science corresponds to Mercantilism. In the former, the King creates money, in the latter Money creates kings (really more anti-kings, since privitization carries with it no public responsibility, wealth itself becomes the king while the possessor of it kneels to it's authority as an automatic, inanimate, digital emptiness - pure observation, no meaning.)

First of all, relevant differences in all your illustrative examples. I wonder what a historian would say to your model.
Second, science is part of culture. It does not constitute it. Just turn on your TV, watch some commercials, a political debate, anything, and see how many fallacious arguments you find. Comparatively few people care about the scientific method except when it produces technology; certainly not enough to apply it.

To me flat, dark, religious, repetitive - gilded dullnes. Just like the worldview at the time.

Just my point. So what's to complain about now?

By 'not of the world', I'm talking about being composed of matter and energy in time and space - which math is not. It is not an object, it's a subject.

Argh. We really should've defined terms beforehand. Is this how you use "subjectivity" all along? I'd just have called it a model.

I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of the SEW insisting that everything be objectively real when it, at it's core, are based on abstract principles.

That would be because science demonstrably follows up with repeatable results. In other words, it's economical. We don't need any other measure than empiricism to see that.
It does not insist that everything be objectively real. It's just that it was made for dealing with the objectively real. Just like geometry was made for dealing with shapes.
Plus, once you delve into scientific philosophy, several assumptions are flat-out stated. It's an if-then truth. I also think that it's one of the strongest and most admirable suits of science to create accurate descriptions from a whole bunch of uncertainties.

See spyglass analogy. If you only look at what's in front of the spyglass and not what's behind it (observer), you only get half the story. The observed, deterministic half.

If what's behind you is invisible you can't tell either way.

It didn't intend to choose that, but in the words of Geddy Lee 'If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice'.

That's not what I said. In no way does finding determinism equal not having considered alternatives.

I'm saying they are not the same thing at all existentially - but that they have the same essence. The are both composed of mere order. No actual indivisible substance that appears as matter appears to us on a human scale. Matter, like the psyche is a function of charged emptiness - more like an idea than ideas are like molecules

Again, I see nothing but a vague point of view. A good example of one that scientific methodology can't touch, no less.

No, we dump out the evidence that we experience with our own senses and pledge blind faith to our interpreted proof, regardless of whether or not it's comprehensible. I'm kidding. That's not what I do anyways. I keep what I see and what I have proof for, and if I can't reconcile them, then I consider them to different views of the same thing - until I get more information. I would definitely question any proof that contradicts the epistemological validity of my own experience so deeply though.

That's what everybody does. Nobody lives their lives by scientific methodology.

We ARE the data. This conversation is the data. You are observing yourself voluntarily choosing to try understand and interpret this, but you're not having to re learn English or figure out how to use your eyes to see the screen. This is consciousness.

By evidence, I meant scientifically valid evidence.
Empirical evidence, yes. I perceive myself.

Meh. "Science will provide".

Maybe it won't. Just saying that science find something out, pronto, won't work.

Well you were saying that if the SEW was hogtied to morality we wouldn't have had these great advances, and so I'm agreeing, and saying that the split from morality was entirely necessary, and that there will continue to be science separate from morality - but there must also be a new thing: Science with morality. Science that discovers meaning as well as material.

Okay, thanks. See my remark about addition constituting change.

Fact is a category of meaning. Meaning doesn't exist as a substance, it informs substance it is the interior essence of substance. Can't be observed from outside of substance, you have to be substance to experience it's meaning (as evidenced by our own meaningful experience as a substance configuration).

Please define every noun in that paragraph, except for the first sentence (which I agree with).
Sorry to be an ass, I just don't see how this paragraph is any different from a new age philosophy.

Not sure what you're getting at about our use of the concept being a fact. Are you saying that using something doesn't imply that it exists? Nvm. I don't want to know. Semantics.

My fault for not specifying the I meant inaccessible objective facts (i.e. that which we are trying to describe) and accessible empirical facts (i.e. that which we consider factual about that which we are trying to describe).

Yes, and that has nothing to do with scientific methodology.

How do you know that?[/quote]
Because, as stated, people don't lead their lives according to scientific methodology, nor does a certain behavior follow from science.

He's using jesuses as a measure of progress. You asked me for a metric to measure exponential growth of progress, so I gave you one.

That's wasn't a measure, it was a comparison. I know what exponential growth is. I wanted to know how you would measure scientific progress; according to applicability? Complexity?

Likewise, the amount of knowledge accumulate every year can be vast without necessarily providing fundamentally new technology. Much of it will "just" be minimizing error margins.

Maybe? Speculation.[/quote]
Er ... no. Actually, the newer models demonstrably need more and more financial support and computing and brain time to get results. That would be because to find something new we have to learn more and more old stuff as a foundation.

It's not a method, it's a gradual process by which scientific discoveries are integrated into it's canon of accepted observations.

Because the SEW underlies politics and economics. They are behavioral responses to the worldview.

That's nice and all, but I still have a hard time picturing a cultural standard as a driver. If anything, it'd be a broken bus.

I don't think that it's hard to describe because it's complex, it's hard because it's subjective. Pain is simple. Can you describe it to something which has never experienced it?

Yes, but dealing with it scientifically is incredibly complex if it can be done at all.

Is there any other way of anything being important other than subjectively?

Of course not.

Science, maybe, but truth no. The fact that it has something to back it up is all it has.

Yes, that's how I meant it.

Without something to balance it ontologically, it succeeds only in nullifying all meaning, all purpose, all sense, all value, all forms of attachment of ourselves to the cosmos. We are absent.

Yes. And a good thing that is when you're trying to describe what's true independently of the observer.

Yeah, you know, I haven't met one of these people who deny their own self, let alone posit that we're less real than the universe.

I don't meet any young Earth creationists who deny the existence of petroleum either, they just don't want to integrate it in their worldview.[/quote]
And that was a rebuttal how?

Because science needs to take the observation of this simple, near universal experience or condition and integrate it in it's story of how life came to be. It's essential to what life is.

More

[/b] essential than it's molecular composition. It's easy to imagine how a molecule might replicate itself - but how does a molecular replication come to care whether it exists or not? This isn't some fancy poetic quest, this is us needing science to pull it's head out and define living consciousness as it actually is and not as it wishes it weren't. Life is not substance. Life uses substance - it needs substance, but life and consciousness are not made of it. They are made of memory.

Memory is demonstrably physical.
Apart from that, essentiality is a human concept that is incompitable with the scientific method. The universality of a beneficial trait should not be surprising in light of evolution; the emergence would indeed be a field worthy of study.
And it's not about "wishing" or not.

[Immediacracy]

I would appreciate a more in-depth explanation (as in, what's "meaning", where the symmetry is exactly, and what follows from it).

Not so much a point of view as just an ad-hoc examination of the similarities and differences between extreme objectivity (with QM being a particularly interesting example) and extreme subjectivity (with divination - Tarot, I Ching, Ouija board, chicken bones, etc) being an example). I find that both extremes are similar in that they deal with a layer of reality furthest from ordinary human experience, intangible, ephemeral, enigmatic, highly esoteric. They are diametrically opposed forms of augury, with the chicken bone side seeking wisdom from subjective influences - from the infra-spiritual realm of who and why - ancestors, entities, impartial observers of our lives who lend insight through highly subjective recognition of subtle coincidental patterns.

Chicken Bones                                          Quantum Mechanics
spiritual                                                    physical
pure faith (no empirical anchor)                    pure evidence (no inspiring meaning)
augurs a world of charismatic wisdom            validates a world of pure impartial probabilities
maps to the now, from the 'top' down            maps to all time, bottom up
cynics ridicule, superstitious revere               new age embraces, physicists struggle
asks the universe a question                        discovers a universal answer

Does it have to be coherent?

If there's a choice for coherent, sure why not?

Not exactly. I was just making the point that a physical objectified view of the universe does not necessarily preclude belief in what can't be objectified. In fact, some of the most exciting fields of research are those deal with those things.

Yes, but how do you reconcile studying things which can't be objectified when the worldview you are operating under disqualifies them from the universe?

Observation, deduction, and experimentation are great - they are one end of the continuum. They are useless without interpretation, understanding, and imagination. Utterly useless.

What's the other end of the continuum? What's the continuum and what makes it a continuum?

Continuum of scientific methods

Subjective methods                                  Objective methods
interpretation                                          Observation
understanding                                         Deduction
imagination                                             Experimentation

What makes it a continuum is the graduated progression of techniques between the poles which combine varying degrees of interior and exterior questioning. In between, I would put things like consensus, communication, teaching/learning

You can't call the universe X (meaningful etc) just because seeing the universe as X is important or even constitutive for humans.

If you drop the conceit of a hypothetical observerless universe and work with the literal reality we experience - using all of the tools and observations at our disposal, inner and outer, then we find that the universe we experience is indeed half homo-centric and half cosmo-centric, and we find that the totality of our cosmos is an indivisible fusion of the two. Further, I would say that our selves, our lives, our planet, as such an integral whole is both more formally accurate and informally pragmatic.

You have failed to present anything to "transcend towards". Yes, no matter what you look at, it's a legitimate wish that it be better. But so far I have a hard time understanding what this thread is even about, as it's very light on specifics; no clear idea what it should be replaced with.

Transcend towards and replace with a Reinlightened Scientific Worldview, which honors both the subjective and objective, matter and meaning as equal partners.

What do you mean by "arbitrarily partitioned"? Science doesn't posit that X is outside its reach randomly. If it does, it has something to back that claim up; and even that doesn't prevent it from reexamining those topics from consciousness to efficacy of mumbling random words over a sick guy.

This is just dwelling on semantics. What is and what is not science. The point is that as long as our worldview is scientific, then the world looks to scientific authority for answers. If science continues to focus only on half of the universe, then there will either have to be a realignment in our worldview away from science or the world will continue to suffer the consequences of an econo-fascist "technosis externality clusterfuck" (to quote James Howard Kuntsler) taken to to fundamentalist extremes.

You don't have to claim it. You just have to not support it in universities, schools, museums, documentaries, etc. If you don't relate to something, you make it irrelevant to your view. You shun it. Just as the church does to science.

How is that science's problem/fault instead of a societal one?

See above. Science is driving the bus. I might even suggest that society no longer even exists in a meaningful way, it's just economic pornography.

It is not a presumption if they have arguments. And the view you present is not by any means a universally accepted view among scientists.

I'm not saying they don't have arguments, I'm just explaining why science's study of things it can study, in the way it wants to study them prevents it from learning important truths which can only come from outside of it's comfort zone.

If you deliberately aim the spyglass in the opposite direction of consciousness, you can't be surprised if you find the opposite of consciousness.

There is no such thing as the opposite of consciousness.
In what way do you suggest they tackle consciousness other than by what they're already doing?

The opposite of consciousness would be anything which has no self-awareness, no meaning, no purpose, pure random probability...much like QM.

It's not a matter so much of tackling consciousness - I mean I'd like to see a lot more Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation work going on, more kinds of imaging and sensing technologies for the nervous system, cyber-sensory extensions, etc but at this point I'm just proposing that we first need to acknowledge that matter and meaning are equally fundamental and intertwined in our cosmos.

Science is not modular. An addition is a change.

Science is far too general a term to get into a semantic discussion over. Science. It's what she blinded me with.

I got that point. In fact, I already pointed out why I think science has no business doing that. It's a tool made specifically for doing something else entirely.
It's not a search for meaningful subjective truths; how would that even work, with science being a bunch of methods formulated specifically to eliminate the subjective as much as possible?

Supposing I'm right, and that humanity is on a clear collision course with a dystopian nightmare of unprecedented misery for unprecedented numbers of people, and that this trajectory is the consequence of the Scientific Enlightenment Worldview. Do you think that the fact that this worldview is designed to go in this one doomed direction is a valid excuse not to try to change it? If not science, who? Who else could conceivable revise this worldview?

Improving the microscope is great, but unless you expect to see what water feels like through it, it won't help get at these features of our human experience which we intuitively know to be universally human. They don't have to be universal, but that evokes an even crazier universe where each brain creates it's own idiosyncratic simulation of the cosmos out of thin air.

Again, why is it or should it be science's business to help us understand the human experience which we think and believe are universal.

Because science is in charge of our collective truth at the moment. It's up to science to continue that role or not.

In no way does an idiosyncratic image of the universe forming out of "thin air" follow from a lack of universal human truths. Unles you mean cerebral architecture.

I mean that something like a circle is either a universal human truth or everyone's brain independently reinvents circularity itself when they are born. The latter is a the crazy, thin air option (although the brain probably does discover circularity after birth, it's really more of a rediscovery of something that all humans are wired to be able to discover).

Things don't happen for a reason unless you mean "cause". s**t just happens. There is no good reason to assume otherwise; I consider this common sense.

Yet this belief system is wildly popular the world over.

Scientists don't view consciousness as a superstition. At all. Why would they even be trying to research it if they did ...

I think you may have touched on a deeper truth than you intended. I would say that it may be the case that consciousness is superstition. Literally. Self awareness and pattern recognition are rooted in being able to project order and meaning into an otherwise incomprehensible flood of meaningless energy bombardment. It's an empirically correlated form of apophenia - a multiply layered 'belief system'.

Except that when I look at it, without using any scientific methodology at all, I merely find out that it's been wrong about everything except for lucky hits well within the plausible statistical distribution.

No, no, even without getting into what I'm talking about they got a lot of things right. Medicine, pharmacology, metallurgy, laboratory procedures and methods to name a few http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/15/good_as_gold/ (annoying popups). But more than that, if you look at the ideas of alchemists like Robert Fludd, Paracelsus, Goethe, not to mention Isaac Newton and Rene DesCartes, you'll find a tremendous body of work devoted to understanding consciousness - symbols, forms, models of inner states. The content may not be particularly useful to build upon but the forms are revealing of timeless architectures of subjective resonance and anthropologically significant meaning. Alchemy is huge.

