This article on both Buddhism and Physics articulates very well, the problem I have had dealing with materialists here on this board. So I am going to present the article, and let people say what they think about it.
As it is in PDF form, I cannot cut and paste an excerpt from it, but it’s probably better that I don’t as there is not really any point in people who have not read it posting in this thread.
http://www.alanwallace.org/Vacuum%20States%20Essay.pdf
Erek
It seems like using the term vacuum with respect to a conscious state is merely an abstraction that may or may not relate to the underlying physical state.
The “low energy” state of consciousness may involve a significant amount of energy usage and physical activity in the brain, and possibly more energy usage than a “higher energy state” with respect to consciousness. This is because “low energy” w.r.t. consciousness merely means that state at which there is the least amount of conscious thought.
Just because the same word has been chosen to apply to 2 different things doesn’t make those things related in any way.
Basically, like the Dancing Wu Li Masters, to the layperson, it sounds good.
The more you know about physics or about buddhism, the less it sounds right.
What exactly would physics have to do with Buddhism? Or vice-versa?
Let’s see - the hebrews invented monotheism, and incidentally the “paradigm for what we in the West now call religion”, around 500BCE ? And that’s just the opening sentence?
mswas, have you ever heard the old saw about having too open a mind?
Or, you know, spoken to any actual practicing Buddhists?
Laying aside the merits of the article for an instant, what is it in you that requires a reconciliation of physics and Buddhism? A bullfrog and a telephone have no use for one another, but both have their place in the world and they need not overlap. How would a physics of dharma help one’s appreciation of the four noble truths, exactly? How is a Buddhist physicist’s understanding of the word vacuum different and special?
As for the merits of the article, it reads mostly as a demonstration of the myth of metaphor. One can trawl unrelated disciplines and intellectual traditions for independent use of the same words and phrases, and, if one is naive or careless enough, come to the conclusion that when Asimov says “chemistry” he means exactly what Dolly Levi means by the term. So it is here with the linked article, except the author doesn’t even go to the trouble of documenting the overlap: he merely asserts that the Buddhist javana “may be characterized as” a “vacuum state” and then proceeds to build upon this as if it were an actual parallel instead of something he just made up.
A bigger problem is that even granting the premise, the paper goes on to prove, well, nothing. Does the concept of javana have anything important to show physicists in their struggle to comprehend the void? Does the behavior of light or gravity in a physical vacuum teach the Buddhist anything about right thoughts or actions? There’s really nothing in the paper even to justify the title: nowhere is it made clear that a Tibetan Buddhist would sign off on any of it, or even think it significant.
Other problems: the footnoting feels dicey to me: the author seems to shun direct quotes, and has a habit of saying a startling or counterintuitive thing, then instantly following it with a much more prosaic assertion, which is footnoted. This leaves me wondering how much of his “thesis” actually has any scholarly support. There is too much use of quotations from sources which clearly do not have the author’s intentions or even his general topic in mind: Boorstin was not talking about arguments over the mechanism of cognition when he used the phrase “illusion of knowledge.” The March-Russell quote is not given a primary source (troublesome in itself), and so there is no context for the snippet about the primacy of understanding vacuums. In general, the sourcing seems to be sort of cobbled together, with no indication whatever that the author’s ideas have any currency in scientific or spiritual circles, or deserve any.
Were the paper better written, it would have me suspecting a hoax, like this one: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ It reads like a parody of fuzzy thinking – it starts with no actual thesis, and goes on not to prove it.
Based on previous thread discussions, there’s no way I can believe that you buy nore than 50% of this paper. My question to you is: What parts of it do you believe hold true, and what parts do you believe do not?
I have to agree with Mr. Dibble – I got through the first 10 lines or so and found myself saying, “Surely you must be Joking” 
. I’m still trying to formulate a coherent answer to the somewhat disjointed paper, but I’m curious what YOU think about it.
