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

[javier velasco]

i first thought of sending this offlist to joe only (first part), then i
figured it could interest others as well (further down)... HTH

Joe Crawford wrote:

> 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.

are you thinking about me here? maybe I was unclear: I never tried to
give any religious attribute to the sunset.

> I think one can simple appreciate being as
> an amazing thing. think of all that has to happen for you to see that
> sunset.

Yes that's exactly the way I see it.

>
> 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.

Yes and on that course with Maturana (Biologist) that I've mentioned
many times. He explained us how he had reaserched on the nervous system,
how vision operates, and in this work he learned that he had to modyfiy
his complete approach to science, he even questions the scientifical
method because it was too manipulative and had to clean some parts of
it. He discivered that the scientist (unconsciously) fixes things in
order to get a pre-concieved answer in the moment of defining the
question. He modified the process a bit to assume complete
responsability for his work, I don't remember many details now.

Later in his studies of vision, he discovered that the things we see
cannot exist independently either in the outer world nor inside our
brains, perception ocurrs in special cells (in our sensory organs) that
involve both the outer world and our nervous systems. He concluded from
this that the observed object and the observed thing are mutually
dependent, and we all see different things, what led him to discard the
concept of OBJECTIVITY and placed it in between parenthesis marks. I'ts
a very interesting work, and his book is also published in english, let
me know if you're interested.

>
> 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. :-)


cheers
javier