What exteriority? Everything we can perceive is a part of the physical universe by definition (although not necessarily accessible to science-as-is).

How about a dream? A dream is an example of far-interiority. We perceive it, do we not? Is the content of dream part of either a physical or exterior reality? Mmm, not really no. Dream activity can be detected externally but it's really just a physical shadow of the dream without any meaningful interior subjective experience.

Second, science is part of culture. It does not constitute it. Just turn on your TV, watch some commercials, a political debate, anything, and see how many fallacious arguments you find. Comparatively few people care about the scientific method except when it produces technology; certainly not enough to apply it.

Well sure, just as the average religious person doesn't care that science disproves their faith...but if the Pope went on tv and said that that there is no God, no heaven, etc, then you would have a massive shift of religious people moving out of delusional belief systems into less delusional belief systems.

To me flat, dark, religious, repetitive - gilded dullnes. Just like the worldview at the time.

Just my point. So what's to complain about now?

Now the worldview is mechanistic, economic, deterministic, arbitrary, confused, complex, cynical, amoral, narcissistic, superficial, callow, craven, mired in groupthink, reactive, condescending, infantilizing, adulterating, overprotective, anxious, deluded, wasteful, cheap, greedy, deceptive, disingenuous, sociopathic, abstractionist, extroverted, irresponsible, exhausted, bankrupt, impotent, indecisive.

By 'not of the world', I'm talking about being composed of matter and energy in time and space - which math is not. It is not an object, it's a subject.

Argh. We really should've defined terms beforehand. Is this how you use "subjectivity" all along? I'd just have called it a model.

How do you define subjective?

It's just that it was made for dealing with the objectively real. Just like geometry was made for dealing with shapes.

I agree, I'm just saying that we are at the point now that we have discovered that science, or whatever discipline can rise to the challenge, needs to begin to come back around the great orbit to synthesize what we have learned into a worldview that is subjectively and objectively valid.

See spyglass analogy. If you only look at what's in front of the spyglass and not what's behind it (observer), you only get half the story. The observed, deterministic half.

If what's behind you is invisible you can't tell either way.

Then you stand in front of a mirror.

I'm saying they are not the same thing at all existentially - but that they have the same essence. The are both composed of mere order. No actual indivisible substance that appears as matter appears to us on a human scale. Matter, like the psyche is a function of charged emptiness - more like an idea than ideas are like molecules

Again, I see nothing but a vague point of view. A good example of one that scientific methodology can't touch, no less.

So it wouldn't matter if it's 100% accurate? If this model of the universe composed of order rather than matter, which unites consciousness, life, and physics rather than distorting the former into meaningless random illusions of the latter - if that is true, and the Scientific Enlightenment Worldview is, like monotheism, a flawed, partial view of the cosmos which is leading us collectively and individually down an undesirable and fully avoidable path...still it doesn't matter? The building is on fire and you are the one with the firehose but you don't use it because it's not in your job description?

That's what everybody does. Nobody lives their lives by scientific methodology.

That's the problem. If we had a scientific methodology which was whole and complete, then people would live their lives by it, just as people live their lives now by astrology and religion.

We ARE the data. This conversation is the data. You are observing yourself voluntarily choosing to try understand and interpret this, but you're not having to re learn English or figure out how to use your eyes to see the screen. This is consciousness.

By evidence, I meant scientifically valid evidence.
Empirical evidence, yes. I perceive myself.

So you don't see the fact that you are not scientifically valid as a problem?

Fact is a category of meaning. Meaning doesn't exist as a substance, it informs substance it is the interior essence of substance. Can't be observed from outside of substance, you have to be substance to experience it's meaning (as evidenced by our own meaningful experience as a substance configuration).

Please define every noun in that paragraph, except for the first sentence (which I agree with).
Sorry to be an ass, I just don't see how this paragraph is any different from a new age philosophy.

Meaning (semiotic interpretation, intellectual coherence, order, gestalt pattern, logic, emotion, beauty, etc) doesn't exist as a substance. (has almost no existential physical content - no mass, no specific gravity or melting point, no molecular or atomic composition).

it informs substance like a house built of Legos, 'Meaning', order, or pattern is the shape and quality that makes the Lego house different from a pile of Legos.

it is the interior essence of substance

Our own subjective consciousness perceives itself to be interior to the head. We presume that whatever subjectivity exists in animals, that it is also interior to the animal's nervous system. On a molecular level, it is the specific complex interactions between specialized neurological tissues which produce, and thus interact with, our human subjective constructs.

In these synaptic clefts and neurotransmitter paths we see no evidence of any sentience whatsoever - we see no miniature words or pictures for memories - just complex biochemical encodings - patterns. Those patterns are biochemistry and neurology on the outside, thoughts, feelings, memories, intentions on the inside. They aren't the same thing. Why not?

I think why not is because matter - substance, has an interior as well as an exterior. The interior cannot be examined directly from the outside. When we look at dynamic images of the brain we look at just the substance - the neuroelectric Legos which the Self shapes into it's house from the inside. The outside of the house is the personality, the face, the voice, the signature - the character and destiny.

For this to be reconciled with what we know about biology, chemistry, and physics, and the fact that we find no great barrier separating them, I think that it's logical to trace the origin of the interiority of complex neurologies to the interiority of it's simpler elements. If consciousness were an elaborate orchestration of molecular activity, (which is exactly what it appears to be on the outside), then why wouldn't molecular activity be a bit like we are on the inside? Is a neuron really much different from a protozoa? Is a cell pattern really much different from an atom pattern?

Look at our internet, our computer. What is it? Plastic. Germanium. Silicon. A bunch of junk with a few watts of electrical power jiggling around in it. The only thing that makes it important is because of the pattern we have used to shape the junk. The internet isn't in the routers, or the servers, or the local cache of memory - it's in our human experience of those things.

I wanted to know how you would measure scientific progress; according to applicability? Complexity?

I would measure novelty, qualitative improvements of civic life and individual understanding, control over our inner and outer environments...

Er ... no. Actually, the newer models demonstrably need more and more financial support and computing and brain time to get results.

Yes, but don't we provide more financial support to more scientists with more tools to use more brain time?

Yes. And a good thing that is when you're trying to describe what's true independently of the observer.

But not so good when you're the observer.

And that was a rebuttal how?

Because it's existence contradicts their worldview, but they choose not to examine it.

Memory is demonstrably physical.
Physical in what sense? What is the melting point of a memory? I would say that memory is expressed through substance (as well as consciousness) but it has no substance itself. It's a behavior of substance.

Apart from that, essentiality is a human concept that is incompitable with the scientific method.

It's the 17th century scientific worldview that is incompatible with our understanding of the cosmos.

[Noman Peopled]

Not so much a point of view as just an ad-hoc examination of the similarities and differences between extreme objectivity (with QM being a particularly interesting example) and extreme subjectivity (with divination - Tarot, I Ching, Ouija board, chicken bones, etc) being an example). I find that both extremes are similar in that they deal with a layer of reality furthest from ordinary human experience, intangible, ephemeral, enigmatic, highly esoteric.

Well, I guess one could put it that way. Except one has a provably legitimate field of study while the other has no results to back it up whatsoever. That's what I've been having trouble with; one end of your continuum is complex and intangible, but has a very concrete area to cover, while the other struggles to show its very legitimacy.

They are diametrically opposed forms of augury, with the chicken bone side seeking wisdom from subjective influences - from the infra-spiritual realm of who and why - ancestors, entities, impartial observers of our lives who lend insight through highly subjective recognition of subtle coincidental patterns.

Exactly what I mean. QM is not augury unless you define augury as any model making predictions.

If there's a choice for coherent, sure why not?

Well, I have presented arguments for why I don't think science can be that world view. You seem to have no more than a wish that it could.

Yes, but how do you reconcile studying things which can't be objectified when the worldview you are operating under disqualifies them from the universe?

It's not a world view. Science influences culture and society; and yet everybody is operating under the assumption that there are things science can't touch. They may be proven wrong in the future, or not. So yes, I can believe in consciousness because I perceive mine while accepting it as unobjectifiable.

Subjective methods                                  Objective methods
interpretation                                          Observation
understanding                                         Deduction
imagination                                             Experimentation

What makes it a continuum is the graduated progression of techniques between the poles which combine varying degrees of interior and exterior questioning. In between, I would put things like consensus, communication, teaching/learning

Okay, that helps. A similar problem as at the start of my post; we have working methods for the right side of your continuum, but much less so for the left side. Science was conceived to deal with the right side exclusively, and to pull things previously thought to have been on the left side to the right (or aspects at least).

If you drop the conceit of a hypothetical observerless universe and work with the literal reality we experience - using all of the tools and observations at our disposal, inner and outer, then we find that the universe we experience is indeed half homo-centric and half cosmo-centric, and we find that the totality of our cosmos is an indivisible fusion of the two. Further, I would say that our selves, our lives, our planet, as such an integral whole is both more formally accurate and informally pragmatic.

It is not homo-centric. That's just anthropic bias. Yes, it's important that we deal with how we see it and obviously what's important to us is what we put more emphasis on.
Humans, as part of the universe and a topic of special importance to us is of course worthy of inquiry, but that doesn't mean that the universe operates under our arbitrary terms and models (like QM, or labels like "homo-centric").
Indivisible fusion? I don't think so. We need the universe; the universe doesn't need us. We're part of the universe, but not vice versa.

You have failed to present anything to "transcend towards". Yes, no matter what you look at, it's a legitimate wish that it be better. But so far I have a hard time understanding what this thread is even about, as it's very light on specifics; no clear idea what it should be replaced with.

Transcend towards and replace with a Reinlightened Scientific Worldview, which honors both the subjective and objective, matter and meaning as equal partners.

That's just a rephrasing of what you already said.

Science doesn't posit that X is outside its reach randomly.

If science continues to focus only on half of the universe, then there will either have to be a realignment in our worldview away from science or the world will continue to suffer the consequences of an econo-fascist "technosis externality clusterfuck" (to quote James Howard Kuntsler) taken to to fundamentalist extremes.[/quote]
"Science doesn't posit that X is outside its reach randomly."
Again, it's not random or even arbitrarily exclusive. Science deals with everything it thinks it can deal with. And it tried to deal with what it can't deal with. It's just that it can't. How, for example, would science approach chicken bones without changing its definition completely?

How is that science's problem/fault instead of a societal one?

See above. Science is driving the bus. I might even suggest that society no longer even exists in a meaningful way, it's just economic pornography.[/quote]
Okay. Personally, I don't see how science is the driving force behind politics or economy.
What you suggest about the meaning of society I can't comment about.

I'm not saying they don't have arguments, I'm just explaining why science's study of things it can study, in the way it wants to study them prevents it from learning important truths which can only come from outside of it's comfort zone.

Replace "wants" with "is able" and I will agree

The opposite of consciousness would be anything which has no self-awareness, no meaning, no purpose, pure random probability...much like QM.

Er ... no. The lack of X is not the opposite of X.

I'm just proposing that we first need to acknowledge that matter and meaning are equally fundamental and intertwined in our cosmos.

On what basis?

Supposing I'm right, and that humanity is on a clear collision course with a dystopian nightmare of unprecedented misery for unprecedented numbers of people, and that this trajectory is the consequence of the Scientific Enlightenment Worldview. Do you think that the fact that this worldview is designed to go in this one doomed direction is a valid excuse not to try to change it? If not science, who? Who else could conceivable revise this worldview?

I have trouble dealing with science as a world view (as in "life philosophy"), as at best it gives us a context in which to evaluate our concepts of meaning. The change I would pursue wouldn't be to change science but our use of what it gives us.
Designed for a doomed direction? You lost me there.

Because science is in charge of our collective truth at the moment. It's up to science to continue that role or not.

Really? With a majority of people being religious and/or spiritual? Basing their votes on the most basic logical fallacies?

I mean that something like a circle is either a universal human truth or everyone's brain independently reinvents circularity itself when they are born. The latter is a the crazy, thin air option (although the brain probably does discover circularity after birth, it's really more of a rediscovery of something that all humans are wired to be able to discover).

Or it's a result of our respective brain architectures, whose similarity is easily explained by evolution. It's universally human just like self-preservation, not necessarily universal.

But more than that, if you look at the ideas of alchemists like Robert Fludd, Paracelsus, Goethe, not to mention Isaac Newton and Rene DesCartes, you'll find a tremendous body of work devoted to understanding consciousness - symbols, forms, models of inner states. The content may not be particularly useful to build upon but the forms are revealing of timeless architectures of subjective resonance and anthropologically significant meaning. Alchemy is huge.

So ... what, it's valid because it's a tremendous body of work? What were the results?
Anthropologically significant meaning can be found anywhere there's people.

How about a dream? A dream is an example of far-interiority. We perceive it, do we not? Is the content of dream part of either a physical or exterior reality?

Physical. If you can perceive it it's physical. That it only gains significance when perceived does not make it exterior (to what? to us? to the universe?).

Well sure, just as the average religious person doesn't care that science disproves their faith...but if the Pope went on tv and said that that there is no God, no heaven, etc, then you would have a massive shift of religious people moving out of delusional belief systems into less delusional belief systems.

You really think that? I think they would just reconstitute their organisation and continue as usual.

Now the worldview is mechanistic, economic, deterministic, arbitrary, confused, complex, cynical, amoral, narcissistic, superficial, callow, craven, mired in groupthink, reactive, condescending, infantilizing, adulterating, overprotective, anxious, deluded, wasteful, cheap, greedy, deceptive, disingenuous, sociopathic, abstractionist, extroverted, irresponsible, exhausted, bankrupt, impotent, indecisive.

I don't know what society you're looking at but any of these could be attributed just as easily to economics, politics, overpopulation.
Not saying I disagree with all your points in all aspects, it just doesn't follow that it's science that should or can remedy all that.

How do you define subjective?

Go a level deeper. A personal perspective, opinion, stance, perception; math is already an intersubjective abstract. (As is religion.)