Being neither a physicist nor a Buddhist I’m not totally comfortable making a judgement here, but let me quote from the essay:
Basically what it seems we have here is the use of terms to equate two concepts that are not similar, like comparing “apples” to “stop signs.” They may both be red, but the similarity ends there.
I had to read a little background on Wallace to find this. From Alan Wallace’s paper: Introduction: Buddhism and Science - Breaking Down the Barriers
RaftPeople, Wallace should take his own advice (as should mswas).
From the same paper:
Well I experience things I read a lot of the time. Not just think about them. When I read this, I experienced a lot of what he was talking about. The substrate consciousness and all that. It’s hard to explain, very very hard to explain.
You are right about not buying into more than 50% of what was said in this paper. Basically, I am highly skeptical. I don’t believe or disbelieve anything straight off, I trust my experiences and I know what I have seen/felt but the ability to elocute them is kind of difficult.
I have read a lot on the subject of esoteric vs exoteric study. Buddhism is quite esoteric in that it seeks internally. Physics is exoteric, in that it seeks externally. What I am trying to figure out is a way to properly explain to people how such things are not actually in conflict. Now, I can’t confirm or deny anything in this paper as I am not an expert in either Physics or Buddhism.
The problem for me in these issues is that I read them and I experience the state that they are trying to relate. I have found in my life that I can just go to states that other people spend their whole life attempting to achieve. I am starting to believe this is because I don’t carry a very specific bias that a lot of people do. In that I am already one with the universe. I do not need to BECOME one with the universe, I am one with the universe, I know this I can understand it logically, it makes sense, it’s not a question for me. However, many seekers spend whole lives trying to achieve a state that I almost take for granted. With me, it’s more like “Ok, I’m one with the universe, so what? I was always one with the universe, this doesn’t change my life in any real way.”, and it has taken me a long time to understand that many other people just aren’t on that tip.
Now the thing about a vacuum with zero energy state, that’s death ultimately. Achieving that is death because the identity is maintained by energy states. We are our vibrational frequencies. Consciousness shapes the physical world. This is a fact, but a lot of people don’t accept that, as he said physicists dismissing the consciousness and the metaphysical as being relevant to their physical studies. There is a lot of western and eastern jingoism based around this particular issue. What I find interesting in this is that in the West “Thought” is held up to the highest level of importance, whereas in the east it is often thought of as being a hindrance. Now both sides are correct and incorrect. Thought is neither most important, nor least important to consciousness. In the west people look at spirituality as BS mumbo-jumbo, and in the east, they view the physical world as the “illusory” world. I have problems with both of these ideas, as they are both what I would say are “half an ethos” or a false dichotomy.
So what interests me is how the consciousness shapes the physical world. So in order to fully explore this with fellow consciousnesses I must get to a point where we can discuss the ideas at all. It would seem that I need to study both Physics and Eastern Thought much more deeply. The thing is though that the Animism of the Native American culture has affected me equally as deeply as both eastern and western thought. Where I grew up was New Mexico “The Land of Enchantment”. The thing about New Mexico is that you get a deeper glimpse into many aspects of mystery than you do most places, and what I found there is a very syncretic mindset. You are constantly being told about secret government bases, Navajo Skinwalkers, Mexican witches, UFOs, Supercolliders, Nanotechnology, huge Microprocessor plants etc… New Mexico is the land where science fiction meets ancient mysticism. Add to this that my father was what he liked to call a “Zen Baptist”, so I was raised sort of passively on a diet of both Christianity and Buddhism, so that these different aspects of thought do not have the regimented seperation for me that make it easier for westerners to craft boxes for them.
So where I grew up we had some of the most advanced physics laboratories in the world, along with being a major new age cultural center. The mountain that I looked at for my whole life from my front yard was hollow and filled with Nuclear weapons. I knew this from when I was a little kid. In the south of the state you have the talk of the UFO that landed in Roswell which was supposedly somewhat arrowhead shaped, and then for about ten years you have F-117s flying overhead out of Alamogordo before they were declassified. These sorts of blurrings of reality and the fantastic formed my open skepticism.
