RE: Scientific knowledge versus spiritual knowledge
January 7, 2016 at 5:18 pm
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2016 at 6:02 pm by God of Mr. Hanky.)
(January 7, 2016 at 4:01 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:(January 5, 2016 at 4:57 pm)God of Mr. Hanky Wrote: Can I get some blue cheese, and perhaps a little red wine with that word salad?Rather than demonstrate how I may have failed to make a coherent argument, your merely resort to anti-intellectual hand-waving. Your teachers must be so proud of you. (That goes for you too, Lady Camus!)
Quote:As I see it, dicohotomies like natural/supernatural and scientific/spiritual serve more as terms of art than precise distinctions. In my preceding posts, I made a clumsy efforts to reveal these ambiguities.
The OP’s author appears to be ignorant of this. I don’t blame anyone from using terms of art. I use them all the time. It is only natural that many errors and misunderstandings follow when the same word can covey multiple meanings. ‘Natural’ is itself one such adjective. Some people think that natural and reality are the same. I do not. Nature refers only to physical objects, their features and attributes. Reality includes both physical and non-physical objects, like circles and triangles. Nor does non-physical necessarily mean magical, depending of course on what you mean by magic.
I believe that you believe it's art, but when you challenge a scientific idea, art need not apply. Science is water, and art is fire. The art you've shown here is a match flame already flickering in the breeze.
If you dispute that nature and reality are different, then instead of going apeshit with insults when we disagree you should
1. Not do anything until you've taken another hard look at your position, considering why you believe it's correct
and
2. If you still hold the same position after Step 1, then give us a reason why anyone, including the skeptics (not the few special snowflakes who are so enlightened above us because they had an "experience") should believe it too.
If you won't do the above, then what are you doing here?
On nature and reality: so, maybe the reality of circles and rectangles are nature, or maybe they aren't - ok, then!
What we can say for sure is they are both reality - I could probably stop right here, but I doubt that will be enough for you.
Q: What have circles, rectangles, and other mathematical realities ever meant to species other than Homo Sapiens?
A: Nothing - when they come upon or are confronted by an object, a body, or other life form, most species don't need to describe it, therefore they don't need to call it one thing or another. They need to decide between two maybes: maybe they could use it, or maybe they should run from it. Whatever the hell said opportunity or danger is, it's shape and other mathematical figures which characterize it are strictly human constructs which we created in order to help us sort out the disparate realities which we are capable of perceiving.
The sorting out and description of realities made it possible for us to actually use data from our observations, and without the ability to do these we wouldn't be able to tell each other whether our home planet is a sphere or a block. Hey, there you go, a sphere certainly is natural, and a reality all at the same time. By the way, we too are part of nature - we evolved by, and we do what we do according to our natural impulses. The ability to think like we do - yup, that too is a natural phenomenon. So if I draw this circle on paper with a pencil, and you say that isn't natural, well you would be making at best a subjective argument. Moreover, to separate the non-eating, non-mating, non-sleeping, and non-defecating activities of humans from nature on account of the intelligence which is required to do these is akin to saying no other animals have any intelligence - that's a certain falsehood to those who study animal behavior! Therefore, I see no valid cause for a separation between reality and nature. I think the only time I ever said anything to the contrary on nature was when I was a kid at the zoo - "Wow, that's so unreal!"
Mr. Hanky loves you!