Then you stand in front of a mirror.

What does that mean? What you can't see you can't see. Looking at yourself won't help you one bit.

So it wouldn't matter if it's 100% accurate? If this model of the universe composed of order rather than matter, which unites consciousness, life, and physics rather than distorting the former into meaningless random illusions of the latter - if that is true, and the Scientific Enlightenment Worldview is, like monotheism, a flawed, partial view of the cosmos which is leading us collectively and individually down an undesirable and fully avoidable path...still it doesn't matter? The building is on fire and you are the one with the firehose but you don't use it because it's not in your job description?

Again, the inability of science to deal with anything doesn't invalidate it. Of course it matters if it's true. But if it can't be found out, it can't be found out. And if it can be found out, just not using science, then it can't be found out using science.

That's the problem. If we had a scientific methodology which was whole and complete, then people would live their lives by it, just as people live their lives now by astrology and religion.

I have already argued why I think that your "if" is no more than a wish or speculation. Science doesn't t even have a whole and complete view of water molecules (never even mind our perceptions).

So you don't see the fact that you are not scientifically valid as a problem?

I am scientifically valid. It's just not scientifically describable (yet). So no, I don't see a problem.

[lengthy explanation I asked for]

What you call the exterior I would call a process.

I would measure novelty, qualitative improvements of civic life and individual understanding, control over our inner and outer environments...

Science has almost no control over whether or not something found out is new or "merely" more precise, or how/whether it's applicable. You present a measure of our use of scientific findings, not science.

Yes, but don't we provide more financial support to more scientists with more tools to use more brain time?

Yeah sure; are the effort needed and the effort put into directly proportional though?

But not so good when you're the observer.

Actually it's awesome, because you can then communicate your findings with a high degree of certainty that they will actually be understood.
Also, I should have emphasized the if-clause.

Memory is demonstrably physical.

Okay, I think we have a bit of a confusion here. I meant the storage system, you meant the process of recalling.

Apart from that, essentiality is a human concept that is incompitable with the scientific method.

It's the 17th century scientific worldview that is incompatible with our understanding of the cosmos.[/quote]
Regardless of the validity of either statement, how are they mutually exclusive?

[Immediacracy]

I'm just proposing that we first need to acknowledge that matter and meaning are equally fundamental and intertwined in our cosmos.

On what basis?

I'm going to try and condense and essentialize here, because I think that most of our disagreement is an issue of semantic preference. I have no issue with 'science' per se, as far as what scientists do, their methodologies, their standards of proof - that was never what I intended to talk about, and I have little knowledge of or interest in that world.

What I've been trying to say since the beginning (see title: God is Imaginary but Logic Fails to Address Imagination) is that our current worldview is a legacy app from the 17th century that I'm calling the Scientific Enlightenment Worldview. The Newtonian-Cartesian revolution dethroned the church as the authoritative source of knowledge and replaced it with a set of axioms about the universe which are mechanistic, objective, deterministic, and unsentimental.

The role of alchemist was transformed from a mad dreamer who wished to be a wizard, to a literal scientific wizard able to predict and direct matter and energy on a tremendous scale but only on the condition that all traces of his subjective will be removed. The scientist seeks to be a transparent, dreamless vessel of the objective universe.

The SEW is so successful for publicly demonstrating science through technology that it underlies modern finance, politics, architecture, civil engineering, industry, etc.. the entire culture. Even religion - the Pope himself may talk about faith, but when it comes down to it, he relies on a bulletproof Popemobile for security.

The problem now is that the consequences of this world view are threatening to put an end to everything it gave up in the alchemical divorce, and unfortunately those things are everything that we are - collective meaning, cultural richness and diversity, quality of life, individuality and creativity, ethics, etc. We are living under a set of axioms which only sees truth as that which can be proved, and proof as the only source of truth.

To me, through a lifetime of experience and contemplation on this subject, I've come to understand that there are truths that cannot be proved and proof that cannot be true, and that these are nontrivial. Science can 'prove' that meaning doesn't physically exist outside of the human mind, but we can infer that because the mind arises in the context of physical existence that indeed physicality is intimately familiar with meaning. It transmits and receives subjectivity freely. Meaning rides on the back of electrical signals and biochemical ink. We know that we are conscious yet peering into the brain gives us no peek at the interiority of that consciousness.

So if you are hung up on science being always and forever just science, then it's just a matter of renaming it. Maybe neo-alchemical quasi-Platonic panpsychic stereo-ontological trans-scientific wholism.

Except one has a provably legitimate field of study while the other has no results to back it up whatsoever.

Exactly. Hence the polarity. One side fails to provide any results but it satisfies the needs of consciousness to make meaning out of it's existence. The other end fails to provide consciousness with anything other than proof that the universe doesn't need consciousness.

Exactly what I mean. QM is not augury unless you define augury as any model making predictions.

It's anti-augury. The QM crystal ball is used to contact the layer of our universe that is devoid of meaning and coherent form - a yawning chasm of probability tangled emptiness, the same nothingness as Tarot or I Ching, but seen from the other side of the pipe. Look too 'high' and too 'close' and you'll find pure apophenia, occult superstition that takes on a life of it's own and drives toward insanity.

Look too low and too distant (QM) and you'll find pure deck shuffling, coin throwing probability but without any fortune to read. A black reflection, not of truth or meaning of an exteriority which supports order, life, and consciousness but a mirror to the vacuum of the observation method itself - the technique and intent of consciousness to be entirely free of itself. This is what consciousness looks like without any consciousness. It is the soul of the spyglass. Same patterns, cycles and symmetries we find in the I Ching but scrubbed clean of any purpose or reason whatsoever. The Enlightenment has found the yin nucleus to it's yang worldview - a quantum Endarkenment.

They may be proven wrong in the future, or not. So yes, I can believe in consciousness because I perceive mine while accepting it as unobjectifiable.

What if half of truth can never be proven? Do we leave that truth on the table?

Humans, as part of the universe and a topic of special importance to us is of course worthy of inquiry, but that doesn't mean that the universe operates under our arbitrary terms and models (like QM, or labels like "homo-centric").
Indivisible fusion? I don't think so. We need the universe; the universe doesn't need us. We're part of the universe, but not vice versa.

It's not The universe, it's Our universe. We know that we can never have any connection with anything that isn't derived from our own neurological simulations of the universe. This is what I was trying to get at with the HOCM. There is no observerless cosmos. It's a useful fiction - incredibly powerful use of consciousness to explore the exterior teleonomy but by leaving out the half of the universe that is us, you only get a universe that is everything but us. Which is fine, as long as you don't confuse this provable side of the universe with the whole truth. Like theism, religious mythology is great as long as you don't apply it literally to the outside universe.

So of course the HOCM doesn't need us, we've constructed it expressly not to need us. It's like building an automobile and then observing that it doesn't need a horse. But the universe we actually live in - the only one we'll ever know, the one made out of comprehensible forms and surfaces, color, flavor, sound, feeling, thinking, observing, deducing, proving, analyzing - Our universe needs more than the HOCM. Humans deserve truth to be recognized, scientific and otherwise, regardless of whether it fits into our previous worldview's conception of itself.

How, for example, would science approach chicken bones without changing its definition completely?

It would approach it as I do, seeing it as the polar opposite of the scientific continuum, emphasizing subjective exploration and intuitive imagination rather than objective determination and reliable prediction.

Okay. Personally, I don't see how science is the driving force behind politics or economy.

Not science, but the SEW.

The opposite of consciousness would be anything which has no self-awareness, no meaning, no purpose, pure random probability...much like QM.

Er ... no. The lack of X is not the opposite of X.

Sure it can be. Is black not the opposite of white? Is black not the absence of color while light is the presence of all colors? Semantics. Opposite is just a made up word.

I'm just proposing that we first need to acknowledge that matter and meaning are equally fundamental and intertwined in our cosmos.

On what basis?

On the basis that it explains the underlying singularity of our cosmos better than the current model. Which is what exactly? How do you suppose that meaning arises from a cosmos of matter devoid of meaning?

I have trouble dealing with science as a world view (as in "life philosophy"), as at best it gives us a context in which to evaluate our concepts of meaning. The change I would pursue wouldn't be to change science but our use of what it gives us.

Yes, I agree. Science doesn't have to change, but what takes it's place? Cyberocracy. Or as I like to call it...Immediacracy.

Designed for a doomed direction? You lost me there.

Because the SEW is consciousness denying itself. Just as theism turned subjectivity inside out, the SEW turned objectivity outside in. Neither accommodate the whole truth.

Really? With a majority of people being religious and/or spiritual? Basing their votes on the most basic logical fallacies?

Those logical fallacies are exploited by cynical corporate interests. Regardless of whoever appears to win the election, the same money stays in power. The religiosity of the voters only makes them easier to manipulate through political science and marketing.

Or it's a result of our respective brain architectures, whose similarity is easily explained by evolution. It's universally human just like self-preservation, not necessarily universal.

That doesn't explain anything though, it just moves the denied reality off to the margins. Of course our neurological similarity is evolution and corresponds to the 'psychic unity of mankind', but that doesn't address what a circle is, where it comes from, and whether it is cognition or recognition. If it's recognition, where and how does the brain come to judge that circles are a pattern worth recognizing if they don't exist outside (or inside) of the brain?

So ... what, it's valid because it's a tremendous body of work? What were the results?

The results were meaningful insights to the nature of order and it's propagation through all aspects of the inner and outer cosmos.

Anthropologically significant meaning can be found anywhere there's people.

Which is everywhere, since we can never go somewhere where we aren't. (Buckaroo Banzai postulate, the other BB, hah.) We can view distant places and times, or on different scales but that is still bringing something to us rather than escaping our own subjective observation. It's still an anthropological, subjective experience. It's like if an ant had an ant telescope and used it to look at a microwave oven, it would see something incomprehensibly large but would have no frame of reference to understand what an oven is, let alone how it works or what the numbers on it mean. Our human universe can never be The universe.

How about a dream? A dream is an example of far-interiority. We perceive it, do we not? Is the content of dream part of either a physical or exterior reality?

Physical. If you can perceive it it's physical. That it only gains significance when perceived does not make it exterior (to what? to us? to the universe?).

You are saying that the experience of a dream is physical? Does it obey the laws of physics?

You really think that? I think they would just reconstitute their organisation and continue as usual.

Maybe, hard to say. I do think that a compelling replacement for theism is possible and desirable.

How do you define subjective?

Go a level deeper. A personal perspective, opinion, stance, perception; math is already an intersubjective abstract. (As is religion.)

I see that as more archaic as it treats 'personal' as some special, unnatural exception to the cosmos. We know, scientifically, that there is no 'personal' - the quantum processes in the matter of our brains are the same as they are in an asteroid. What we think is what our part of the universe thinks, nothing more, nothing less.

What does that mean? What you can't see you can't see. Looking at yourself won't help you one bit.

You can see that the process of using a spyglass focuses awareness away from the subjective and toward the objective, and that movement is an altered state of consciousness.

I am scientifically valid. It's just not scientifically describable (yet). So no, I don't see a problem.

Why wait for a description that may never come? What's wrong with the descriptions of ourselves that we have now? Astrology and numerology do an outstanding job.

But not so good when you're the observer.

Actually it's awesome, because you can then communicate your findings with a high degree of certainty that they will actually be understood.
Also, I should have emphasized the if-clause.

Hah, well it's good if you are doing science, but it's not so good for our personal and collective well being.

Apart from that, essentiality is a human concept that is incompitable with the scientific method.

It's the 17th century scientific worldview that is incompatible with our understanding of the cosmos.

Regardless of the validity of either statement, how are they mutually exclusive?

They aren't. I'm just saying that the replacement of our outdated worldview to encompass our newer understandings of our cosmos is a universally important and critically urgent task, while the observation that this new worldview won't fit into the old one is trivial and near tautological.

[Noman Peopled]

I'm going to try and condense and essentialize here, because I think that most of our disagreement is an issue of semantic preference.

Wouldn't be the first time

[long helpful paragraph]

Okay. I don't agree on certain points (specifically the amount of influence you attribute to science (everybody was always using whatever worked to a high degree), the scientist wanting to be a transparent dreamless vessel, us living under a set of axioms).
What did we lose in alchemy that can't be made up for by philosophy?

To me, through a lifetime of experience and contemplation on this subject, I've come to understand that there are truths that cannot be proved and proof that cannot be true, and that these are nontrivial.

I would agree with this paragraph. However, I'd argue that very nearly all people are operating under this assumption.

So if you are hung up on science being always and forever just science, then it's just a matter of renaming it. Maybe neo-alchemical quasi-Platonic panpsychic stereo-ontological trans-scientific wholism.

It would be a matter of changing its goal and therefore its methods. As I said, science was conceived with a very strictly defined and specific goal; as long as the goal remains the same, the methods will not change very much (unless it can be shwon that another set of rules of conduct is vastly superior for doing the same thing - doubtful, I think, but at least hypothetical possibility).
What you're talking about though is a change of the goal of science. Since the rules are now as well-suited to do what science-as-is does, I don't see how you could do that without diminishing its potency in the fields it's covering now. Especially since you seem to demand that it cover what even you call polar opposites. If a coherent structure were possible, sure, go for it. I just don't see one.

Exactly. Hence the polarity. One side fails to provide any results but it satisfies the needs of consciousness to make meaning out of it's existence. The other end fails to provide consciousness with anything other than proof that the universe doesn't need consciousness.

Ah. Well, I wouldn't call it a failure but I see where you're coming from. I still think it's a leap to demand from science to cover, say, qualia. Science doesn't cover all of consciousness even remotely, but neither does anything else I've seen. Specifically, every system that I know that is capable of providing meaning does so dogmatically, quite often treading on the toes of scientific findigs.

It's anti-augury. The QM crystal ball is used to contact the layer of our universe that is devoid of meaning and coherent form - a yawning chasm of probability tangled emptiness, the same nothingness as Tarot or I Ching, but seen from the other side of the pipe. Look too 'high' and too 'close' and you'll find pure apophenia, occult superstition that takes on a life of it's own and drives toward insanity.

