Re: virus: religion

Sodom (sodom@ma.ultranet.com)
Tue, 21 Apr 1998 13:27:59 -0400


Eric Boyd wrote:

> > I think that this slight wrinkle does not really detract from
> > the fact that we need to do a whole lot of unlearning before
> > we can come up with an integrated view of quantum reality and
> > Newtonian reality.
>
> I'm really not sure why we would need to do this. The way I see the
> difference is in levels of detail. Sure, we could try and modify the
> Newtonian world view to include our knowledge of what happens at the pico
> level, but why should we? What we have now works, and I doubt that any
> small improvement we could get by modifying the physics would be worth the
> new complexities we would have to include. (there is one hell of a lot of
> molecules in any significant amount of matter!) To coin an analogy, I
> don't think that the operators of a casino actually worry about every
> little dice that is being thrown. As long as they know that the
> probabilities favour them, in the long run, I suspect they are quite happy
> to let God play dice with the universe... In the same way, I don't think
> that we need to be particulairly concerned about the position or shape of
> atoms: with so many of them, we are better off going with probabilities.

This part i cant agree with. In practice I agree that it is much easier to use
a mostly correct system, but in the bigger picture, we do need science to reach
the most accurate description available. Not the easiest description - though
for practical purposes I can understand the idea of staying with what you have
but that leads to what we are trying to avoid - belief in something that is
factually incorrect. I agree that we need to do a lot of unlearning, I think it
would be best to drop the entire notions of space and time, emotion and
religion, and a great deal of other concepts as most people think of them. It
took a long time for me to purge fear and emotional decision making, had i
started out without being trained with them, I "think" I would be better off
today. People still talk about right and wrong, good or bad etc.. even though
we all know thses terms cannot be accurate as absolutes. thatt here is almost
always a maybe are that is more profound than simple right or wrong. If we
could all unlearn the 0 - 1 thought process, I think we would be much better
off, but 0-1 are so ingrained, that I cannot begin to unravel what it has done
to all of our thought processes

Sodom
I saw the light and it was 1/2 on