So to put it the most succinctly, I grew to place the nuclear physicists in a similar category with shamans; as mystics. Now the further I go, the more appropriate I find this distinction, though it might offend some scientists, and others might agree with me.
In my study of history, something that I find always prevalent is the presence of mystery cults involved in the events that we consider seminal historical events. So, as certain aspects of understanding of our world become more mainstream, we see those who understand it more deeply helping to guide and shape the changeover as it occurs. Scientific advancements and religious advancements come in tandem. As we gain a greater knowledge of how to shape the physical world, we are confronted with questions about information and how information shapes that world, and how we can consciously shape that world. Then come the ethical questions of whether or not we should just because we can. Scientists today are using DNA as a structural foundation for nano-machines. We can split atoms, and control electromagnetic frequencies. Already virtual reality is bringing up questions about where does the human end and the machine begin. Imagine when nanotechnology further blurs that line.
So these ideas of “Substrate Consciousness” are where we delve to basic undifferentiated consciousness, though they can also eliminate the identity, effectively killing us, as assuredly as would a physical vacuum, though it is not incorrect to view them as “pure” states. Now what he is referring to as being conscious when reaching that substrate consciousness is about not being killed by it, where we can cleanse our identities and help to release those parts of us that we identify with but are not really helping us to evolve as people, so we need to go further down into fundamental states of awareness in order to figure out what is fundamentally us, and what is not. Some people become obsessed with these states of consciousness and assume that this blissful null state is a desirable state, and become stuck, basically, they die. When you have eliminated all desires, and all wants, then the compulsion to act ceases, at these levels a beating heart, breathing or brain activity is considered action, and if there is no will to act then these functions will cease. This is why there is a balance that is maintained between having an identity and allowing that identity to be subsumed by macrocosmic forces.
Now as a human being we use physical forces to control atoms. Every human does this, in that every one of us has a body that we can manipulate. When you wave your arms around you are controlling the way the atoms interact with one another. The greater one’s awareness of the way atoms work the greater one’s ability to control them becomes. This happens of course more profoundly on a species level than it does at an individual level, as our species is learning to control the most fundamental building blocks of life, though the control of such things is being seperated amongst multiple people into domains. The same people who control nukes do not directly control nanotechnology, and our political system helps to maintain a balance of power over the control of such things. Political systems help maintain boundaries on identity, placing restrictions on the realms that each of us controls as an individual. This is not as simple as bureaucratic channels, but also questions regarding where our feet end and the ground begins. , or the difference between the ground and the sky. Energy interacts in different ways and there are differences between states of matter, but those differences are decided by perception. Solid, Liquid and Gas are all fluid states, just at different of flow. So the perceiving entity decided upon the point at which we delineate when matter is in the state that it is in. Questions like when does water stop being a liquid and start being a gas or a solid, or plasma? Some aspect of the consciousness had to decide where to set these demarkations. This happened at a much more primordial state of evolution, probably before could even perceive ourselves as humans.
Our perception of the physical world is not the only perception that shapes it. It is not limited to Homo-Sapiens on Terra in the Solar System, but is shaped by the universal mind. The physical universe itself is the universal mind, experiencing itself in myriad different ways, human life being simply one of them. However, to truly understand the physical world it is important to understand that consciousness is an integral part of physical interaction.
It is the easiest thing in the world to prove in fact, but some people will not accept it. For instance, I can pick up a rock, and move it ten feet from where it was, and there I have impacted the state of the physical universe, I have changed ever so slightly the way that forces in the universe interact with one another, of course the farther away from that rock you pull your view of the universe, the less significant the movement of that rock is. To an ant I just moved a mountain. To a star, it was a tiny little blip of matter. The consciousness is the relationship of all energy in the universe, and a self-awareness of those relationships. One of the most difficult things for a western mind to perceive is consciousnesses that are not human. We have created a very narrow definition for life. Many people believe that cats are stupid, when they are most certainly not. This definition of intelligence is very anthro-centric, but a definition of intelligence that is based upon how like a human it is, isn’t very useful IMO.
