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New Anyone still fascinated with the unAnswered.. (especially the unAnswerable) Questions?
(after say, some fresh event of synchronicity?) They never quite-disappear, do they?

Here's an example of what a brilliant mentation can do, via meticulously evading purest digital-think/related fallacies re: such Questions (as have killed many millions over the Centuries--via the ignorant framing of small-minds, next their large armies. And still. (Probably next, too.) :-/
Looking for something else, I came across this lunch-time essay of Feynman's of 5-2-56. What Feynman achieved at his best, IMO was his Clarity: even on nascent topics about which the little 'known' was anything but 'clear', even in implications.

Over the eons, in various locales the IGM has jousted amidst many of the ideas set forth here, and my hindsight is, that we are such amateurs! when we attempt to logically parse the Known-unknowns (never mind.. the Class:Unknowables!) as-if.. logic were enough. My fav koan is, that Mankind Lacks (ability to employ) Scale and Relativity
(..stolen from any number of gurus across centuries, however variously expressed.)

Here, however, R.P.F. comes as close as yet seen (esp. if funnel-sorted by word-count!) to succinctly achieving that perception, just short-of 'explaining the ineffable' (an impossible errand, that; by definition.) That he Stops-short of that meta-level.. is the best indicator I can conceive as any 'test' of the koan.
Methinks that, had this little essay surfaced to any one of us, all the way back to Sandy Reed/IW daze: our grande fulminations would have been quite less hyperbolic and produced more light than heat. That he delivered this essay--as likely never made the pop-meeja of any-day-since--fifty-eight years ago! is surely an indicator of what Gems are (still) being buried under the tsunami of TMI.. as shall only become larger, henceforth. Thanks! CalTech for saving Everything, even before transistorization mega-diluted the Good-stuff with.. what-crap-I-had-for-lunch.

Had I heard this, then, I'd have saved thousands of hours of time wasted with incoherent ramblings of the unwise (I already knew about the Certainty bugaboo, but was still way-short in epistemology and nada about James Frederick Ferrier, who coined it.) But at least I'd have had a compass, much earlier.
(We aren't much further-along re consciousness in 2014; note his treatment of that, too.)

Bon appetít. Anyone else ever hear of this? there's lots of Feynman lore hereabouts.


The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
--Bertie
New ObSentient LRPD "Let's ask the Magic Conch shell."
I think the single most compelling piece of evidence for global warming is that Fox News viewers think it's a hoax.
New Thanks. It's a good read.
I vaguely recall seeing it before. He presents a good case, but is a little too kind it seems to me. He mentions the metaphysical difficulties in the conflict between religious stories about what the universe (and we) are and how we came to be, but glosses over (it seems to me) the fundamental conflict there.

It seems to me that if the creation stories are wrong (and they certainly are), then the demands from religious leaders that the Bible (or Church teachings or whatever) be regarded as inerrant must be incorrect as well. And if that is true, then teachings that God or the Bible demands that this or that behavior on a topic that is not even discussed there (abortion, etc.) be regarded as obvious and inerrant must be seen as unsupported as well.

IOW, if you tell me that your religion is correct and has all the answers, don't point to a book for proof that says that the Sun literally stood still or that the world existed before light or that there was a global flood or ... Demanding belief in falsehoods doesn't make your case stronger.

He glosses over, IMO, the control aspects of religion. And in singing the praises of the "heritages of Western Civilization" he certainly ignores the bad parts!

But his comments on the necessity of humbleness in attempting to figure out the world are certainly good and well worth remembering. Humbleness in religious teaching (at least among the big three monotheistic churches) is all too rare though.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Of course those are significant omissions.. this was a lunch-break chat ;^>
It would be counter-intuitive (would it not?) to attempt to Solve this perpetual social dilemma: by employing (yours or my) Logic to settle the entire Matter. Eh?

I mean, merely: that his withholding of innate bias was a Necessary and Proper (to coin a phrase) ingredient, if what you want to produce in the auditor, is: some model for creating then maintaining a dialogue with Both (or n!) Sides--for the purpose of increasing comity. Because if you cannot move in that direction?
cf. [Where's that List of all the known-warz since stone tablets recorded same? gotta look for the upgraded one.]

That was 58 years ago.. We are suffused with (merely the Latest,) now impendiing-Next of these Wars About Metaphors: the bugaboo of our little errant-grey-cells: and our religious-Faith that logic-is-enough to cover Any Question as ever arises, here in the daily 'maya' (yet-another metaphor as has had Legs for millennia.)
(Personally, I'd like to have heard Oppie's 'review of this talk' and his other observations; he had--at least--read such material as the Bhagavad Gita, much else ... all material unlikely ever deemed worthy of perusal via those earning their keep via science/engineering lore.)

Quite agree re the Control-aspects of all those who have invested their personal/worldview into One humongous metaphor. The scientific method is a recipe ergo metaphor for understanding (literally "standing under") the mechanics of the observable, tested, reproducibly-measurable phenomena we notice. Human mind(-set) Control remains another chimera: devoutly (!) to be wished by many, (probably another bug-hunt?)

