Thoughts on Buddhism

[Abracadabra]

There's a reason why people "restrict themselves to logic and computation," because several centuries of productive science as a result of doing so has yielded more useful truths than several millennia of navel gazing.

That's certainly true, and it would require a fool to not recognize that truth.

However, at the very same time there are equally logical reasons for recognizing the limitations and domain of the sciences.

If you stand back and look at science you can clearly see what it does. Science looks at the observable universe and describes how it behaves in terms of quantitative or mathematical relationships.

Period. That's all that science does.

Science does not explain, or even attempt to explain, why there exists a universe that obeys quantitative relationships in the first place. That is just assumed to be the case because that's what we observe. It doesn't need to be proven or explained, all it needs to be is experienced and that is sufficient proof that it exists.

However, science has now come to a place where it has actually shown us that this method of observation and explanation must necessarily break down at the quantum level. This is precisely the predictions of the most scientific theory to date - Quantum Mechanics. The mathematics of Quantum Mechanics demand via the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that we can never go beneath the quantum level. We even have reasons to believe that space, time, and even mathematics as we understand it may very well all break down beneath the quantum level. Yet we have sound reasons for believing that there exists some sort of 'reality' beneath the substrate of what we see as a physical universe.

So science has actually come to the place where it is basically indicating that there is something that goes far beyond science, and possibly even mathematics and logic as we perceive them to be.

So science has led us full-circle, and now it has become reasonable to believe that there may exist aspects of nature that may not adhere to the quantitative mathematics and logic that we so cherish.

We've come full circle.

Is science great at describing spactime, and the behavior of energy and mass within that fabric? Yes, absolutely, it's perfect for that job.

But can that same method of inquiry lead us to anything beyond that?

We now have legitimate reasons to suspect that this may not be the case.

Just look at String Theory.

Most people may not realize this, but even though String Theory is tied to mathematics, that doesn't mean that it is restricted to mathematics as we understand it. Oh the contrary most string theorists now believe that there may be well over ten to five-hundredth power possible string theories.

That a 10 with 500 zeroes after it.

And every one of those solutions may represent an entirely different kind of universe which may be just as legitimate as our, yet the very nature of mathematics (i.e. the quantitative relationships between things) in those universes may seem totally illogical and bizarre to us.

So our very notions of "logic" and "reason" may themselves be highly illogical and unreasonable with respect to the true nature of reality.

And, of course, that will absolutely be true if String Theory turns out to be right.

So how ironic is that?

Science isn't what it used to be back in the days of Isaac Newton.

Science can be perfectly true and correct, yet reality can still be extremely strange and unimaginable in terms of what we consider to be 'logical'.

Contrary to what many people seem to be thinking, science does not demand that reality must be 'reasonable'.