RE: Mind/matter duality
June 3, 2013 at 10:50 am
(This post was last modified: June 3, 2013 at 10:53 am by little_monkey.)
(June 3, 2013 at 10:37 am)bennyboy Wrote:(June 3, 2013 at 8:55 am)little_monkey Wrote: I believe what you have left out what is the most important element, Darwin's theory of evolution: the fact that we've evolved from lower species. Evolution has no specific goal other than for a species to survive not only against the natural elements but also against other species. In that struggle, nothing was ever written in cement that we, homo sapiens, would have the brains completely wired to understand every aspects of the universe. But as the dominant species on this planet, we have accomplished quite an extraordinary feat in understanding a good part of this universe with two simple tools: the alphabet and a number system. Just 100 years ago we began to understand why atoms bond to form molecules. Just 50 years ago, we've discovered DNA, the basic stuff of life. I don't think our journey has ended, rather it has just begun. The reality that we can even understand the nature of our limitations, through math (Godel Incomplete Theorem) and physics (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle), is extraordinary in itself.
Joe
No doubt. My belief is that as we push against new boundaries, we're going to come up against more and more ambiguities that seem unsolvable. We may solve some of them through cycles of experimentation and theoretical physics, but we'll also realize that others are necessarily unsolveable.
I also believe (and this is speculative) that many of the apparent ambiguities will get fought over, and eventually shrugged off as brute fact, like particle/wave. I highly suspect in the end that matter and mind may end up being indistinguishable-- not because mind is just a byproduct of matter or vice versa, but because they may end up being different manifestations (or perspectives) of the same thing: mind/matter/energy/stuff.
/woo
Agree on that.
One note tho', about the wave/particle thingy. In our everyday life, we have classical physics that gives more or less a reasonable picture of the universe. In that regime objects are classified as either particles ( things that collide and bounce off) and waves ( things that go straight through and interfere destructively/constructively) But at subatomic scale, that classification no longer holds. We have objects that can be like particles in some circumstances, and waves in different circumtances. But somehow we have developped a theory that can handle these. So what we couldn't describe through ordinary language, we have done it through the other "language", called math. So what about the other outstanding issues like free will or self-awareness? Who knows, but 100 years ago, there were no theory about the beginning of the universe. Now we have a half-dozen of them. I believe we live in very exciting times.