@nameless,
nameless;72528 wrote:
I find it exciting that the once apparently disparate disciplines of mysticism and 'science' (alchemy once) are at long last converging!
I am still missing a conviencing explanation of how modern science and mystic ideas correlate.
Some people like to take a statement of a physicist and search the bible for metaphors that seem to somehow express the same thing, meaning you can read into that sentence from the bible what the statement of that physicist was, if you tolerate a lot of unpreciseness.
These connections have been made on more or less sophisticated levels already. Fritjof Capra for example, who i find to be a highly respectable intellectual person, also made connections between quantum physicists' statements and statements made by (e.g.) buddhist monchs (see 'The Tao of Physics'). What he obviously didn't recognize was that he also was a victim of what is called selective perception (
Selective perception - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) - a term that explains how each person's subjective perspective creates blind spots. Or actually it seems like with selective perception we don't have just a blind spot, but actually we only have a small visible spot, while the rest is invisible to us.
This is not something that happens to uneducated people. We all have it. A very simple example would be how somebody has the feeling that it always starts raining when he leaves the house. He simply doesn't register other peoples' experience of leaving the house and it starts raining. He thinks it just happens to him.
At this point i have to point my finger especially to the selective perception that appears when looking at something in retrospective.
Retrospective allows selective perception at all levels.
This happens e.g. when people read a horoscope. They forget about ninety percent of what they read, but when an event occurs that corresponds with the horoscope they will say:
"That's what my horoscope said!" The fitting point is what reaches our perception, the rest of it is (not a blind spot but actually) blind landscapes.
I know this feeling of science is close to what once would have been called magic.
But the parallels that i have seen turned out to be selective perception. If we look at the huge amount of assumptions made by alchemists and quantum physicists (to stay close to your example), and if we really try to connect any alchemist assumption with a quantum theory idea by drawing a clear arrow for each connection, we have to admit that the number of arrows is quite tiny.
For example think of the 'philosopher's stone'. This was one of the major issues of alchemy. It was supposed to have the properties of the sun, which is manifest in the properties of gold, and to find it would also cause (or demand) the alchemist himself to reach a higher level of consciousness. Finding it would mean twice: Reach a higher stage of consciousness and being able to create gold.
That's something nice to dream about, but do we have anything correlating in modern science?
No.
I'm sure you will be able to find some spots where parallels DO exist. But it will be tiny spots in a huge landscape.
I don't even want to go into further details about the research of alchemists who tried to create so called homunculi using special mixtures including human sperm, haha...
A hand full of similarities will not make old and new science merge.
nameless;72528 wrote:"Genuinely successful theories interconnect information from previously disparate areas of experience,"
This is an interesting sentence to me. I believe that future science will demand more capabilities of thinking in synthesist ways.
nameless;72528 wrote:
Both seaks 'truth' and as Truth is one, all roads seem to lead to Rome!
There are many Perspactives that are capable of seeing the convergence (similar Perspectives). Actually, for every Perspective that sees such a convergence, there is an equal and opposite Perspective.
I have been wondering if i need to object to this part of your philosophy.
I haven't because it is very similar to my personal philosophy. However we will certainly come to a point where the difference is to relevant.
The similarity first of all seems to me, that i also respect the point of view that every perspective has its own reality.
From my point of view there is no perspective that can be called ultimately wrong.
Every perspective origins from reality and as such has its right to be existent as such.
So every schizophrenic person's description of paranoid ideas has to be considered a splinter that reflects a particular part of reality.
Everyone of us is nothing but a splinter of glass reflecting a particular part of reality.
The difference between your philosophy and mine is certainly that yours is based on the assumption of an ultimate truth.
Which i totally reject.
I certainly DO believe that there is a material world around us.
But i do not see any evidence of the existence of truth.
Truth is a concept created by humans. The 'world of things' (which would be Immanuel Kants philosophical pendant to the scientific 'material world') does not have space for anything like truth.
The final ultimate truth that i have found is that there is no ultimate truth.
The word 'truth' will always contain components that are based on conventions:
One convention is that truth is what we agree on.
Another (scientific) convention is that truth is what is functional in a particular context (even if we don't understand it).
Which means truth would be what works for all of us.
Science tries to find rules that work for all of us, however Einstein found out, that in the contrary anything we perceive is based on the viewers perspecticve. Thus nothing WE perceive (works for all of us) can be ultimately true.
Any perception we have is bound to be based on a particular perspective.
And apart from perceptions there could be recognitions that are not based on perspective, but those are so general that they are not functional to describe the environment of a living individual which is so complex that a general physical formula looses its applicability.
So it's bound to loose its functionality which is the primary scientific criteria.
The functionality of 'true' assumptions persists only in a particular constellation which is valid only for the particular frame of reference.
There is as many frames of reference as there are living creatures. At least.
So there can be as many truths as living creatures. And actually much more.
You certainly see why i had the feeling that i don't have to object to your point of view.
However it's obvious where the difference is:
You say "All roads seem to lead to Rome". From my perspective however there is no Rome.