My point to Erek is that doing alchemy is just like being an asshole - it maybe contributes to a person’s ability in some way, but isn’t a good thing of itself.
I should do a story someday about an asshole scientist having a conversion a la Scrooge and choosing to play with his kids instead of working extra hours in the lab. It turns out he doesn’t get around to doing an important experiment, and misses a cure for cancer, and millions die who could have been saved. Maybe being nice ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Yes, I would say that being an asshole is pretty integral to who they are. Look at Roger Waters. He was a total asshole, and I think it had a lot to do with the music he wrote.
So you are saying that CitizenBob knows what I meant better than I do huh? You are in love with the idea of me being tone deaf to science. I guess it makes you feel like you’re winning or something. Anyway, his interpretation of my views was way off the mark regardless of what your out of context catch phrase for me has lead you to believe.
Voyager And what I am trying to say to you, is that Isaac Newton lived at the time when Alchemy was turning into Chemistry, and that he was on the cusp of what allows you to take your pedantic and arrogant attitude. So judging him by the same criteria that you would judge a modern chemist who practices alchemy is your stupidity not his. Also, I would be interested to find out if you know anything at all about alchemy besides anecdotes of other people telling you it’s BS, and some other bullshit about turning lead into gold. I don’t know much about alchemy myself so I couldn’t comment. However, what I am saying is that a scientists failed experiments are as essential to his successes, as are his successful ones. He found out what works, and what doesn’t, and you enjoy the fruits of that labor now, because you are able to scoff at his failures because he tried and failed a few hundred years before your Daddy came in your Mommy and transmuted her egg into your narrowminded ass. So because he failed at it you and your contemporaries don’t have to repeat those experiments, thanks to him. You keep judging him by modern criteria, and yet it is ME that is tone deaf to science.
Let me see if I can spell it out for you. Newton lived at the time where they debunked alchemy, and was instrumental in the development of what you know of as science today. So the opinion that you were provided that you clearly haven’t given much thought to, was provided in part by Isaac Newton.
IMHO, Alchemy is not different than chemistry, except for one distinct fact – that is, that Chemistry HAS NO GOAL, other than knowledge of what actually happens. Alchemy had a serious goal ranging from “eternal life” in one culture to the “production of gold from other substances” in another. [Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy#The_changing_goals_of_alchemy ]. I have even seen a variant claiming that these two goals were considered to be one-in-the-same by such people. There was an intense trial&error mentality, which I respect, but not many do. Having inspiration might be great, but it doesn’t necessarily determine IF you reach your goal, only HOW FAST you reach your goal, with adequate vigilance.
MrErekWas, The reason I don’t think you’re completely insane is that I have hung out with medical, nutritionists and Physics PhD’s that intend to earn $$$ by accomplishing exactly either of those Alchemy goals. Anyone who scientist who really thinks about stuff have been tempted by such things.
The lesson little scientists (like myself) are taught in graduate school are that if you apply a goal to your science too virulently, it will affect your perceived results – and you will end up with crappy notes and conclusions, much like the ‘alchemists’. I believe this is VERY true. All experimentalists throw out data that jumps off the page as statistical error, but keep others. If you have an agenda, you might be tempted to keep and model the wrong data.
Newton was a problem solver. He did not have access to Leibnitz’s notes, so he invented a tool that does the same as calculus, for himself - because he needed a mathematical tool to get around a number of problems. IMHO, he did not set out to “discover” math. He also lived in an age when the “universal church” (AKA Catholicism) was being drawn into question by the four corners of Europe - being that he believed that logic could be applied to anything, he studied pythagoreans (yes, I saw your post on that one), Alchemy, Moses, the trinity, etc. THESE were the mysteries of his day, and he could think of no greater pleasure than to SOLVE THOSE PROBLEMS. His conclusions (as I have read of them) were fairly anti-mainstream. If he had published those conclusions with the vigilance he applied to basic mechanics, his career would have been over… and we would NEVER have heard of ‘Isaac Newton’. It’s not just people today or on the Straight Dope. People just don’t like change - it’s an unavoidable state of most average people’s human nature.