No you won't. One is about nothing, and the other is a description of the universe. There's a lot of superstition about QM, true, but that's because people don't understand its mechanisms. In no way is QM looking at the same thing as the I Ching "from the other side". One attributes meaning randomly, the other arbitrarily.

Look too low and too distant (QM) and you'll find pure deck shuffling, coin throwing probability but without any fortune to read. A black reflection, not of truth or meaning of an exteriority which supports order, life, and consciousness but a mirror to the vacuum of the observation method itself - the technique and intent of consciousness to be entirely free of itself. This is what consciousness looks like without any consciousness. It is the soul of the spyglass. Same patterns, cycles and symmetries we find in the I Ching but scrubbed clean of any purpose or reason whatsoever. The Enlightenment has found the yin nucleus to it's yang worldview - a quantum Endarkenment.

Again, eloquent and vague. QM is a model of truth, but not of meaning. What of it? it never was supposed to. Would you fault a blueprint of a power plant that it fails to adress your subjective impressions? QM is a discipline covering grounds where consciousness and qualia and subjectivity don't matter. Why would it then include those factors?

What if half of truth can never be proven? Do we leave that truth on the table?

What else are we going to do? Science will cover all that it can (barring ELE's and junk), and the rest will be left to the individual, just like always.
(Besides, science doesn't deal with proofs positive. As an imperfect depiction of the universe, there will always be room for improvement, for lack of braintime if nothing else.)

It's not The universe, it's Our universe.

Er, no it isn't. There's a universe, and how we perceive it is tremendously important to us. In no way is the universe "ours". Hell, the concept of ownership or belonging is already a purely human concept that we impose on our surroundings.
You're equating the universe as is with the universe we perceive and describe.

Which is fine, as long as you don't confuse this provable side of the universe with the whole truth. Like theism, religious mythology is great as long as you don't apply it literally to the outside universe.

The first sentence is what I've been arguing nobody does anyway.
The second I thoroughly disagree with. Religion is not great as long you don't apply it to the universe. You apply it to yourself, a part of the universe, and it influences your behavior. You believe in something that not only can't be proven, but that you have never perceived yourself. That's way beyond the belief in consciousness or qualia.

It would approach it as I do, seeing it as the polar opposite of the scientific continuum, emphasizing subjective exploration and intuitive imagination rather than objective determination and reliable prediction.

Alright, but what's the polar opposite? What's the opposite of the tenet of falsifiability, Occam's razor, the demand for experimentation and results?
How do we even know it's the polar opposite?

Not science, but the SEW.

People use whatever works. They did so in the past; I don't see how the SEW misusing the tool of science (following your lines of reasoning) would cast doubt on the viability of the tool. As I said, there's nothing in science that allows the SEW you posit to form validly.

Sure it can be. Is black not the opposite of white? Is black not the absence of color while light is the presence of all colors? Semantics. Opposite is just a made up word.

That you have been using quite heavily, so I can just as easily call you on semantics. Besides, this is another instance of us projecting meaningful attributes onto the universe where they can't help but lose meaning.
Black is not the opposite of white in any way, btw.

On the basis that it explains the underlying singularity of our cosmos better than the current model.

You have failed to show that, along with the viability of such a method.
Providing meaning is far from providing truth.
If with "underlying singularity" you mean "consciousness" I'd first scratch the "underlying" as well as the use of "singularity" (as that's a mathematical definition of a point where we can't really tell anmore - a limit to knowing). Besides, the fact that we have better methods of dealing with consciousness doesn't invalidate science's findings or motives one bit; it just shows their limits. You wouldn't retrofit a car with a horse just so it can be more complete.

Yes, I agree. Science doesn't have to change, but what takes it's place? Cyberocracy. Or as I like to call it...Immediacracy.

Okay, so it's not really science that fails to adress imagination but people?

Because the SEW is consciousness denying itself. Just as theism turned subjectivity inside out, the SEW turned objectivity outside in. Neither accommodate the whole truth.

As I said numerous times, science doesn't deny the existence of phenomena it can't deal with. If the posited SEW thinks that that follows from science it's sorely mistaken, and science is not to blame.
Plus, nobody operates under the assumption that science is all there is or that science can cover everything so I don't really see where this SEW is.

Those logical fallacies are exploited by cynical corporate interests. Regardless of whoever appears to win the election, the same money stays in power. The religiosity of the voters only makes them easier to manipulate through political science and marketing.

So where are those people so swayed by the SEW that they can't tell an appeal to emotion from god-given truth and Occam's razor from a gut feeling? So swayed by the irrelevance of their own thoughts that they continue to provide their ego with power and money well past the point of need?

That doesn't explain anything though, it just moves the denied reality off to the margins. Of course our neurological similarity is evolution and corresponds to the 'psychic unity of mankind', but that doesn't address what a circle is, where it comes from, and whether it is cognition or recognition. If it's recognition, where and how does the brain come to judge that circles are a pattern worth recognizing if they don't exist outside (or inside) of the brain?

I'm curious. What's your answer and why should I assume yours is any better than anyone else's? Why would your subjective truth matter to me unless you're able to objectify it and show that it's also true for other people?

The results were meaningful insights to the nature of order and it's propagation through all aspects of the inner and outer cosmos.

They're a bunch of bunk except where they're used to derive meaning that could've been gotten elsewhere easily, without the baggage of demonstrable universal falsehoods.

It's still an anthropological, subjective experience. It's like if an ant had an ant telescope and used it to look at a microwave oven, it would see something incomprehensibly large but would have no frame of reference to understand what an oven is, let alone how it works or what the numbers on it mean. Our human universe can never be The universe.

Well, I agree with that. The ant can still say something about the oven though.

You are saying that the experience of a dream is physical? Does it obey the laws of physics?

No, I'm saying the dream is a physical phenomenon.
It does not obey the laws of physics that we use to describe the universe. It does obey the rules of the universe. How could it not?

You can see that the process of using a spyglass focuses awareness away from the subjective and toward the objective, and that movement is an altered state of consciousness.

What does that change about my posited invisible object being invisible?

Why wait for a description that may never come? What's wrong with the descriptions of ourselves that we have now? Astrology and numerology do an outstanding job.

No they don't. They're no different from religion in positing momentous things without any shred of evidence (screw science, there's not even purely empirically accessible evidence). They provide meaning and comfort just like everything else humans like and cling to, including computer games, kite-surfing, and heroin.
Why wait? Because being content with what we have is the best way to never improve it.

Hah, well it's good if you are doing science, but it's not so good for our personal and collective well being.

Exactly. The method is tailor-made for its purpose.

I'm just saying that the replacement of our outdated worldview to encompass our newer understandings of our cosmos is a universally important and critically urgent task, while the observation that this new worldview won't fit into the old one is trivial and near tautological.

I wouldn't call a world view outdated unless you have a specific idea what to replace with it and good reasons to do so.
So far, I have heard from you a vague notion that science should strive to deal with what it now can't by incorporating methods (or non-methods) incompatible with what it can do now. You posit a system Y as being better as system X but simply assume this Y exists without bothering to describe it in any detail. It's like demanding that we take what's best in democracy and what's best in fascism and make something new without even making an attempt to describe how that would work (as opposed to what the goals should be), and calling both systems outdated on that basis alone.



I wonder how many people are still following this thread

[Immediacracy]

What did we lose in alchemy that can't be made up for by philosophy?

That's a good question. What we lost is the understanding of our lives and their contents as an expression of cosmic meaning. The Alchemical mandala of consciousness was turned inside out to become a big bang nucleus of unconsciousness. While it's been a vast improvement, most people are still only looking through one eye, believing that their very I is somehow less real than the molecules and atoms which project it. We have made I into i (mathematical pun intended). Philosophy examines various subjective topics but it gives individual people nothing to anchor their experience in the ground of being. They won't find themselves in a Philosophy book.

To me, through a lifetime of experience and contemplation on this subject, I've come to understand that there are truths that cannot be proved and proof that cannot be true, and that these are nontrivial.

I would agree with this paragraph. However, I'd argue that very nearly all people are operating under this assumption.

Even if that were true, and from what I've seen here and elsewhere on the net people who like to argue generally only accept truths that are proved, it's like arguing that it's fine to keep putting people in prison for smoking pot even though we know it's not discouraging drug use and that the drug war causes more problems than the drug. Just because people's subjective experience finds it's way through the cracks of SEW is no reason to assume that the SEW doesn't need to be updated. It's not much different as the Catholic church continuing it's anti-gay, anti-condom stance.

What you're talking about though is a change of the goal of science. Since the rules are now as well-suited to do what science-as-is does, I don't see how you could do that without diminishing its potency in the fields it's covering now.

It's not much different from the Enlightenment. After the SEW there is still a Catholic Church, it still has power and authority over a lot of lives, and in many ways those people enjoy the same benefits as everyone else. After the Re-Enlightenment, there will still be science and religion but there will also be more and more people finding value in an integrated stereo-ontology.

It's anti-augury.

No you won't. One is about nothing, and the other is a description of the universe.

Which one is which? I see the I Ching as an insightful description of the subjective universe, refined over centuries by the finest scientists of Chinese culture, and QM I see as a mathematical fetishized description of a layer of exterior reality that resembles static on a television set in between stations.

There's a lot of superstition about QM, true, but that's because people don't understand its mechanisms. In no way is QM looking at the same thing as the I Ching "from the other side". One attributes meaning randomly, the other arbitrarily.

Again, which one is which? I see both I Ching (Tarot, etc) and QM as having both random and highly ordered elements. I see why you would reject this comparison, but the level of protest seems a bit out of proportion for the context of random vs arbitrary. Notice that I say 'anti-augury'... as in, using an oracle to augur meaningful truth is the opposite of using QM observations to augur evidence of meaninglessness. The structure of the I Ching is more similar to describing DNA than anything else I've seen outside of genetics. http://myweb.usf.edu/~pkho/yijing/dnatst.htm#L2

QM is a model of truth, but not of meaning. What of it?

I Ching is a model of meaning, but not of empirical truth. Opposites.

it never was supposed to. Would you fault a blueprint of a power plant that it fails to adress your subjective impressions? QM is a discipline covering grounds where consciousness and qualia and subjectivity don't matter. Why would it then include those factors?

I completely agree. I don't have a problem with QM or I Ching et. al., I just notice their symmetry.

What else are we going to do?

Accept that subjective and objective realms are part of a greater whole. It's plainly obvious that that's the case, we just should stop pretending otherwise.

Science will cover all that it can (barring ELE's and junk), and the rest will be left to the individual, just like always.

It's not left to the individual though. It's left to religion, ignorance, and spiritual malnourishment.

It's not The universe, it's Our universe.

Er, no it isn't. There's a universe, and how we perceive it is tremendously important to us.

There's a universe, but we have no connection to it whatsoever except for what can be filtered through our human perspective. We are the ant, our universe is a white box that beeps and has new crumbs of food all the time. The universe 'as is' could be the microwave oven's circuitry, could be the diesel power plant it's plugged into, could be the kitchen, or the city, or the planet... who knows? Not the ant. I'm not saying that it should be any other way, and in fact Our universe is The universe as far as it will ever matter to us - but part of that universe is the knowledge that we can't really ever know what it is completely.

In no way is the universe "ours". Hell, the concept of ownership or belonging is already a purely human concept that we impose on our surroundings.

I doubt that concept of ownership is not unknown in all of the cosmos except for species HS on planet M3. They won't have a human word for it, but animals own their food, plants own their roots, I would say that stars own their satellites. The pattern is an essential theme of general relativity.

The second I thoroughly disagree with. Religion is not great as long you don't apply it to the universe. You apply it to yourself, a part of the universe, and it influences your behavior. You believe in something that not only can't be proven, but that you have never perceived yourself.

'literally' is the key word. Having access to religious or mythological stories is not the same as believing in them literally. Once the conceit of exterior validity is dropped, these narratives serve the secular enlightened mind just as any historical fiction does. They can serve by negative example or positive example. I notice that many of the people on this board who argue the finer points of the Bible have taken a deep and scholarly interest in the text - pointing out it's ambiguities, contradictions, hypocrisies, and immoralities. That's a great use of the Bible, highlighting the fundamental problems with it, using that as evidence to support the SEW.

It's fine for people to be solidly behind the SEW. I'm just putting this info out here for those who might want to take a step beyond it. There is a tremendous amount of freedom in the SEW, it's a true freedom which arises from focusing on the objective, empirical side of things. I understand that. I started out that way. I've just had a lot of time to see that it doesn't have to be the whole story, and that there is a whole other side of the cosmos.

Alright, but what's the polar opposite? What's the opposite of the tenet of falsifiability, Occam's razor, the demand for experimentation and results?
How do we even know it's the polar opposite?

Well, the polar opposite we already have innately. Pattern recognition, intuition, understanding. The SEW sets itself against those, weeding out those things which satisfy objective observations alone. Which is great, for doing science or supporting a mechanistic worldview.

To restore the i to I, however, we need the stereo view. We need to see, for example, that what we experience about water - how it looks, how it sounds, looks, tastes, smells, feels like when you touch it or when you are swimming in it, what it means when you encounter it in a dream, etc, etc; those qualia are likely every bit as real if not more real to THE universe than H₂O, and that both of those realities are parts of the same thing - not mutually exclusive, not one a side effect of the other, but a simultaneous expression of an essential archetype of our _(the) cosmos and an important molecule in the (our) cosmos.

I have a hunch that because matter seems solid to us and archetypes seem ephemeral, that most everyone presumes that The Universe sees it in the same way. To me that's a crucial anthropocentric myth. To The Universe, matter, energy, time and space may be ephemeral Legos with which it constructs timeless firmaments of order, pattern, and meaning.

I don't see how the SEW misusing the tool of science (following your lines of reasoning) would cast doubt on the viability of the tool.

