[thechat] rationality is not enough (was: New Year's Resolution)

Joe Crawford joe at artlung.com
Fri Jan 3 15:09:00 CST 2003


rationality is satisfying inasmuch as one can be happy with a truth that
there is not an ultimate truth about the nature of the universe.

the fact is that mental telepathy has not been proved to exist. if it were
I certainly think the folks at Coca-Cola would be using it to sell us more
soda pop, and Al Queda and the CIA would be using it to kill people.

As far as appreciating a sunset when one does not agree that there is a
"god" "godhead" "essential universal spirit" "all encompassing energy"
which created it - I disagree. I think one can simple appreciate being as
an amazing thing. think of all that has to happen for you to see that
sunset.

first, the sun is a much larger object than you or i can possibly imagine,
and yet there it is, we see on a regular basis - a fiery nuclear furnace
generating light and and energy and has done so for a long time - that
light takes 8 minutes to get here. this *has* been canculated. we know a
bit about the local neighborhood by watching it very closely. but think of
that - if the sun suddenly went out, we would not know it for 8 minutes.
contemplating scale like this is dazzling to me.

closer to home, the sunset is beautiful because of the colors - which
themselves are due to the chemical properties of the things in the
atmosphere  - and a sunset always seems to be a little different, unique
and wondrous.

and to think of all that my body must do to perceive that sunset also
makes me wonder - i must have eyes that work - themselves amazing
implements for converting light into electrical pulses my brain can read
as "vision", powered by the nutrients and oxygen my blood provide.

all this and much more is going on all at once. despite my agnosticism, i
have more than a small sense of wonder about the world. the world dazzles,
even if we only account for the things we *think* we can understand with
science.

Richard Feynman I think wrote once that he was asked by a poet if it
bothered him that as a scientist he had to reduce the experience of a
flower to mere scientific phenomena - where is the poetry? where is the
exhultant joy a poet describes in the flower? and he answered how I do now
- that by knowing *more* about the flower, you are able to more fully
appreciate the grandness of the world.

That's my story. But I'm hopped up on cold tablets and a fever. So perhaps
that affected me. :-)

Joe

--
Joe "ArtLung" Crawford
San Diego California USA: http://artlung.com/





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