Alchemy had nothing to do with falsification, which is why I can agree with Voyager’s classifying it as not “a good thing of itself.” Their methodology consisted primarily of: (Wikipedia)
I believe that alchemy was an important part Newton, but because the process used in alchemy is more philosophical (mystical, unsystematic and with a bit of trial-error) I can not agree with the sentiment that it was a positive scientific characteristic that Newton possessed.
And yet you are blind to my point about someone doing something not that useful in itself being a contributor to something more useful.
No, what I meant. He’s clearly someone who does science, and it was gratifying that he saw it too.
Perhaps you missed the post where I said that the observations collected from alchemists about what worked and what didn’t served as a base for real chemistry? It remains the case that Newton’s study of alchemy, and his religious pursuits too, didn’t contribute much - except inasmuch as it might have inspired his physics. Most people I’ve heard with this opinion offer it in the same way that people feel regret that Einstein never accepted quantum theory - though there, in the EPR paper, he came up with experiments to disprove it that eventually strengthened it. Who knows what insights he could have come up with? People like Newton and Einstein come around only ever few centuries, and we selfishly wish the eschew dead ends.
BTW, I’m not aware that Newton made any major advances in alchemy, advances that helped propel chemistry anyhow.
I don’t know how many times people will have to tell you that the ancients being wrong does not mean we think they were stupid. You seem, well, tone deaf to this concept.
Other people have responded to this better, but I of course never said any such thing. The fatal flaw of the alchemists is that because of their goal, as Citizen Bob so elegantly said, they did not try to falsify anything, or even recognize that their work was going nowhere.
My minor quibble with too much reliance on falsification is that it is not the be-all and end-all of the scientific process, and falsifying something is harder than some people think. Your statement that falsification is a necessary part of the scientific process, however, is something I agree with fully.
Almost everyone noticed the mistakes **mswas ** has with Newton and Alchemy.
I thought he could learn from examples, but even examples are ignored by him on purpose:
**gooftroopag ** was not:
From the link posted by **Left Hand of Dorkness ** in page one of this thread:
Now, from what century Newton was from?
Looks like it is hard to figure that out… for a mystic it seems. Let us check the year Newton was born: 1643… Well, that was the middle of the merry olde 17th century! This is why I remarked earlier that Newton followed the wrong road.
By the time Newton was growing metal trees, the first group was already getting into chemistry. Newton did hide or code his alchemy research! Newton was not part even of the debunking of alchemy.
Notice that **mswas ** ignored on purpose what historians found recently about the alchemy of Newton in the other thread, just another clear example of misinformation and bad faith from mswas.
You seem to be in a pretty good place, because both Voyager and his camp and I feel like you are understanding what you are talking about.
The thing I would like to point out also, is that mystic studies also frown upon starting out with a goal that can overshadow the truth. Idries Shah wrote entire books about it, one “Knowing How to Know”, which is one of my favorite books and I have referenced it often. Another, “Learning How to Learn”, which I have yet to read. He speaks very clearly about presuppositions getting in the way of actual knowledge.
What the others in this thread can’t seem to grasp is that I am not trying to promote alchemy. As I have said, I know very little about it if the truth be told. However, what I am saying is that Newton’s experiments in alchemy refined his skills and contributed to his overall pursuits. That just because his alchemical pursuits might have borne less fruit than other pursuits is rather irrelevant to the discussion.
Something that I seem to be failing to do, is to show them what the mystical process is, because what they think it is, is not what it is. They are looking at tiny little minutiae that are of only passing relevance to the topic at hand. I’ve chosen to focus on these minutiae in order to try and illustrate the holistic approach. The one thing I have learned in all this is not that I am ‘tone deaf to science’, or that I don’t understand the subject matter at hand, but simply that I have been approaching the problem the wrong way. Each individual post of yours has been worth about 10 of tomndebb’s, 100 of Voyager’s and 1000 of GIGObuster’s. Der Trihs will probably have to make a million posts for me to learn as much as I do from a single one of yours. The problem also is that they are making a presupposition that I do not understand what they are talking about. Which is not true. My problem in these discussions are three. 1) My rhetoric is not up to snuff 2) I get angry and frustrated too easily. 3) I do not have a formal education, and lack the ‘facts’ that they are amply provisioned with. However, the thing is, and I have been trying to elucidate this without a lot of success apparently, is that I am not trying to debate ‘facts’, the facts are only as useful as their ability to illustrate the point. There are lots of facts that have absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and many of them have been brought into the discussion in order to suitably confuse everyone.