It doesn't. I don't accuse the SEW of being a misuse of anything, it's just that it's the adolescent model, and what I'm calling for is an adult model (not the lingerie and silicone kind).

Is black not the absence of color while light is the presence of all colors?

Black is not the opposite of white in any way, btw.

Well, it's true that the Chinese color wheel uses red as the opposite of black (energy fully materialized vs matter fully materialized) and white as the opposite of green (energy fully energized vs matter fully energized), but still, how can you say that black and white aren't opposite in the sense of being mapped to fully present visible wavelengths vs fully absent? It seems pretty tortured reasoning to suggest that black is not the opposite of white. What makes you claim that? If black isn't the opposite of white, what is an example of something that is a pair of opposites?

You wouldn't retrofit a car with a horse just so it can be more complete.

No but whether you are driving a car or riding a horse, having a GPS can help.

Okay, so it's not really science that fails to adress imagination but people?

Science is people. It's the authoritative set of axioms used by industrialized cultures currently.

So where are those people so swayed by the SEW that they can't tell an appeal to emotion from god-given truth and Occam's razor from a gut feeling? So swayed by the irrelevance of their own thoughts that they continue to provide their ego with power and money well past the point of need?

Not sure what you mean. Where are they? In the United States.

I'm curious. What's your answer and why should I assume yours is any better than anyone else's? Why would your subjective truth matter to me unless you're able to objectify it and show that it's also true for other people?

My answer is that circles and circularity are essential patterns which fundamentally inform both material existence and the psyche. It's a primary principle of order as elemental and real as Hydrogen.

As to any subjective authority, I don't have any interest in making other people believe me, I'm just trying to find out if other people have any reason to disagree with me other than that they don't like the idea of changing their beliefs. I'm looking for someone to provide me with anything other than what I had when I was a 5 year old atheist - otherwise I'm validated at least in the sense that I'm going in the right direction.

They're a bunch of bunk except where they're used to derive meaning that could've been gotten elsewhere easily, without the baggage of demonstrable universal falsehoods.

That's exactly what I used to think.

It does not obey the laws of physics that we use to describe the universe. It does obey the rules of the universe. How could it not?

That's all I'm saying. Consciousness obeys the rules of the universe, how could it not? Meaning, subjectivity, will, etc. Rules of the Universe. Laws of Physics on one side of the brain, Physics of Laws on the other.

What does that change about my posited invisible object being invisible?

I think we're spyglassing on different pizza cutters in this extended metaphor.

No they don't. They're no different from religion in positing momentous things without any shred of evidence (screw science, there's not even purely empirically accessible evidence). They provide meaning and comfort just like everything else humans like and cling to, including computer games, kite-surfing, and heroin.

The evidence of astrology and numerology is the same evidence that there is a such thing as a name or a birthday. They are about pattern recognition and understanding identity and have nothing to do with recreation-for-the-sake-of-recreation unless you choose to see it that way. The more you look at it subjectively, the more sense it can make, but if you only look at it from the outside, the only sense it can make is nonsense.

I'm not expecting you to believe this, and it may not be in the cards for you to benefit by considering it, all I can tell you is that I never in my life would have considered astrology to be valid in any way, but that after more than 20 years looking at hundreds of peoples charts I can tell you conclusively that it's not what you think it is. Not saying it has much in the way of existential predictive value - for that it's maybe on par with meteorology, but predicting events is not what I'm interested. I'm only after understanding.

Exactly. The method is tailor-made for its purpose.

Just like religion.

You posit a system Y as being better as system X but simply assume this Y exists without bothering to describe it in any detail.

It's not a system, it's a change in our axiomatic principles. It's seeing things from a more detached and more engaged perspective. Instead of saying 'and God said let there be light' or 'and the Laws of Physics say there was a Big Bang', I can say 'originating singularity is an archetypal pattern expressed existentially in things like the Big Bang, the formation of stars and atoms, sprouting seeds or meiosis, and subjectively as creativity, awakening, enlightenment, the number 1, the letter A, Alpha, Aleph, Ace, the color red, the Magician, mandala, Sun, Aries, a nucleated circle, spiral maze, etc.'

Said another way, 'let there be light' and 'there was a big bang' are two observations of the same event, just as lightning is the same essential event as thunder, but the difference in the relative speeds of propagation of light and sound create the existential separation. The archetype is one essence, but it manifests existentially as a duality because our visual antenna picks up on fast moving photons long before the acoustic publicity arrives.

Intuition can work the same way. Dreams or thoughts can occasionally turn prophetic when one's intuitive antennae pick up a flash of lightning long before other people hear the thunder.

I wonder how many people are still following this thread

If there are any left, they are much older people by now, hah.

[wright]

Norman Peopled:
I wonder how many people are still following this thread 

Immediacracy:
If there are any left, they are much older people by now, hah.

Hah, well that's fair enough, though I keep reminding myself no one forced me to follow this particular conversation 

It's been interesting. Immediacracy, I'm no closer to agreeing with you than I was from the start, though I do understand your PoV a bit better now. You seem to be arguing that the "SEW" might lead to a future of the type C. S. Lewis warned about in The Abolition of Man. I admit, I find that particular dystopia convincing, though fortunately not inevitable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_abolition_of_man

Norman pretty much parallels my own thinking, though much more clearly...

I wouldn't call a world view outdated unless you have a specific idea what to replace with it and good reasons to do so.
So far, I have heard from you a vague notion that science should strive to deal with what it now can't by incorporating methods (or non-methods) incompatible with what it can do now. You posit a system Y as being better as system X but simply assume this Y exists without bothering to describe it in any detail.

Thank you both for the civil and interesting dialogue.

[Noman Peopled]

What we lost is the understanding of our lives and their contents as an expression of cosmic meaning.

There's no such thing as cosmic meaning.

Even if that were true, and from what I've seen here and elsewhere on the net people who like to argue generally only accept truths that are proved

Even when discussing subjective topics? This is a forum about religion. Of course proof will be demanded. Nobody demands proof that it's wrong to kill or that love exists.

Which one is which? I see the I Ching as an insightful description of the subjective universe, refined over centuries by the finest scientists of Chinese culture, and QM I see as a mathematical fetishized description of a layer of exterior reality that resembles static on a television set in between stations.

Fetishized? Dude. One's an accurate descriptive system, the other is ... old. I reiterate, whatever you could get from the I Ching you can easily get elsewhere without all the baggage.
Also, what the I Ching may or may not provide is qualitatively different from what religion can provide how?

There's a lot of superstition about QM, true, but that's because people don't understand its mechanisms. In no way is QM looking at the same thing as the I Ching "from the other side". One attributes meaning randomly, the other arbitrarily.

Again, which one is which?

The one that can show that it has descriptive power? That got tested the hell out of it?

I see both I Ching (Tarot, etc) and QM as having both random and highly ordered elements. I see why you would reject this comparison, but the level of protest seems a bit out of proportion for the context of random vs arbitrary.

If the QM has random components it's because what it describes is or appears random. Same for the I Ching of course. But while QM makes us able to build computer, the I Ching doesn't do anything more or less than Tarot cards, astrology, or whatever.

I Ching is a model of meaning, but not of empirical truth. Opposites.

You can't have meaning without empirical truth.

Accept that subjective and objective realms are part of a greater whole. It's plainly obvious that that's the case, we just should stop pretending otherwise.

If you mean the universe, sure.
Who's pretending? Everybody acts irrationally, everyone acts as if emotions, thoughts, and perceptions were part of every aspect of the universe. Nobody is ignoring the existence (as a process or otherwise) of the subjective.

It's not left to the individual though. It's left to religion, ignorance, and spiritual malnourishment.

And that's the business of a purely descriptive system how? If anything, it's a societal issue.

There's a universe, but we have no connection to it whatsoever except for what can be filtered through our human perspective.

Exactly. And we should take care not to project ourselves onto the universe when we want to get close to knowing how it really is.

I doubt that concept of ownership is not unknown in all of the cosmos except for species HS on planet M3. They won't have a human word for it, but animals own their food, plants own their roots, I would say that stars own their satellites. The pattern is an essential theme of general relativity.

No relevant difference. Include all species; it still doesn't change my point.

It's fine for people to be solidly behind the SEW. I'm just putting this info out here for those who might want to take a step beyond it. There is a tremendous amount of freedom in the SEW, it's a true freedom which arises from focusing on the objective, empirical side of things. I understand that. I started out that way. I've just had a lot of time to see that it doesn't have to be the whole story, and that there is a whole other side of the cosmos.

No, there's another side to you.

Well, the polar opposite we already have innately. Pattern recognition, intuition, understanding. The SEW sets itself against those, weeding out those things which satisfy objective observations alone. Which is great, for doing science or supporting a mechanistic worldview.

Pattern recognition and intuition are already heavily used by almost everyone, including die-hard scientists. And these innate abilities are demonstrably flawed, having been developed to help us survive and nothing else. Science doesn't cover everything; but what it does cover it covers more accurately than pattern recognition and intuition.
Understanding is a goal or a state, not a method.

To restore the i to I, however, we need the stereo view. We need to see, for example, that what we experience about water - how it looks, how it sounds, looks, tastes, smells, feels like when you touch it or when you are swimming in it, what it means when you encounter it in a dream, etc, etc; those qualia are likely every bit as real if not more real to THE universe than H₂O, and that both of those realities are parts of the same thing - not mutually exclusive, not one a side effect of the other, but a simultaneous expression of an essential archetype of our _(the) cosmos and an important molecule in the (our) cosmos.

Sure, unless you think that qualia are an innate part of every aspect of the universe as opposed to models.
If you present a workable method, I'll be all over it.

To The Universe, matter, energy, time and space may be ephemeral Legos with which it constructs timeless firmaments of order, pattern, and meaning.

I agree up to "meaning". Meaning is an aspect of the human psyche, the brain architecture, not of the universe.

Well, it's true that the Chinese color wheel uses red as the opposite of black (energy fully materialized vs matter fully materialized) and white as the opposite of green (energy fully energized vs matter fully energized), but still, how can you say that black and white aren't opposite in the sense of being mapped to fully present visible wavelengths vs fully absent?

What do Chinese color wheel have to do with anything? Another human concept with no basis in nature.
Black and white aren't opposites in the same way that intelligence is not the opposite of stupidity. Just varying values.

It seems pretty tortured reasoning to suggest that black is not the opposite of white. What makes you claim that? If black isn't the opposite of white, what is an example of something that is a pair of opposites?

-1 and 1. Magnetic poles. Particles and anti-particles.
Maybe I just misunderstood your use of the word polar though.

No but whether you are driving a car or riding a horse, having a GPS can help.

Er ... yes it can ?

So where are those people so swayed by the SEW that they can't tell an appeal to emotion from god-given truth and Occam's razor from a gut feeling? So swayed by the irrelevance of their own thoughts that they continue to provide their ego with power and money well past the point of need?

Not sure what you mean. Where are they? In the United States.

Right, and these scientifically-minded people vote based on fear, greed, irrational ideologies rather than things proven and unproven?

My answer is that circles and circularity are essential patterns which fundamentally inform both material existence and the psyche. It's a primary principle of order as elemental and real as Hydrogen.

I subjectively disagree.
What subjective method will help us solve this conundrum and what good is it if it doesn't?

As to any subjective authority, I don't have any interest in making other people believe me, I'm just trying to find out if other people have any reason to disagree with me other than that they don't like the idea of changing their beliefs.

Is that why you think I disagree?

That's exactly what I used to think.

And your change of mind is basically no different from being touched by a sacred ancestor or a spirit as far as I can tell. Where's the proof, even an intersubjectively communicable one? Something I can do myself? Something I can do with the I Ching that shows me that it works on some level, and not only if I already think it will? Seriously, suggest something and I will go get the I Ching.

That's all I'm saying. Consciousness obeys the rules of the universe, how could it not? Meaning, subjectivity, will, etc. Rules of the Universe. Laws of Physics on one side of the brain, Physics of Laws on the other.

Sure, but not vice versa.

I think we're spyglassing on different pizza cutters in this extended metaphor.

Easily possible.

The evidence of astrology and numerology is the same evidence that there is a such thing as a name or a birthday.

There is a birthday because we define it as such. It's just a name we give a specific day that has arbitrary meaning to us. Same with names. Hell, we've been using words in this debate haven't we? Just as arbitrarily assigned and a mere tool to describe the universe, meaningless without communication, and with no explanatory power whatsoever. Plus, birthdays and names don't exactly produce new information, do they?

They are about pattern recognition and understanding identity and have nothing to do with recreation-for-the-sake-of-recreation unless you choose to see it that way. The more you look at it subjectively, the more sense it can make, but if you only look at it from the outside, the only sense it can make is nonsense.

The latter is true for anything.
Pattern recognition is fine as long as it's not pareidolia. What's the meaning of the patterns found in numeroogy other than those we assign them?

It's not a system, it's a change in our axiomatic principles. It's seeing things from a more detached and more engaged perspective. Instead of saying 'and God said let there be light' or 'and the Laws of Physics say there was a Big Bang', I can say 'originating singularity is an archetypal pattern expressed existentially in things like the Big Bang, the formation of stars and atoms, sprouting seeds or meiosis, and subjectively as creativity, awakening, enlightenment, the number 1, the letter A, Alpha, Aleph, Ace, the color red, the Magician, mandala, Sun, Aries, a nucleated circle, spiral maze, etc.'

So either that's just another way of putting things or claiming things without evidence, I'm not sure which.

Said another way, 'let there be light' and 'there was a big bang' are two observations of the same event, just as lightning is the same essential event as thunder, but the difference in the relative speeds of propagation of light and sound create the existential separation.

Neither is an observation in the first place. One's pulled out of someone's neocortex because it sounds about right, the other is a deduction. One is formally indistinguishable from anything I can pull out of my ass, the other is a hypothesis that has and continues to run the gauntlet.
Lightning is on no way the same phisycal event as thunder. One causes the other and they occur concurrently.