So a vacuum physically and a vacuum in consciousness are poles of the same thing. To achieve that perfect null state of consciousness one’s life functions would cease. To external observers of course there would still be energy transference as the body has a gravitational field, it decomposes etc… but the vacuum state of consciousness most definitely interacts with the physical plane, and affects the shape of that physical plane via the vehicle of perception.
Erek
[QUOTE=gooftroopag]
If you don’t think I take that into account you’ve clearly never read my posts.
Erek
Great woosh! It’s classic poststructuralist fashionable nonsense. For more of the like, see SCIGen, The Automatic CS Paper Generator.
Stranger
Nah. It might be a hoax, but it doesn’t come from the paper generator. The scandal of that one was the ripoff conference that never read its submissions. The paper generator really wasn’t all that good.
mswas, I hope you are aware that a total vacuum is impossible because of Heisenberg. The paper actually gets this right, and speaks of the lowest possible energy state. I do agree with the general tenor of responses, that this paper names Buddhist concept with physics terms and then claims some sort of deeper connection.
The Dalai Lama, by the way, is involved with a study where the meditation states of monks will be measured. That will be very interesting, since I have no doubt there is a measurable effect. He said, in an OpEd column in the Times, that if science and Buddhism disagree, Buddhism will have to change. That’s a religious leader I can get behind!
Saying we move atoms is true but a bit misleading. We do move big clumps of atoms by controlling our muscles through our nervous system.
We of course assign the tags solid, liquid, and gas to the states of water. However, water freezes even if no one is there to see it. The phase change is not a matter of perception, but a matter of chemistry and physics. I don’t understand your point enough to agree or disagree with it, but I don’t think it is very profound.
Is consciousness truly always an important part of physical interaction? If you put your hand on a hot stove by accident, you will interact with it without conscious thought. From our pre-conscious origins we’re wired to do many things automatically, like breath for instance.
BTW, if there are any UFOs visiting the Intel chip plant in Rio Ranchos NM, they are invited to stop off at my plot of land nearby, corner of Cactus and Cactus. It could use a property value boost.
I was referring to your describing Buddhist concepts in Judeo-Christian terms. It makes more sense based on your Christian/Buddhist upbringing, but you might want to research where the ideas you’re incorporating into your Cafeterianism come from - it might help you express your thoughts in a language that others understand, rather than redefining Judeo-Christian concepts to suit your needs.
While I recognize Wallace has a PhD in Religious Studies (and a BA in some type of physics/philosophy), he routinely presents untruths as fact and fails to back up his claims with actual scholarship. Based on that I would not quote him as a viable source of information in science nor religion (with the exception of, maybe, Buddhist facts - extrapolation is clearly not is fortay).
I’d certainly agree that knowing you’re “one with the universe” isn’t of much practical value. People will still cheat you, or hit you, or deceive you, and what do you do then? I suppose the idea behind such sweet thoughts is, “we’re all in this together, so let’s be nicer to each other.” A lovely sentiment, if only you could get everyone to take it in.
It might also be that the physical world shapes consciousness — entirely, perhaps.
Just a thought.
The metaphysical, whatever that might be, is beyond the scope of physics by definition.
As to consciousness, physicists concern themselves with those features of the world that can be measured objectively and modeled mathematically. It’s not that consciousness is irrelevant, or uninteresting, or that it doesn’t, as you point out, have obvious physical effects. It’s just that it’s outside the bounds of what physics can model. It’s “too hard” a problem.
Sometimes in physics you get equations that can be solved analytically. Those are sweet. Sometimes they can’t though, and they must be solved numerically. Sometimes your equations can be solved, but the system they describe is chaotic, and so your equations, though technically correct, have no predictive value over the long run. In the case of consciousness however, there are no equations. There is no testable, mathematical model of consciousness. Not yet, anyway. If you can come up with one, and it works, you’ll surely make a name for yourself.