I think that the issue we are dealing with is one of the most profound issues of the day, but the problem with it is when people realize it in themselves they just kind of sigh and go “huh”, and it becomes a truism. So I am dealing with people who resist the idea violently, and others who feel that discussing the subject is trite and pointless, and still others who view it as spreading pearls before swine. I see this problem in western thinking as being at the bottom of many of our issues, the war on terror being one. We keep trying to fit the Middle East into our western social framework, we try to force them to conform to it, and yet it just doesn’t fit. I try to use respected western mystic/scientists such as Pythagoras and Newton as examples, but that has only served to increase the confusion.
There are so many things in this board that you will see dismissed as delusion, that in other cultures are accepted as part of every day life. Chi is a good example of this. Voyager will try to give me some cite about the debunking of Chi, and I don’t even bother to read it for the simple reason that I know Chi exists because I interact with it all day every day. I can focus my Chi, I’m no master at it, and I haven’t the will to prove it experimentally because I have no mastery over it. I don’t care how well the case is argued, if someone has experienced something, and they know it to be true because of their experience, then the case being argued is not relevant, and the person arguing it only looks silly. Now, if I tried to explain Chi using scientific mechanisms, it is very possible that I will be wrong about the way that it works, but that doesn’t prove anything about the experience other than I am using the wrong framework by which to prove it. And in this, I don’t mean the scientific method is inadequate, I mean that if I tried to explain it my lack of mastery of both Chi and Physics would only serve to confuse the person I am speaking with.
I do not believe that objectivity exists. There is an object to be certain, but each one of us has our subjective interpretation of things, and the idea that one person is doing it objectively, is absolutely absurd. I do believe though, that the person who embraces the fact that he cannot escape his own subjectivity is at an advantage toward properly interpreting the object than one who hasn’t made it past that point.
Also vanity and arrogance comes into play. The people I argue with here often arrogate themselves to a position of representing science. They no more represent science than I do. They aren’t the great scientists that they are idolizing, and I’m not talking about the great scientists that they are idolizing. I am only speaking about them. The issue that I am trying to contend with is this false assumption that there is some kind of rivalry between mysticism and science, and what I am trying to illustrate, albeit poorly, is that there is no rivalry, they go hand in hand quite well.
Thus far you have helped me immensely in refining the way I argue this, and I look forward to more of your posts. (Though I am not expecting them as a predetermined outcome to my line of inquiry)
Erek, let me give you an example of what I mean by saying you are tone deaf to science. Back a while ago you claimed that you had the ability to read auras. If you remember, I did not deny that you had this ability, but said that it was an interesting statement and offered some tests that you could do to confirm or falsify that you actually had this ability. I said that if you were correct, it would be extremely interesting. You were not at all interested in doing this, and, as far as I can remember, even disputed that these tests would be reasonable.
You’ve said that mysticism and science are not necessarily contradictory, and I agree. However, mystics don’t seem to want to expose their claims to tests, and, if they do, explain away negative results. (I would be happy for you to offer counterexamples.) First you have to establish that there is something to explain, and then you have to figure out the explanation. The basis of the argument in the supernatural thread in GD was that some people thought that only science could offer explanations for seemingly supernatural events. I don’t want to go into that again, but pretty much everyone did agree that you had to establish the evidence first.
You talk a lot about mystic discoveries of the past. The question is, can the correctness of some of these be explained by chance and some by distorting the actual prediction to match what has been discovered through science? I don’t only judge mystical discoveries by this criterion, but those from other means, like Democritus’ atomic theory.
You seem to be so upset that certain people agree with you, that you distort our words to make it seem that we don’t even when we do. Newton in your post above is yet another example.
I am not a master at it. I can see people’s auras to a certain degree, but it’s not like fluctuating light, I can just detect energy flows in them. For instance, I can find knots in your back without touching you. I could go straight to the knot. However, the problem is this, that I do it by finding empathic affinities in my own body. So if I am not centered then the results are corrupted. So that’s why I am not feeling the experiments, because I feel like my own skill limitations would corrupt the experience, and then confirm your bias for you, making it even harder to undo that bias later. It also requires some kind of connection between the people involved in the experiment. I could prove it on an individual basis if the right conditions are met.