Intuition can work the same way. Dreams or thoughts can occasionally turn prophetic when one's intuitive antennae pick up a flash of lightning long before other people hear the thunder.

And this is different from being touched by Zeus how?

I wonder how many people are still following this thread

If there are any left, they are much older people by now, hah.[/quote]
I myself have grown a beard

[Immediacracy]

You seem to be arguing that the "SEW" might lead to a future of the type C. S. Lewis warned about in The Abolition of Man.

Thanks, I'll have to check that out. Generally CS Lewis is a little too wholesome and a lot too Christian for me, but I can't pass up a good apocalypse.

For the record though, saving the world is just an optional benefit - mainly I'm interested in a Reinlightened Scientific Worldview because I think it's a more accurate model.

[Immediacracy]

There's no such thing as cosmic meaning

See?  

Even when discussing subjective topics? This is a forum about religion. Of course proof will be demanded. Nobody demands proof that it's wrong to kill or that love exists.

I find myself having to prove that consciousness exists, that color is a feature of consciousness, etc. Which to me is revealing of the hard skew to the 'right' - bias toward objective material and away from subjective meaning. I don't mind, I'm just saying.

Fetishized? Dude. One's an accurate descriptive system, the other is ... old. I reiterate, whatever you could get from the I Ching you can easily get elsewhere without all the baggage.
Also, what the I Ching may or may not provide is qualitatively different from what religion can provide how?

Old, ha. Ageist. The I Ching isn't relgious, it's an elaborate Magic 8 Ball. You ask it questions and you get answers. It's a coincidence compass. But you can use anything for that, what makes the I Ching interesting is it's structure. It's a deep semiotic analysis of binary grouping patterns which form a canon of internally consistent archetypal interpretations. People who use the I Ching properly routinely find it to be uncannily insightful, but that isn't the important part about it all - what matters to me about it is that it tries to define the atoms and periodic table of subjectivity, and in doing so it uses the same mathematics as computers and genetics. The Kabbalah, same thing. A periodic table of subjectivity. These things are of course very different than chemistry, they are reflections of the psyche rather than matter so their truth lies in their meaningful resonance rather than empirical value. It's the baggage that counts.

The one that can show that it has descriptive power? That got tested the hell out of it?

The I Ching has been 'tested' for centuries. What does QM describe that has any connection with anything we would consider ordinary and real? I would call it an imaginary world of dancing nothingness but it's not imaginary, it's anti-imaginary. It's the fabric of 'real' and nothing more. The I Ching describes archetypal situations which can be applied to... well here. Here's what I get when I 'throw' the online I Ching online right now http://www.eclecticenergies.com/iching/consultation.php?lns=866777:

12. Obstruction
Line 2:

Taking on service.
Ordinary people have good fortune,
senior people are obstructed.
Progressing.

Getting in the service of others. This is frustrating if it means not being able to realize one's own ideas. It is good if one doesn't have ideas to realize. Any way there is progress.
Line 3:

Taking on shame.

Doing something shameful.


Hexagram is changing to:
44. Providing

Providing.
The woman is strong.
No use to marry the woman.

For the provision of something one is dependent on someone in a strong position. One cannot win this person over to one's own side.

The thing about using an oracle is that there are a finite number of characters in it's alphabet. It's up to you to determine which aspects are meaningful and which aren't. The part about doing something shameful is interesting - because for me and undoubtedly for you, throwing the I Ching is embarrassing. Plus for me, using the online version rather than real coins is kind of lazy. Obstruction fits adequately to describe the situation from my point of view at least.

In the second part, Providing - also makes enough sense to me to be interesting. Obstruction turning to Providing. Not bad. But the kicker is the parting shot "One cannot win this person over to one's own side.". Do you know how long it would take someone to try to find a hexagram that says that? I have a hard time believing that that phrase is in fact not the most appropriate string of characters which could conceivably be derived from a composite of eight random probabilities.

As an added bonus, the only way to prove the I Ching wrong is to contradict the prophecy that 'One cannot win this person over to one's own side.'

But while QM makes us able to build computer, the I Ching doesn't do anything more or less than Tarot cards, astrology, or whatever.

Absolutely. And I would much rather have a computer than astrology - but - these things are centuries old. They represent just the natural science of subjectivity. Where we will need to understand these kinds of truths again is when we begin to merge with the computer. We will need to understand what we're simulating. What consciousness is made of.

I Ching is a model of meaning, but not of empirical truth. Opposites.

You can't have meaning without empirical truth.

As was demonstrated, it is possible to derive meaning from the I Ching interpretation without it being a source of empirical truth (it's just a coincidence, after all). The meaning helps validate what we both know already, but lends a quasi-authoritative perspective that I can choose to consider or not. In this case I think the Ching is right - and that actually helps me see the situation more clearly. Plus it's funny. (it's funny cos it's true).

Nobody is ignoring the existence (as a process or otherwise) of the subjective.

If that were the case, we wouldn't be having this discussion. How does logic address imagination?

There's a universe, but we have no connection to it whatsoever except for what can be filtered through our human perspective.

Exactly. And we should take care not to project ourselves onto the universe when we want to get close to knowing how it really is.

Except that we have now gotten close enough to know that how it really is is that there can never be a way for us not to project ourselves onto the universe, and in fact, the universe is as much Our universe as it is anything else and when we look in the places where we are least projected we see a reality which is itself least projected. Had we found infinitesimal billiard balls, indivisible building blocks charged with particular behaviors which can account for pattern, life, consciousness, etc then we could be satisfied that indeed the universe is formed from the bottom up - but that's not at all what we find.

No, there's another side to you.

Maybe, but the I Ching begs to differ . Or does it?

Pattern recognition and intuition are already heavily used by almost everyone, including die-hard scientists. And these innate abilities are demonstrably flawed

If they weren't flawed they would be identical to omniscience.

having been developed to help us survive and nothing else.

Presumption. Evolutionary instrumentalism is bunk for explaining subjectivity. Our brains really don't need us at all to survive and keep the species reproducing. I go back to the example of the text on this screen. Your brain has no problem pre-chewing the characters and words into English for you, I doubt it needs help to extract meaning out of the paragraph.

The brain can orchestrate the metabolic equivalent of probably a thousand symphonies a second (w.a. guess), I'm sure it could navigate around some bears and snakes and find water and food just like all the rest of the mammals without having to invent intuition out of thin air (it's not like growing longer canines; intuition implies a sense which violates ordinary constraints of physical and temporal locality...it's more like a temporary or conditional omniscience than a physical adaptation).

Science doesn't cover everything; but what it does cover it covers more accurately than pattern recognition and intuition.

Meh, that's like saying 'cars don't take you everywhere, but where they do go is further than roads or wheels'.

Sure, unless you think that qualia are an innate part of every aspect of the universe as opposed to models.
If you present a workable method, I'll be all over it.

No, in fact, I would say that qualia function to make parts of the universe different from other parts. Understanding qualia seems pretty ambitious...maybe something for symbiotic supercomputers of the future to help us with.

I agree up to "meaning". Meaning is an aspect of the human psyche, the brain architecture, not of the universe.

I can go along with that to a point. I would say that meaning is an elaboration of organic patterns, which are an elaboration or inorganic patterns, but the same goes true in the other direction. Subjectivity rises from simpler proto-subjective elements. Cosmic urges we observe as charge. Instinct is the inside of math.

What do Chinese color wheel have to do with anything? Another human concept with no basis in nature.

Oh man. Back to square one of the SEW.
Dig it. Color is a human perception without any necessary basis outside of itself (as evidenced by dreaming in color).  There may be color inherent in the mathematics of light, but we have no direct contact with it. That's why we need eyes - to probe 'nature' so that the brain can simulate it for us. Color has zero to do with 'nature' as you are defining it. The color wheels which every visual artist or designer is familiar with are all human-facing constructs that have only partial overlap with the physical 'nature' of light.

It seems pretty tortured reasoning to suggest that black is not the opposite of white. What makes you claim that? If black isn't the opposite of white, what is an example of something that is a pair of opposites?

-1 and 1. Magnetic poles. Particles and anti-particles.

Interesting that those things are all things which human beings can't experience directly. Math is an imaginary logical abstraction, magnetic poles are an understanding of invisible magnetic fields, and anti-particles are "hypothetical concept of particle physics". I guess you don't see how these things are more abstract than black and white - that because they are all invisible, intangible, or theoretical and require a decent scientific education to even consider.

These are only opposites because we have applied the term to them - they are abstractions which have inherited the real world human experience of opposites - black/white, good/bad, hot/cold, left/right, up/down, etc. This is what subjectivity is made of - which is why a 4 year old knows the opposite of good is bad but they don't know -1 from Barney.

Right, and these scientifically-minded people vote based on fear, greed, irrational ideologies rather than things proven and unproven?

Oh I see what you're saying. Its the corruption of or ignorance of the SEW that contributes to the sorry condition of things. True. I'm not even going to suggest that a Reinlightened Scientific Worldview might be more likely to capture the imagination of the masses, but still, I don't think anything is going to get better by not trying.

My answer is that circles and circularity are essential patterns which fundamentally inform both material existence and the psyche. It's a primary principle of order as elemental and real as Hydrogen.

I subjectively disagree.
What subjective method will help us solve this conundrum and what good is it if it doesn't?

It's not really a conundrum yet because you haven't offered another explanation of circles that I can compare mine with. You say you disagree, but I don't believe you.

As to any subjective authority, I don't have any interest in making other people believe me, I'm just trying to find out if other people have any reason to disagree with me other than that they don't like the idea of changing their beliefs.

Is that why you think I disagree?

Actually no, that wasn't directed at you personally, just people in general seem to come from ego and wanting to be right without considering that there might actually be something different from what they may have heard before. I'm still waiting for anyone to make a point that I haven't heard before though.

That's exactly what I used to think.

And your change of mind is basically no different from being touched by a sacred ancestor or a spirit as far as I can tell. Where's the proof, even an intersubjectively communicable one? Something I can do myself? Something I can do with the I Ching that shows me that it works on some level, and not only if I already think it will? Seriously, suggest something and I will go get the I Ching.

Sure, if you want to. I would just use that site: http://www.eclecticenergies.com/iching/virtualcoins.php, but the thing is, how you approach it is key. You can't just sit there and throw it over and over - it's not a machine, it's the opposite of that. If you try to prove it's randomness, then you will. You have to be open to the idea that coincidence can also be the opposite of what you think it is. You don't have to be superstitious, but you have to say 'if I were superstitious...'

I hardly ever use things like this, because ultimately it's better to ask yourself important questions than the random splatter of the cosmic Pollack for advice. If you are going to use it, I would wait until the natural moment arrives - something comes up that you want to find out about.

Whatever, divination can be troublesome. Fascinating, and applicable for what we're talking about, but ultimately as distant from sanity as QM is from poetry.

That's all I'm saying. Consciousness obeys the rules of the universe, how could it not? Meaning, subjectivity, will, etc. Rules of the Universe. Laws of Physics on one side of the brain, Physics of Laws on the other.

Sure, but not vice versa.

Right, not exactly vice versa. Like if you're a flower it doesn't mean that the universe is a flower. The universe knows how to make things that flower though. It knows how flowering works more than even the flower. It doesn't 'know' like a person knows, but it seems to remember patterns and elaborate on them.

There is a birthday because we define it as such. It's just a name we give a specific day that has arbitrary meaning to us. Same with names. Hell, we've been using words in this debate haven't we? Just as arbitrarily assigned and a mere tool to describe the universe, meaningless without communication, and with no explanatory power whatsoever. Plus, birthdays and names don't exactly produce new information, do they?

This is an area that you have to approach from the inside. I know it doesn't seem like these things could have qualia but a lot of people have find that they do. New information comes from comparing the birthdate with the current date. It's ok, I wouldn't expect anyone to believe me without really investigating it fully. I wouldn't have.

Pattern recognition is fine as long as it's not pareidolia. What's the meaning of the patterns found in numeroogy other than those we assign them?

Like a 'real' science, numerology is just a refinement of common sense about numbers and letters. I started out looking up the meanings of the numbers and just being impressed at how the readings I could do out of the book contained an almost unmistakable thread of truth to them. Later on I became familiar enough with the meanings that I began to see why they mean what the books say.

Numbers have or are an ontological identity - by their very nature. One implies first, only, solitary, original, creative, independent (or dependent, isolated, failing to start..ie, dropping back toward zero). Two creates the possibility of relation, cooperation, refection, pause or patience (or supersensitivity, etc). The digital sequence is seen as a spectrum, like color (and corresponding to colors, among other things) which carries over to the alphabet.

Of course, you don't have to pay attention to the subjective meanings of numbers at all, numbers can just be meaningless digits for counting. They're semiotic, they can be interpreted in different ways.

When you think about it, after we die, barring any special contribution we leave behind, our existence will be marked by a character string and a numerical value. Those two things are the only two tangible things in the cosmos that we innately 'are' from beginning to end, besides our DNA. Our DNA is not a very good way to understand personal identity - it can really only tell you about the history of their body - the name, however, can tell you a little bit about a person even if you've never heard the name before, and not just cultural extraction and gender - the sound of the name itself has an associative resonance which extends beyond the text. Sometimes it's ironic. Sometimes 'Bertha' isn't fat, sometimes 'Butch' is a wimp, but you know, there is a stereotype there to either embody or play against.  Words are just as real and complex as molecules in their way.

So either that's just another way of putting things or claiming things without evidence, I'm not sure which.

Evidence where there's evidence, truth where there's truth.

Said another way, 'let there be light' and 'there was a big bang' are two observations of the same event, just as lightning is the same essential event as thunder, but the difference in the relative speeds of propagation of light and sound create the existential separation.

Neither is an observation in the first place. One's pulled out of someone's neocortex because it sounds about right, the other is a deduction. One is formally indistinguishable from anything I can pull out of my ass, the other is a hypothesis that has and continues to run the gauntlet.