(On the other hand, physicist Roger Penrose believes — or used to believe — that consciousness comes from quantum mechanical effects in our neurons’ microtubules. He offered no test to verify this however, so it’s still just his conjecture as far as I know. Anyway, he might have a big head start.)
I have to disagree, since I believe the physical world preceded any conscious beings who happened to arrive later. There was still a world here before life of any kind ever arose, and there will continue to be one after all life is extinguished. And there never really needed to be life at all, conscious or not. Our consciousness might just be the result of a peculiar collision of circumstances on this and a tiny few other planets. Conscious is probably a fluke — which makes it interesting, but not an integral part of the physical world.
I’ll certainly agree that it’s important to understand consciousness. I can go with you there. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating subject and people won’t stop asking questions about it. But I think it will be our knowledge of physics that informs our knowledge of consciousness, not the other way around. (Or: consciousness needs physics; physics has no need for consciousness.)
Your term “universal mind” troubles me too. You’re free of course to use colorful phrases like that and use them as you wish. So the universe is really the Universal Mind, you say. But the word “mind” implies a thinking being. It’s not at all obvious that the universe as a whole resembles any kind of mind. Most of it, outside the Earth’s biosphere, resembles a mindless automaton if anything.
Mere physical processes do not inevitably make a mind. That isn’t apparent. I would need to see some evidence. I would need to subject the universe to a Turing Test, for example, or show it some Rorschach ink blots. Put it on the couch. Ask it about its mother. Charge it $200 an hour. That sort of thing.
There’s nothing wrong with having an antro-centric definition of intelligence. We’re not such a bad yardstick for making those comparisons. Obviously other species have some mental abilities far beyond ours — bats can process echolocation input like we never could, for example. But our species distinguishes itself from all the others primarily because of what goes on inside our heads. Our use of language and mathematics and architecture and technology is what makes us special. (Not better, particularly. Just special.)
And whatever the intelligence level of bats and cats, you’re still playing fast and loose with the word “consciousness”. Before man, before cats, before any earthly life form, did consciousness exist on this planet? You would say “yes”, I’m guessing. But it’s not a bit obvious that there’s a universal mind like you claim, or self-awareness, or that the “relationship of all energy in the universe” has anything to do with anything.
Let’s see, where to begin…
I have read through and digested the paper and I feel that the purpose is highly dubious. I think that Dr. Wallace knows only the tip-of-the-iceberg mainstream conceptions of western physics, but is not too familiar with the history, derivations, directions, alternate theories and true pluses and minuses of those theories. From what I see in the paper, he (about page 15 or so) tries to pummel the reader with suggestions that western physics can’t possibly measure up to the standards of Buddhism because it,… er… and then it doesn’t say why. In fact, it seems like the nearly the rest of the article (from start to finish) is spent trying to define “new” words and concepts that are not new to western thought and religions. Understanding some of the basics of Buddhism, I believe there are things he does NOT mention which may be orthogonal to physics (non-overlapping, but not necessarily conflicting). Ultimately, he is saying something like “grasshoppa, just as the rock has a top and a bottom, so does the coin… they are therefore one in the same” to show that vacuum state in space = lack of connected consciousness stream.
Anyway, let me digress through the words used and re-interpret them to what I see as their analogous western form:
[Western Science] Energy = Activity + Stored/Built up Potential
[Western Social Thought] Energy = Activity + Outward Charisma/Active self-confidence
javana = [Western Thought] Cerebral/conscious activity
bhavanga = [Western Thought] Cerebella Activity (able to be conditioned to motor and sensory inputs on repetitious, subconscious level (+ Medulla - primal pre-wired stuff)
alaya = [Western] (loosely) physical body + physical brain
alayavijnana = [Western]loosely, brain mechanism/thought body + javana
dharmadhatu = [Western Thought] Reality
jnana=100% Pre-wired stuff, the hard-wired heart-control, wake/sleep motivations, survival, etc. and surrounding limitations and effects on the daily activities [Medulla]
relative vacuum state = Hap-hazard usage - while not wrong, Absolute is usually implied.
