Life Is More Meaningful Than Mere Facts Can Convey
npr.org
npr.org
"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
This is really nice; thank you: "The reason poets of the times past wrote verses about stars and not quarks is because they could not see quarks."
I'm sure you know how much trouble string theory has had -- not because it is bad science, but simply because it is hard to come up with a way to test something that makes claims that lie at the limits of our understanding. Suppose though after decades of painstaking experiments we do come up with a Unified Theory (UT). But then one fine day someone notices some strange effect beneath that is not explained by the UT. What then? When Max Planck decided to become a physicist (end of 19th century), his advisor told him that basically "everything in physics has already been discovered, physics now is only concerned about details." We may feel the same way after we come up with UT, but even UT may be "the tip of an iceberg" that is actual deep reality.
As another illustration, the space-time is expanding at an ever increasing rate, and that space-time expansion is not limited by the speed of light. Some time in the distant future (a few billion years?), the background radiation we now see from the time of the Big Bang will be off limits because the Universe's boundary will have expanded faster than light. So the future scientists will be forever in the dark about how the Universe came about. They will generate some theories about it, maybe even close to correct ones, but they will never really know what happened in the beginning.
There are certain physical bounds (computational complexity, irreversibility of entropy/time, uncertainty principle, the speed-of-light limit, cosmological constant) that prevent us from knowing everything and which may be impossible to overcome. We should remain cautiously optimistic though, since pessimism is counter-productive. Also, hey, it looks like strong AI will be a reality one day, maybe it will answer those questions for us.
Since he brought up Rumi, I thought I'd use him as an example. Rumi has said "I died a mineral, and became a plant. I died a plant and rose an animal. I died an animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?"
Here he is pulling in knowledge; knowledge of nutrient cycling, maybe even evolution.
But I can respond in kind; I could answer his question, saying that "you're less by dying when you die a man and become minerals." Here I too am pulling from knowledge again; if it's true that "you" become "more" by going from plant to an animal- then surely it follows that you become "less" by traversing the opposite direction. And that is most definitely what happens when men die; they are reduced to their components by the process of decomposition.
I don't see how anyone can completely decouple "spirituality" from knowledge, since all forms of spirituality I've encountered speak in the language of knowledge. And I don't see Rumi's statement is less or more spiritual than mine, either. Perhaps his is more optimistic, but there's plenty of pessimism in some forms of spiritualism.
This is straight from the school of thought that says any great truths have to be understood at the experiential level, not just the intellectual level. A pedestrian codification of this is the "Child has to learn it for themselves" statement when parents attempt to impart life wisdom on offspring but realise that in itself is not enough. They see, perhaps for the first time, the real difference between understanding and Understanding.
A more specific example is love. An observer studying the biological / physiological mechanisms involved, and immersing themselves in second-hand accounts of new romance could allow themselves to intellectually approximate human love, but experiencing it directly gives them a much deeper, experiental understanding than would otherwise be possible.
The case is no different when it comes to the meaning of life. The answer to that question cannot be extracted and written down as knowledge, and instead must be derived from the full life experiences of each individual seeking an answer. As the author states 'the essence of the question is about experience, not facts'.
The war between science and religion is only real for people who believe that science precludes a religious outlook, and vice versa. Science is about pattern recognition from observation. Religion is about living life from revealed or derived wisdom. Religion can be informed by science if it accepts science as part of wisdom. Science has obvious limitations to only what can be observed and explained or duplicated, and it can't get outside that box.
But if you take a fact and intend to spend your limited life pursuing it, it should be real. It should be the truth. You shouldn't be wasting your life working from faulty assumptions, because as far as we can observe (pace Hinduism), this one life is our only chance to do some damage.
Are there major differences in the life you live if you have a different set of facts? Do you have to decide? I would say yes for myself. But apathy like that of the editorialist will kill any amount of wisdom.
For sure they were great communicators. But ... ;)
(And, just to be clear, it was NPR who got it wrong, not the poster above.)
In any case, is that rule one applies to names? That it's okay to mangle the true spelling as long as the pronunciation remains the same?
A man as impressive and significant as Gandhi, and people can't be arsed to get his name right?