True, not observations. Ideas/theories.

Yes, the one that sounds about right is not on the same level of importance as the one which has been proven, but for being something that came out of an ass, it's not too far off. It's about as good as you could expect from someone without any scientific education. It was perfectly valid for centuries because it's truth was close enough.

Lightning is on no way the same phisycal event as thunder. One causes the other and they occur concurrently.

Causality doesn't make it a different event. It's one event with a chain of physical consequences. An explosion's sound isn't a different thing from the explosion. I mean you can consider it different if you want to focus on the sound alone, but the sound is just an interpretation of the human eardrum.

And this is different from being touched by Zeus how?

Mythology is just a decorative container. It's not necessary to invoke a deity to explain intuition, but it may as well be Zeus for all we can understand about it. Like 'Let there be light', the main thing they got wrong was the anthropomorphic element.

I myself have grown a beard

lol. same. Don't go to Plato's allegorical cave without it.

[Noman Peopled]

See?  

I didn't disagree that we lost cosmic meaning (arguable). I just implied that this was a good thing. Having abolished something doesn't validate it.

I find myself having to prove that consciousness exists, that color is a feature of consciousness, etc. Which to me is revealing of the hard skew to the 'right' - bias toward objective material and away from subjective meaning. I don't mind, I'm just saying.

Maybe it's curiosity, a desire to know something about consciousness for sure. I maintain that those who demand evidence of consciousness still believe in it (although quite possibly not your definition of it) or at the very least act accordingly on some level.

Old, ha. Ageist. The I Ching isn't relgious, it's an elaborate Magic 8 Ball. You ask it questions and you get answers. It's a coincidence compass. But you can use anything for that, what makes the I Ching interesting is it's structure.

"Old" I was using as a citation of your description of the I Ching. Age is irrelevant here and I found it odd that you mentioned it at all.
How elaborate the I Ching is has nothing to do with how accurate it is.

These things are of course very different than chemistry, they are reflections of the psyche rather than matter so their truth lies in their meaningful resonance rather than empirical value. It's the baggage that counts.

So they're important because they're meaningful rather than a reflection of truth?

The one that can show that it has descriptive power? That got tested the hell out of it?

The I Ching has been 'tested' for centuries. What does QM describe that has any connection with anything we would consider ordinary and real?[/quote]
Computer chips? DVD players? Hell, eyesight would be impossible without what QM describes. Same thing for glittering butterfly wings.
The I Ching has been tested? I'm unaware of any validation other than its persistence.

The thing about using an oracle is that there are a finite number of characters in it's alphabet. It's up to you to determine which aspects are meaningful and which aren't.

And I have any right to call the results truth how? I can assign meaning to my plays with Magic the Gathering cards.

I have a hard time believing that that phrase is in fact not the most appropriate string of characters which could conceivably be derived from a composite of eight random probabilities.

So? This seems to be another version of "it's improbable, therefore it can't be coincidence and contains a profound truth". Besides, wouldn't the I Ching be developed to say something that makes some kind of sense instead of "marble, pistol, blue corner, shave the cow"?

Absolutely. And I would much rather have a computer than astrology - but - these things are centuries old. They represent just the natural science of subjectivity. Where we will need to understand these kinds of truths again is when we begin to merge with the computer. We will need to understand what we're simulating. What consciousness is made of.

We can't ever have anything but simulations.
Besides, "science of subjectivity" is a contradiction in terms, not by my definition but by dictionary definitions.
We cannot claim understanding of anything but maybe ourselves when we assign or derive uncommunicable meaning, and should be vary of confusing our concepts of meaning with our concepts of reality.

As was demonstrated, it is possible to derive meaning from the I Ching interpretation without it being a source of empirical truth (it's just a coincidence, after all). The meaning helps validate what we both know already, but lends a quasi-authoritative perspective that I can choose to consider or not. In this case I think the Ching is right - and that actually helps me see the situation more clearly.

I don't get it. I derive personal meaning from the I Ching interpretation with no connection to empirical truth, its results being coincidental, validating what I already thought was true (whether that's actually the case or not) by giving it an optional authority? Why would I not just think stuff over (with heavy doses of gut feelings if you prefer), and posit myself as the authority?
On what grounds would I be accepting or denying its authority anyway? You think that in this case the I Ching is right. I wouldn't know. What about the cases where it's wrong?

Nobody is ignoring the existence (as a process or otherwise) of the subjective.

If that were the case, we wouldn't be having this discussion. How does logic address imagination?

Logic doesn't claim to adress imagination. That doesn't mean it doesn't acknowledge its existence, either. In fact, a small but important bunch of rules of logic deal with the inadmissibility of deducing/inferring the subjective view from the objective one and vice versa.

Except that we have now gotten close enough to know that how it really is is that there can never be a way for us not to project ourselves onto the universe, and in fact, the universe is as much Our universe as it is anything else and when we look in the places where we are least projected we see a reality which is itself least projected.

This begins to sound much like "we can't know anything for certain, therefore we can't know anything".
There's a qualitative difference between saying the universe is ours on account of the definition of words, and calling it physical on account of observation, no matter how imperfect; for starters, the latter adds new information to our models while nothing of verisimilitude follows from the former. I could call the universe snifty, and if I define snifty as a property of the universe, that statement will be true; it will have no bearing on what the universe looks like, though.

No, there's another side to you.

Maybe, but the I Ching begs to differ . Or does it?

I don't care if it differs. Can it back the claim up?

If they weren't flawed they would be identical to omniscience.

Sure, but how are they polar opposites or symmetries (or even complements as opposed to parts) of the scientific methods?

Presumption. Evolutionary instrumentalism is bunk for explaining subjectivity.

Well-supported presumption.
Evolution does a great job of explaining most human traits, even if it's only as well-supported hypotheses. It explains why we have so much in common, why we're social, why we have intelligence, why we fear death. Many more aspects can be explained by the complexity and flexibility of the human brain, which is in turn easily explained as a beneficial evolutionary trait.

Our brains really don't need us at all to survive and keep the species reproducing.

?
Our brains are a constitutive part of what we are, and as vital to our survival as any other organ.

I go back to the example of the text on this screen. Your brain has no problem pre-chewing the characters and words into English for you, I doubt it needs help to extract meaning out of the paragraph.

'course it does. I have to think about it, and where I don't, the ability to parse has been acquired with great effort during the evolution of brain architecture as well as long learning and modelling processes on my part.

The brain can orchestrate the metabolic equivalent of probably a thousand symphonies a second (w.a. guess), I'm sure it could navigate around some bears and snakes and find water and food just like all the rest of the mammals without having to invent intuition out of thin air (it's not like growing longer canines; intuition implies a sense which violates ordinary constraints of physical and temporal locality...it's more like a temporary or conditional omniscience than a physical adaptation).

Consciousness and intuition can easily develop alongside the body. And just because we don't know how it works and it seems uncanny to us at times, intuition needn't violate anything. In fact, it works best within the constraints that were relevant to our species a few ten-thousand years ago.

Science doesn't cover everything; but what it does cover it covers more accurately than pattern recognition and intuition.

Meh, that's like saying 'cars don't take you everywhere, but where they do go is further than roads or wheels'.

That's not what I said. I said that where science is applicable, its results are more accurate than intuition is where only intuition is applicable. Following your analogy, it would be more like saying that where cars can drive, they're more fuel-efficient than helicopters are where only helicopters can go.

I can go along with that to a point. I would say that meaning is an elaboration of organic patterns, which are an elaboration or inorganic patterns, but the same goes true in the other direction.

You mean the universe is somehow directly influenced by the subjective?

There may be color inherent in the mathematics of light, but we have no direct contact with it. That's why we need eyes - to probe 'nature' so that the brain can simulate it for us. Color has zero to do with 'nature' as you are defining it. The color wheels which every visual artist or designer is familiar with are all human-facing constructs that have only partial overlap with the physical 'nature' of light.

Just my point though; when we observe nature, we find no color wheel. It's our own abstraction, as indeed all our definitions of "opposites". They have no bearing on the universe, only on our perception of it (and while everything we perceive is by definition subjective, it's easy enough to find out simple things that hold true for all observers and thus are objective to a higher degree of certainty).
Assuming that nature has to play by our definitions is fallacious at best. Of course opposites can be used descriptively, as they often are in science and everyday language, but it's important to be aware that these are models, not a direct reflection of the universe. Optional terms in which we can describe its non-optional properties.
I would indeed call black the opposite of white in everyday language, but not so when writing a presentation on physics or discussing metaphysics. No need there for an arbitrary human concept with no descriptive power.

Interesting that those things are all things which human beings can't experience directly. Math is an imaginary logical abstraction, magnetic poles are an understanding of invisible magnetic fields, and anti-particles are "hypothetical concept of particle physics". I guess you don't see how these things are more abstract than black and white - that because they are all invisible, intangible, or theoretical and require a decent scientific education to even consider.

Of course I see that. See above. In these cases, they have descriptive meaning. In the color wheel, they do not; they even imply a continuum of colors which directly contradicts the physical properties.
When dealing with perception, the color wheel would serve as a descriptor of how we perceive colors, not how colors are - a description of us, not the universe.

It's not really a conundrum yet because you haven't offered another explanation of circles that I can compare mine with. You say you disagree, but I don't believe you.

You haven't offered an explanation either. You have offered an opinion, an idea.
At best, I disagree with your choice of words, but that's semantics. I would say that while circles are a human abstraction not present in nature, in has been shown by results following from models incorporating the concept of the circle that it has some descriptive power. As for why, I don't know and claim that you can't know either.

Sure, if you want to. I would just use that site: http://www.eclecticenergies.com/iching/virtualcoins.php, but the thing is, how you approach it is key. You can't just sit there and throw it over and over - it's not a machine, it's the opposite of that. If you try to prove it's randomness, then you will. You have to be open to the idea that coincidence can also be the opposite of what you think it is. You don't have to be superstitious, but you have to say 'if I were superstitious...'

Okay, will try. Might take a while, though. Sry, looking for a job is more pressing

I hardly ever use things like this, because ultimately it's better to ask yourself important questions than the random splatter of the cosmic Pollack for advice. If you are going to use it, I would wait until the natural moment arrives - something comes up that you want to find out about.

A good excuse to take some time then
In any case, the first part of that paragraph is exactly what I've been saying. Why rely on the I Ching or whatever when it does the exact same thing that you could get by mulling things over without the heavy connotations?

Right, not exactly vice versa. Like if you're a flower it doesn't mean that the universe is a flower. The universe knows how to make things that flower though. It knows how flowering works more than even the flower. It doesn't 'know' like a person knows, but it seems to remember patterns and elaborate on them.

Lose the metaphorical connotations of the universe's ability to think and remember and I agree. Maybe replace them with potentiality or something.

This is an area that you have to approach from the inside. I know it doesn't seem like these things could have qualia but a lot of people have find that they do. New information comes from comparing the birthdate with the current date. It's ok, I wouldn't expect anyone to believe me without really investigating it fully. I wouldn't have.

My point was that what we call something has no bearing on what it is.

Like a 'real' science, numerology is just a refinement of common sense about numbers and letters. I started out looking up the meanings of the numbers and just being impressed at how the readings I could do out of the book contained an almost unmistakable thread of truth to them. Later on I became familiar enough with the meanings that I began to see why they mean what the books say.

Like what? What are the mechanisms? Has this been confirmed by experiments? I think it's warranted to ask for confirmation, since you likened numerology to science if nothing else. If it doesn't get objective results (or intersubjective if you will), it's not science after all.

Numbers have or are an ontological identity - by their very nature. One implies first, only, solitary, original, creative, independent (or dependent, isolated, failing to start..ie, dropping back toward zero). Two creates the possibility of relation, cooperation, refection, pause or patience (or supersensitivity, etc). The digital sequence is seen as a spectrum, like color (and corresponding to colors, among other things) which carries over to the alphabet.

No. One, like the circle, is an abstract human concept with no correspondent in the physical universe. There is no "one"; it's a measure by which we can describe some of its aspects. (In fact, "two" does not allow for cooperation in any way unless we're counting entities.) Saying "one" is mathematically equivalent to saying "two" or "X" as long as you replace all ones with twos or Xs.
What you (or I) take "one" to imply is irrelevant, as semantic implications are not to be confused with fact.

Of course, you don't have to pay attention to the subjective meanings of numbers at all, numbers can just be meaningless digits for counting. They're semiotic, they can be interpreted in different ways.

So why would I think your interpretation is true as opposed to merely personally meaningful?

When you think about it, after we die, barring any special contribution we leave behind, our existence will be marked by a character string and a numerical value. Those two things are the only two tangible things in the cosmos that we innately 'are' from beginning to end, besides our DNA.

Yes, but only by other humans using a system of letters and numbers descriptively. (Which can be done rather easily for DNA as well.)
How are they tangible? They're just communicable.
Being real "in their way"? Why do you even have to qualify it like that? Because they're not really real, I'd argue, but only "real to you", or as I would say, meaningful to you.

So either that's just another way of putting things or claiming things without evidence, I'm not sure which.

Evidence where there's evidence, truth where there's truth.

As if those were separate independent categories.
You can claim truth without evidence, but you can't claim knowing it's the truth unless you have evidence or good reason at least; else it would be coincidental, a guess.

True, not observations. Ideas/theories.

Ideas, yes. Theories only in the everyday use of the word, as scientific theories are qualitatively different.

Yes, the one that sounds about right is not on the same level of importance as the one which has been proven, but for being something that came out of an ass, it's not too far off. It's about as good as you could expect from someone without any scientific education. It was perfectly valid for centuries because it's truth was close enough.

It wasn't valid, people just usually had no way of telling its illegitimacy. Big difference.

Causality doesn't make it a different event. It's one event with a chain of physical consequences. An explosion's sound isn't a different thing from the explosion. I mean you can consider it different if you want to focus on the sound alone, but the sound is just an interpretation of the human eardrum.