Absolute vacuum state = Not possible due to Hawking’s version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle - A damn shame in my opinion. I love Heisenberg;'s Principle, but see it very differently (I’m in the minority 
)
Plato:
This whole thing is ALSO similar to the breakdown of Plato’s concept of the soul.
Soul identifies those things that are alive. As a programmer, you should appreciate this one:
Level 1 (Plants) = Vegetative soul
Level 2 (Animals)= Level 1 + sensitive soul
Level 3 (Humans) = Level 2 + Rational Soul
]After making his definitions clear (THANK YOU!), he defines his method/religious endeavor as **observation, experimentation and reason ** – that’s fundamental to the original definition of science! The author refers to this not as thinking about the physical but the Metaphysical. [Maybe I can buy this claim, before I read the rest of the article].
He insists on calling this ideal state as being a “Ground State” is certainly more applicable than the vacuum assertion. Anything less than the ground state will result in death. There seems to be a void between life and the vacuum – the difference of which are the primal and involuntary bodily functions.
The author’s assertion that “one must calm the involuntary activity of the brain”, may indeed be therapeutic. Present day western psychologists recognize this at least to some extent – when anxiety runs too high for too long, the average human body and health wears down faster. Sitting down with a beer after work in front of the television, watching too much television, or listening to a preacher for too long seems like a simple, everyday possibilities :). Meditation seems even better. Going temporarily brain-dead (AKA, the “ground state” of consciousness), might indeed be the most therapeutic thing a person can do, ask Israel pres. Sharon – it may be like hitting the “reset” button, clearing out the cr@p stalled in high memory and starting with a clean boot… I can agree with him and psychologists on this one. That said, western Psychiatrist over-use of prescribed chemicals to fix the problem pisses me off, but I don’t take any, so I shouldn’t really worry, I guess.
The author’s insistence on calling the vacuum “an unfluctuating state”, give me a break… they have to come out of it to tell people about it, sheesh!.. and a reminder, contemporary physics does not allow absolute vacuums (again per Stephen Hawking - the perfect vacuum actually produces Hawking radiation from the 0-point). The “dreamless sleep” idea presented is interesting – I suppose one could possibly make a perceptual analogy to looking at ‘Solar corona’ during an eclipse (again, something not unfamiliar to western thought).
There is western school of psychology & thought, called ** Phenomenology ** that seems to fit 85% or so of the definitions given. The missing 15% is divided between metaphysics and the multitude of mystical Christian and anit-christian sects in the west. I’m certainly no expert, but I often find myself paralleling that school’s pattern, being a physicist/Engineer and all. It’s not horribly popular, but it is on a peripheral branch of the mainstream.
Obviously, western thought is mired (and correctly so, in my opinon) by the belief that perfection cannot be achieved by any human. Matematically and philosophically, one can explore the ideas of such things, but cannot truly experience them. “Perfect Moments” are not truly perfect because all good things must come to an end :). So No nirvana… However, the christian and mystical elements buy into perfection through a deity, AKA, ‘God’ (or ‘Christ’, as you have pointed out in the past) and the state of “heaven”. Heaven =Nirvana. so, there is a dichotomy of western ideas – Religion seems to produce Nirvana, Science seems to not imply nirvana (not imply against it, however).
Then the author goes on a rant, this is where I begin to get angry: “The above description can easily be misinterpreted as an expression of philosophical idealism” Its a cop-out. That is the FOX NEWS way of trying to guilt trip you out of thinking for yourself.