The argument I’ve been making is a conflict in the language being used. I have been saying the whole time that the conflict is semantic in between being called an idiot and a charlatan. I have been reiterating this over and over, and yet people keep getting on my case for cleverly redefining terms, when all of my arguments are questioning of how we define those terms. For instance in the Pheromones debate everyone is perfectly happy to call me and idiot for making some wild claim about pheromones even though i was perfectly happy to accept that I wasn’t using the word ‘pheromones’ correctly, but the jackasses still see it as some kind of sign of my inferiority. I have adjusted the way I use words many times. Scott_Plaid pointed out that I was using rational when I could be saying reasonable and it would be more appropriate, so I started saying Reasonable, and it ended the rationality debate. I have made every effort to adapt to your phenomenological field in order to explain things to you, and what you see as being tone deaf to science, I would say is a lack of formal education. In short my vocabulary and rhetoric is off, not my ability to understand science. And I don’t expect you to, but if you went back into my posts from years back you would see posts from me talking about how I post here in order to refine my rhetoric. That’s why posts from people like CitizenBob are so helpful because he addresses my issues with terminology and doesn’t try to treat me like I’m an idiot who doesn’t understand science.
As for tomndebb he keeps talking about the strawman atheist I am building. I am not building a strawman atheist. I can point to exactly who I mean in each case when I am constructing my argument. I am taking my cues from real atheists who professed a certain belief. Der Trihs and GIGObuster in this thread, and you in others. It’s not a straw man, both of them have said straight up that if people discovered things prior to the advent of science it was by accident. The argument I’ve been making this whole time is that it’s still that way, we still discover things by accident, the only thing science has changed is how quickly we identify our accidents.
What I see is that New Agers and other Spiritualists/Religionists have a metaphorical language that works very well when dealing with someone of their type, but it sounds ludicrous to anyone that doesn’t understand the lingo. Then they come in and talk to someone like you, and you bash their understanding of the subject matter because you want them to prove that ‘fairies’ exist. The thing that I think YOU need to understand is that fairies most definitely exist, but what they are, and the mechanism for their existance might not be what you are trying to conceive of them as. You have an idea of fairies in your mind that do not exist, but someone else might have another idea. Their experience is no more or less subjective than yours, and what they experience is 100% real for them, that doesn’t mean that it will translate as real into your world, and expecting them to conform to your method of analysis is just as delusional of you as it would be for them to expect you to conceive of the metaphorical ‘sprite’. Think of what a sprite is in a computer, it’s a visual representation of a program. That’s what a real sprite is too. It might exist purely in the matrix of that person’s own subjective encoding, but that doesn’t make it not real.
Something that I would contend is that everything that is alive is conscious and communication with it is possible. I have communicated with trees, but it’s not the same as communicating with a human, nor would I ever try to tell you that it is. Many people have a limited conception of consciousness, and will scoff at anyone who does not fit within that limited conception. However, a tree is organic, and it does ‘feel’ things and interpret it into the subjective experience of being that tree. Your particular physical form is unique in the way it processes the energy that flows through it, but none of the processes that humans have are unique to humans, the only thing that is unique to humans is the combination in which the processes happen, and how the WHOLE process of being human is enacted.
It’s more of a way of approaching things than anything else. You might approach a tree and analyze it, whereas I approach the tree and both analyze it an attempt a sort of communion with that tree’s energy. That communication is an assimilation of our energetic vibration. Basically like a tuning fork. I am attuning myself to the tree’s vibration, and it is also attuning to mine as the energy process is always both ways. You cannot observe something without interacting with it on some level. Scientists try to remove themselves from the environment that they study, but that is not possible as the energy flows are all connected, and contiguous, even if it’s many levels removed.
The way we seperate things into this and that, where we draw our lines of measurement is purely subjective, all things are a part of all other things and connected in one big universe from one conception, or one big universal mind from another conception. So you may think of yourself as just your body, or you may consider yourself the sum of yoru experiences, or you may consider it as both. Basically, you are what you sense. You are what you can assimilate. What has irritated me the most about these discussions is that people are arguing with the way I conceive of things. So I enter into these semantic debates, which of course are quite relevant because it is by words that we seperate things, draw the lines that Define their limits, the things that seperate the forest and the trees into two seperate concepts. However, a “forest” is a state of being just as a “tree” is a state of being, just as Voyager is a state of being.