There is no such correlation (I've yet heard of) as admits scientific-cataloguing, (let alone explanations) of the root of all our mental, daily, incessantly chattering mindstuffs. You cannot set up repetitive experiments as produce such a map, for obvious reasons: nobody can 'monitor' another's mindwork except via some statistical projection of test-questions?/answers across large numbers of units. Psych IS a pseudo-science (like Econ, 'political-science' etc.

ie Unless/until consciousness should ever be deciphered: all the rest is Talk. Science IS a religion for many practitioners, insofar as such a one imagines to deliver Answers to the Questions merely limned by RP's concise Intro, Philosophy is harder than 'doing science', maybe orders of magnitude? That there are rotten 'philosophers' and inept 'scientists' isn't even debatable. For me, Certainty is one core-fallacy within that (other debatable, probably also unresolvable) concept: the maya.

Works for me: allowing me to distance-self from the accelerating devolution towards madness, as is now so familiar that we (think we) are inured to its effects. For all the exabytes of factoids, IMO/IME we remain a pig-ignorant species: weighing what we 'know' (never fershure.. never That) -vs- that huge Empty-list of the stuff we can't even 'miss', lacking the imagination even to guesstimate beyond the easy.. material-stuff.

(I no dog in this fight; the pen may be mightier than the sword, but in the land of the blind, the One-eyed is King, I've heard. We'll see, but will we See?


As to that loaded-icon, 'Western-', oft taken to signify Enlightened (each one defining that word differently from any other one) It calls for a conclusion on the part of the witness (,Your Honor.)
If the species does not Resolve the Twin-aspects (logic + also too, evanescence) of a human, via some base-line of unambiguous Tolerance, soon? well.. you know.

Techno has provided us the means for ... whatever fantasy (happens to appear, with Power behind it.) Is that even arguable?
New Good points all around. :-) Thanks.
New Re: Questions?
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.


Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
New (One of my favs, too.) 'Certainty' is forever bogus.
New Not forever.
Only until we come up with a system of mathematics for which the Incompleteness Theorems do not hold. ;0)
New More on science, consciousness (some physicists' early explorations) on npr today:
Irrelevant, this topic, for any who have decided that the methods of science can/shall reveal answers to any questions wondered-about: now or next. (To accept that, you must also acknowledge that our understanding of 'Energy': its kaleidoscope of sub-categories, is now near-enough solved as to be deemed complete.)


To the Best of Our Knowledge
The Edges of Science

How do we know what's real? Can science tell us, or is there an unseen reality we'll never understand? The show explores the borderlands of knowledge and reflects on some remarkable episodes in the history of science -- Nobel laureates who investigated ghosts and a pioneer of quantum physics who found messages in his dreams.



The Edges of Science .
Today's offering, via 3 books, describes an interesting time when credentialed-scientists focussed their analytic skills upon purported para-normal events. While most of these proved to be bogus/or even scams, some events defied rational explanation, (including a mentioned experience of one of these investigators.)

Alas towards the end of this section, when Chopra chimes-in re (basically, our ignorance of consciousness itself) his antagonist suggests that, pretty much ~"we'll have a map of imagination (implicitly consciousness too) Real Soon now." And the host was out of time.

What this brief commentary had no time to follow up was a comment at opening, "What. if. serious scientists, with today's techno, were to again focus upon incidents today, of similar strangeness (selecting out those reports whose author tests too-sane to handily discredit, say?) I suspect there's little inclination to risk obloquy from one's cohorts ... but it would have been worth hearing the repartee, I thought. There's so much bogosity-noise around the most subtle of events-within-consciousness, it's understandable that such a Tar-baby topic would be eschewed--by most of those best-suited to seek truthiness (wherever discernible.) Catch 22.
New The answer is simple - there is no reality.
It is a matter of perception.
New One primer, then: 'The Doors of Perception'
then a few hundred others. Math won't reveal much in this area, physics can't 'study' it and words have no Referents, so ...
Perception is just another synonym for [what isn't remotely understood] Eh? Circle-jerk.

Maybe some next generation will come up with something transmissible? (Till then, I'll have to go with my perception that Ignorance of Reality is no proof of its non-existence.) Were there no such 'thing', then maybe the Cosmos doesn't 'really' exist, either--if'n ya wanna go with Leibniz and that "dark-room with a projector running".

Now if Something is amused at our word-games.. would It have a URL?

     Anyone still fascinated with the unAnswered.. (especially the unAnswerable) Questions? - (Ashton) - (10)
         ObSentient LRPD "Let's ask the Magic Conch shell." -NT - (Silverlock)
         Thanks. It's a good read. - (Another Scott) - (2)
             Of course those are significant omissions.. this was a lunch-break chat ;^> - (Ashton) - (1)
                 Good points all around. :-) Thanks. -NT - (Another Scott)
         Re: Questions? - (a6l6e6x) - (2)
             (One of my favs, too.) 'Certainty' is forever bogus. -NT - (Ashton) - (1)
                 Not forever. - (mmoffitt)
         More on science, consciousness (some physicists' early explorations) on npr today: - (Ashton) - (2)
             The answer is simple - there is no reality. - (Andrew Grygus) - (1)
                 One primer, then: 'The Doors of Perception' - (Ashton)

Two words: meat helmet.
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