The references to Big Bang piss me off a little, but that’s because I see it as a possible future travesty and scar on the face of science. Modern Physicists do not really see things from a “God’s eye view” - hence the rampant atheism ::jab:: , though their ego’s are often destructively high… Most people who do the REAL work understand that mathematics is the most precise method anyone publishing has invented to explore and analyze observations in the lab and accounting for conclusions. Granted, there are certainly holes in existing presentations on consciousness after physical observation and reporting is not possible anymore (eg, after death), partially, because it has nothing to do with actual science - it is META-physics as ByteGeist mentioned. Of course physcists haven’t finished the job – by their own recognized limitations, science can always provide better results than the last time, by understanding the variables and effects better [exceptions to this disgust me, intensely].
The Buddhist view may have no objective, but my red-flag-o-meter went off far too many times, due to a few programming words the author attempted feebly to use against my rational thought.
With a post like that, there are going to be errors:
(1) the cite http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ is actually for phenomenology, not Plato’s Republic
(2) a couple of the paragraphs got transposed when I re-cut and pasted the thing back together.
(3) I was going to continue with the “grasshoppa” thing, but I got side-tracked.
Great post Citizen Bob thanks. It gave me a lot to think about.
Where I am at today though, is I am wondering if there is such a thing as “Objective” reality. I am not certain of this.
Mind you, I am not saying there isn’t, but I am questioning it.
Erek
IMHO, Reality MUST be one of many assumptions one must make before (a) developing technlogy, (b) programming computers, (c) communicating with other people/cultures. There are many more examples, but I can only type so much in the few minutes that I have. In summary, one must realize that there are natural (or potentially man-made)rules outside oneself in order to (a), (b) and (c) with any effectivity.
(a) Developing Tech:
One juicy bacon-sliver of truth is the fact that machines work on their own, without someone having to provide energy or watch constantly. Having developed some technology myself, going from idea, to mathematical model, to trying different applications (seeing what ideas actually fly and which ones do not), to succeeding at one, then refinement and documentation & presentation, then business application, (yuck, I hate the last step).
I think it was Thomas Edison [Tesla! Tesla! :)] who mentioned that he learned much more than how to make a light-bulb during his research on the topic, he learned “100 ways to NOT make a lightbulb”… Those methods, which were never published - to the slight detriment of scientific historical data, IMHO. My remotely similar experience leads me to believe that reality works a certain way. A person can see connections, make predictions, and achieve (always better) understanding of what is actually happening, and then create an automated system that will produce the effect you are looking for… Any complicated machine is one in which the universe is working on its own, without any needed human to percieve it - they CAN percieve it, if they like, but then what would be the point – machines work so that we don’t have to (on the same level).
(b) Each languge (C, Perl, Java, Cobol, fortran … the list goes on) has rules, that the originator of the compiler decided on. If you can’t get your mind around those rules as being reasonably absolute on a base-level, then you will never be a good programmer - your programs won’t work. The ideas may play beautifully in your head, but your translation to the reality medium (AKA computer) did not successfully take place. One could argue that THAT is all scientists are doing. There’s no “Reality-Program Rulebook”, so they do tests to figure out what the rules are. When they publish, it’s no more magical than taking a cr@p, but it did take hard work and they reported their results with loose mathematical models that seemed to match-up. The more (and more carefully) experiements that are done on the reality medium, the better people generally understand it, AS LONG AS IT IS DOCUMENTED MATICULOUSLY. One of the things I think is sad in the old world (“pre-scientific”), is that when a scientific genius would start figuring things out, he was generally not accepted in the end, and his documentation destroyed (all that is left are stories and rumors).
(c) Communication is another obvious one. Unless one is aware of word usage rules and hand gestures (rules outside of yourself). Between people or between different cultures… One must at least be able to apply basic foreign ruler to keep good relations with the foreign system. Sometimes they are incompatible with your survival, and then wars happen… but you can’t win them all.
Now, being “Objective” about observing reality is obviously impossible. But the noble goal of the better scienitists is just to make it “as objective as humanly possible”. The problem is that politics in the scientific cumminity allows the arrogant to actually get the most power, and still receive respect from many (eg Carl Sagan)… so because of politics, we end up seeing papers that fall further from the objective tree than is actually possible by people… but most believe that time and survival will heal such errors.