As is everything else we perceive. By your definition, the big bang is the totality of the universe, hitting someone is the same event as pain, and the sun is the same thing as the light it emits.
Sure, it's an arbitrary definition as valid as any other, just not very useful, as it doesn't allow for the distinction between events withing causal chains.

Mythology is just a decorative container. It's not necessary to invoke a deity to explain intuition, but it may as well be Zeus for all we can understand about it. Like 'Let there be light', the main thing they got wrong was the anthropomorphic element.

I disagree, the main thing they got wrong was believing without any indication it was true.




As an aside, P.K.Dick wrote "The Man in the High Castle" using the I Ching. Said it screwed up the ending.

[Grimm]

I'm chiming in late to address a single point:

From the ongoing discussion between Norman (the outer quotes) and Immediacracy:

Quote
I have a hard time believing that that phrase is in fact not the most appropriate string of characters which could conceivably be derived from a composite of eight random probabilities.
So? This seems to be another version of "it's improbable, therefore it can't be coincidence and contains a profound truth". Besides, wouldn't the I Ching be developed to say something that makes some kind of sense instead of "marble, pistol, blue corner, shave the cow"?

Immedacracy - Norm's very right.  This is a probability argument that runs something like this:

Your backyard (assuming you have one) probably has several hundred thousand blades of grass in it.  Let's, in fact, say you've counted them - and you know it has, oh, 800,000 individual blades of grass.  If you were to stand on your patio/porch/deck blindfolded and fling a lawn dart at your backyard, what is the probability that it will land on any particular blade of grass, assuming an equal chance of landing anywhere in your yard?

Well, that's easy, right?  1:800,000.

This is analogous to what you're saying - that an I Ching casting coming up with any particular set of runes in any particular set of circumstances is a pretty slim probability, right?  That particular arrangement?

On the other hand, what is the probability you'll hit any grass at all?

1:1.

If you throw our lawn dart, you WILL hit the yard. 

If you ascribe meaning to the pattern you get - to the point that it's landed, believing that it is in fact somehow special - then what you've really done is apply confirmation bias to the situation at hand.  You are confirming your own beliefs, not generating insight.  If this helps you come to a decision, as meditation might then so be it.  It's useful to you - but it cannot, must not, be mistaken for significance at some cosmic scale.

In truth, only your belief makes it so.

Take this from a guy who used to read Tarot for fun and profit - as a grifter - I don't care how the cards fall, I can pull whatever meaning I need to pull from them in any given arrangement.  The I Ching is no different. 

You will get a Tarot spread.  You will get a chart.  You will get an I Ching spread.  In the end, that's guaranteed.  What meaning you pull from it is wholly subjective, and it will always have relevance to the situation at hand.

You will, guaranteed, find meaning.  They're made for that.  But high concepts do not a reliable divination method make.  That's the point; if you want to use them as a tool, they can be.  I concede that.  But they're a tool to recognize things you've already decided, not to see into some collective gestalt.

[Immediacracy]

I maintain that those who demand evidence of consciousness still believe in it (although quite possibly not your definition of it) or at the very least act accordingly on some level.

I agree, I just consider it unnecessary hypocrisy.

"Old" I was using as a citation of your description of the I Ching. Age is irrelevant here and I found it odd that you mentioned it at all.
How elaborate the I Ching is has nothing to do with how accurate it is.

Old is relevant because when we deal with intuition, the closer we get to primitive consciousness the better. Opposite to the objective worldview where the most contemporary technology is generally trusted, with the subjective world, ancient models are potentially more revealing of the raw architecture of the psyche.

So they're important because they're meaningful rather than a reflection of truth?

Their meaning is what's important about them, which is a reflection of inner truth.

Computer chips? DVD players? Hell, eyesight would be impossible without what QM describes. Same thing for glittering butterfly wings.
The I Ching has been tested? I'm unaware of any validation other than its persistence.

QM can only be validated objectively. I Ching subjectively. It's just an entirely different orientation from top to bottom.

And I have any right to call the results truth how?

It's not about calling it anything. You just let it be what it is.

I can assign meaning to my plays with Magic the Gathering cards.

Yep. The TV works too. TV Ching. Nothing special about the I Ching or Tarot other than they are designed expressly for that purpose so you get a really rich and coherent vocabulary to draw from.

I have a hard time believing that that phrase is in fact not the most appropriate string of characters which could conceivably be derived from a composite of eight random probabilities.

So? This seems to be another version of "it's improbable, therefore it can't be coincidence and contains a profound truth". Besides, wouldn't the I Ching be developed to say something that makes some kind of sense instead of "marble, pistol, blue corner, shave the cow"?

I'm not claiming that it's not a coincidence at all. (Everything is a coincidence, technically). I'm just saying that on one level the coincidence is meaningless, and on another level it appears uncanny. That's what consciousness is made of. Pattern recognition. Choosing to recognize a pattern or not. Choosing to what to pay attention to. The I Ching mirrors the moment, either as synchronicity or as part of the chain of deterministic cause and effect. Up to us. Sometimes it's a better idea to go with the coincidence and blow off the synchronicity.

I don't get it. I derive personal meaning from the I Ching interpretation with no connection to empirical truth, its results being coincidental, validating what I already thought was true (whether that's actually the case or not) by giving it an optional authority? Why would I not just think stuff over (with heavy doses of gut feelings if you prefer), and posit myself as the authority?
On what grounds would I be accepting or denying its authority anyway? You think that in this case the I Ching is right. I wouldn't know. What about the cases where it's wrong?

Absolutely, and it's very important to know that oracles like I Ching not only can be wrong, but misleading, seductive, and downright insidious if you abuse them (did you ever see the Twilight Zone 'Nick of Time'? http://www.youmaker.com/video/sv?id=05d5d5c5ede04d25821f41e16a0bfefb001) That's why I don't recommend that people trifle with things like that if they don't have a solid grounding in material objectivity. You definitely should just think stuff over. I do. Once every few years I might throw the I Ching or pull a Tarot card to satisfy an idle curiosity. The point is not to use divination, but to understand that it's not nothing, and that it's shadowy semi-validity reveals some important truths about the Self and it's connection to the Cosmos. That's why I say it's on the other side of our cosmos from QM.

Logic doesn't claim to adress imagination. That doesn't mean it doesn't acknowledge its existence, either. In fact, a small but important bunch of rules of logic deal with the inadmissibility of deducing/inferring the subjective view from the objective one and vice versa.

I agree. It doesn't stop people from using logic to prove the erroneous conclusion that imagination isn't real.

This begins to sound much like "we can't know anything for certain, therefore we can't know anything".
There's a qualitative difference between saying the universe is ours on account of the definition of words, and calling it physical on account of observation, no matter how imperfect; for starters, the latter adds new information to our models while nothing of verisimilitude follows from the former. I could call the universe snifty, and if I define snifty as a property of the universe, that statement will be true; it will have no bearing on what the universe looks like, though.

This gets too semantic for me. Definitions. Language. Bleh. I like snifty though. I'm on board with snifty. If you write a book on it, and it sells, who knows, in 50 or 100 years we may be well into the era of the Sniftic Enlightenment.

I don't care if it differs. Can it back the claim up?

It doesn't claim. It teases.

Sure, but how are they polar opposites or symmetries (or even complements as opposed to parts) of the scientific methods?

Back into the science/not science red herring.

Many more aspects can be explained by the complexity and flexibility of the human brain, which is in turn easily explained as a beneficial evolutionary trait.

Absolutely. Not all aspects though. Not qualia.

Our brains really don't need us at all to survive and keep the species reproducing.

?
Our brains are a constitutive part of what we are, and as vital to our survival as any other organ.

True, but I would say that I'm not a brain. I come from a brain. Brain exhaust. Electric brain sweat, mayybe. I don't need to be here, my brain is perfectly capable of making it's computations without a me monitor and an I mouse connected to it.

'course it does. I have to think about it, and where I don't, the ability to parse has been acquired with great effort during the evolution of brain architecture as well as long learning and modelling processes on my part.

Nope, you're not getting it. Obviously having to think about it is the way it is, but why would it be that way if the universe were purely automatic? The brain can read words and letters and not bother you with the English deciphering process you had to learn, so why bother you with anything else? Who needs an I when you have an eye?

Consciousness and intuition can easily develop alongside the body.

haha. Well I think it can, because I think that order is inherent in the body and in all forms of the cosmos. But without any order exterior to human intellect, what do you suppose could lead to the invention of consciousness? Based on what provision of matter or energy?

You mean the universe is somehow directly influenced by the subjective?

Every time you voluntarily move any part of your body you are directly influencing the universe. The body is part of the universe, no?

Just my point though; when we observe nature, we find no color wheel. It's our own abstraction, as indeed all our definitions of "opposites". They have no bearing on the universe, only on our perception of it.

Yes but 'abstraction' loses relevance when we talk about color. Color is both entirely subjective but concrete. Our opposites don't need to have a bearing on the universe, they are the universe informing consciousness. We discover opposites, we don't invent them. The logic of looking for an opposite is intuitive - we are searching for a relation that exists already internally, provided by our neurology, not creating it out of thin air and deciding it's an opposite arbitrarily.

I would indeed call black the opposite of white in everyday language, but not so when writing a presentation on physics or discussing metaphysics. No need there for an arbitrary human concept with no descriptive power.

Physics, no, but why not metaphysics?

the color wheel would serve as a descriptor of how we perceive colors, not how colors are - a description of us, not the universe.

That's what I'm saying, both the color wheel and the nuomenon of color are part of the Cosmos. It's not an either/or.

I would say that while circles are a human abstraction not present in nature, in has been shown by results following from models incorporating the concept of the circle that it has some descriptive power. As for why, I don't know and claim that you can't know either.

I don't think we have to know, I just think it's dishonest not to include them in any meaningful cosmology.

Okay, will try. Might take a while, though. Sry, looking for a job is more pressing

Oh, bummer. I hope you find one soon. I'm all for taking a break, hah.

Lose the metaphorical connotations of the universe's ability to think and remember and I agree. Maybe replace them with potentiality or something.

I'm cool with potentiality. I like essence. Similar.

My point was that what we call something has no bearing on what it is.

True, but in the subjective world, it's conceivable that names arise intuitively. Just as color may be communicating it's essence to us existentially through the texts of light, neurology, and consciousness, we may also have an intuitive perception of other kinds of essences and happen to choose names which bear a resemblance in some way already. Not thinking a one to one, like names are actually what the universe calls someone or something, but just that names have their own subtle, hypercomplex pharmacology.

Like what? What are the mechanisms? Has this been confirmed by experiments? I think it's warranted to ask for confirmation, since you likened numerology to science if nothing else. If it doesn't get objective results (or intersubjective if you will), it's not science after all.

I wouldn't call it science, no, but it is as close as you could probably get in that realm. Like the I Ching, what it gives you is a tantalizing glimmer of a curious thread that runs through our days, months, and years. The mechanisms are simple. You turn any letters into numbers according to their order in the alphabet and add them up. From that you get numbers that relate to your character and destiny, cyclical patterns within your life, etc. It's like the I Ching or Tarot, you kind look at it as if you were superstitious, and lo and behold, uncanny insights. Apophenia? Almost, but not quite. Believe me, I'm not a typical 'average Joe' so when I read a description that talks about individuation, analysis, understanding in both my astrology and numerolgy, it's not so easy to dismiss.

No. One, like the circle, is an abstract human concept with no correspondent in the physical universe.

I know what you're saying but I'm not talking about the physical universe. Other end of the Cosmos.

So why would I think your interpretation is true as opposed to merely personally meaningful?

It's true to the degree that it's personally meaningful.

Being real "in their way"? Why do you even have to qualify it like that? Because they're not really real, I'd argue, but only "real to you", or as I would say, meaningful to you.

I qualify it because numbers are too far infra to be considered objectively real. They are elemental decatypes to us. I have no reason to presume that the Cosmos has any such prejudice though. Our numbers may very well be as real to the nuonomenal Cosmos as cosmic rays or supernovas. Why wouldn't they be? Quarks are real to us, why wouldn't our 'ideoquarks' be real to it?

As if those were separate independent categories.
You can claim truth without evidence, but you can't claim knowing it's the truth unless you have evidence or good reason at least; else it would be coincidental, a guess.

The color yellow is an example of a truth without evidence. A circle. etc.

Ideas, yes. Theories only in the everyday use of the word, as scientific theories are qualitatively different.

No argument there.

It wasn't valid, people just usually had no way of telling its illegitimacy. Big difference.

Yes, but we still only have the ways that we currently of telling our own worldview's illegitimacy. Just as Einsteinian relativity invalidated Newton's model to a certain extent, our own worldview may yet be revised to be more inclusive and meaningful.

As is everything else we perceive. By your definition, the big bang is the totality of the universe, hitting someone is the same event as pain, and the sun is the same thing as the light it emits.
Sure, it's an arbitrary definition as valid as any other, just not very useful, as it doesn't allow for the distinction between events withing causal chains.

I would say that it's more valid for some purposes, less valid for others.

I disagree, the main thing they got wrong was believing without any indication it was true.

The the way that Greek belief was experienced is not necessarily like monotheism's belief. An archaeologist of our civilization could easily that we worshiped the Stock Market, or any of the iconic deities that adorn our skyscrapers. I'm not positing that Greek myth is a myth, but that you may be painting prehistory with a broad brush. Zeus worshipers did alright with the math and the philosophy, the architecture, the democracy...not bad for people who believe things without any indication that they are true.

As an aside, P.K.Dick wrote "The Man in the High Castle" using the I Ching. Said it screwed up the ending.

Ah cool, I like that book but it did seem a little screwy in the structure department. I wonder if he got the idea from William S. Burroughs?

Ok, reply if you want but I gotta take a break for a day or two.

[wright]

Immediacracy:

True, but I would say that I'm not a brain. I come from a brain. Brain exhaust.

You do have the gift for a nice turn of phrase, Imm. "Brain exhaust"; lovely concept  . Are you a writer?