I don’t talk about mystic discoveries of the past. I talk about how science used to be the purview of mystics by and large. That without the ancient shaman helping to define the world for his tribe, you would still be naked in the jungle. All I would like to see is a little bit more reverence for these other mods of conceptualization than I see on these boards. I would like to see a day when the words mysticism, and new age are not met with immediate derision amongst armchair academics. It’s like there is a permanent siege mentality in the scientific community as though spiritualists and religionists are all the spanish inquisition coming to stop you from practicing science. Certainly there are many luddites out there, but I am not one of them, I like science I like technology, and I like Mysticism. I personally would identify as a mystic before I would identify as a scientist, and I learn from people who would prefer to be scientists all the time, it’s the main reason I post on these boards, so that I can learn about that method of discernment.
I have been arguing this argument for the past couple of months simply because I would really like to discuss the things that fascinate me with people who will approach it open mindedly, and the thing that has happened is that people on this board ARE more accepting of it now than I experienced six months ago. To me that’s a major victory, as this board accesses a very large meme pool. I conceive of society as meme pools, and I pick certain venues with which to propagate my memes. The more eloquent I get the more efficient I will be.
Well good if you agree with me that’s great. Let’s move on then. How about this, you accept that I am not a scientist, stop acting like I should be one. Realize that I lack education, and am not tone deaf to science, and approach discussions with me that way. If you can help me formulate my arguments better, that would be highly appreciated.
In the past I have been largely cagey about a lot of shit. But coming out of the closet on my birthday has freed me up to do a lot of things. So now I’ll be more forthcoming with what I actually believe, because as of this point I haven’t really been discussing what I truly believe.
Here’s an example, the Greek Pantheon are real people, they do exist, and they make decisions all the time. I really do believe that. I believe that every God who is still remembered is still alive and is still a God. HOWEVER, what I would say they are is conscious memes. Can they appear to me and talk to me and interact with me? Yes they can, but that doesn’t mean that I will have physical evidence to show others, but to my subjective consciousness, if I have the will to do it, I can most definitely conjure them up. I believe that all thought is a big telepathic matrix that is broken up into spheres of influence. You control what you conceive of as “your thought” but all information is floating in the universal mind waiting to be contextualized so that it is meaningful and useful to the person conceiving it. Time and space are measurement tools. The Universe has no size shape or time, it is all times and spaces all at once formless shapeless. That is the concept of nothing, or no thing. no thingness is the state of the lack of form. It’s not the same as existanceless. It’s just a sort of conscious energy state where all that exists is undifferentiated. If you are applying a color to it like a pure white void of pure light, or a pure black void of pure darkness. You have applied properties to it and made it into a ‘thing’, therefore it is no longer ‘no-thingness’. When a human is born they are CONCEIVED, just like an idea is conceived. Your mind does not exist in your head, it is your entire body, for without the sensory input the cross-referencer is pointless. Pointlessness, means without a point, literally, there is no point by which to measure other points in order to create the arcs and curves necessary to conceive of the energy flow that carries information. Words define physical reality, they are an integral part of physical reality, and our conception of physical reality shapes it. However, human beings are NOT the ONLY intelligences in the universe, everything that is alive is intelligent. Now we can go into a debate as to what is alive. I’m going to say “Everything”. Death is not the end, Death is not inevitable, and something with a beginning doesn’t necessarily have an end, except in the “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning.”
So, I am not interested in debating that here, because it’s a whole bunch of different debates. But that’s where I am coming from. I am not wrong, if you want to help me learn about the mechanisms by which to prove these things, or manipulate them, I am all for it, but I already know that I am not wrong. I know everything, it’s seperating it into small manageable chunks that I have a hard time with.
Since existence is formless, in what sense is knowing everything different from knowing nothing? Isn’t separating it into chunks denying its essential nature?
So now I’ll be more forthcoming with what I actually believe, because as of this point I haven’t really been discussing what I truly believe.