Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, to convince ourselves we see it objectively -- at a distance from ourselves -- and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism.
This objective mechanical worldview was founded in ancient Greece when philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One school held that all nature, including humans, was alive and self-creative, ever making order from disorder. The other held that the `real' world could be known only through pure reason, not through direct experience, and was God's geometric creation, permanently mechanical and perfect behind our illusion of its disorder.
This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present.
Philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato were thus the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, though Galileo, Descartes, and other men of the Renaissance translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated human experience ever since.
What if things had gone the other way? What if Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive, had won the day back in that ancient Greek debate?
What if Galileo, as he experimented with both telescope and microscope, had used the latter to seek evidence for Anaximander's theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus's celestial mechanics? In other words, what if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics?
I couldn't say. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.
What sequence of steps during the “Big Bang” caused the “Big Bang” to be hot?
If heat is the measure of a particle’s mass’s oscillation, then when did the “Big Bang” become hot?
If the Higg’s Boson is what causes a packet of quantum to become quantized with a mass and differentiated into the Fermions of Quarks and Leptons, then when during the “Big Bang” did the Higg’s Boson emerge into existence?
Did the Higg’s Boson also differentiate packets of quantum to become quantized into the other Boson force carriers?
Did the Higg’s Boson also give the Fermions and other Bosons all of their other differentiated properties, like spin and chirality and flavor, etc.?
Did the “ocean of quanta” and the Higg’s Boson emerge into existence during Inflation and then the Higg’s Boson quantized the “ocean of quanta” into Fermions and the other Bosons, and then it was the oscillating Fermions that created the heat that made the “Big Bang” hot?
Maybe Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity is telling us that Energy and mass are equivalent and interchangeable when the mass in its quantum wave state has a frequency speed of c^2?
Maybe when the mass in its quantum wave state has a frequency speed of just c, then it becomes quantized into the Fermions of Quarks and Leptons?
Elisabet Sahtouris wrote:
Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, to convince ourselves we see it objectively -- at a distance from ourselves -- and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism.
This objective mechanical worldview was founded in ancient Greece when philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One school held that all nature, including humans, was alive and self-creative, ever making order from disorder. The other held that the `real' world could be known only through pure reason, not through direct experience, and was God's geometric creation, permanently mechanical and perfect behind our illusion of its disorder.
This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present.
Philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato were thus the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, though Galileo, Descartes, and other men of the Renaissance translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated human experience ever since.
What if things had gone the other way? What if Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive, had won the day back in that ancient Greek debate?
What if Galileo, as he experimented with both telescope and microscope, had used the latter to seek evidence for Anaximander's theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus's celestial mechanics? In other words, what if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics?
Organic biology evolved from chemistry and chemistry evolved from physics.
I believe that all life that has ever existed evolved from one single event.
I couldn't say. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.
What sequence of steps during the “Big Bang” caused the “Big Bang” to be hot?
If heat is the measure of a particle’s mass’s oscillation, then when did the “Big Bang” become hot?
If the Higg’s Boson is what causes a packet of quantum to become quantized with a mass and differentiated into the Fermions of Quarks and Leptons, then when during the “Big Bang” did the Higg’s Boson emerge into existence?
Did the Higg’s Boson also differentiate packets of quantum to become quantized into the other Boson force carriers?
Did the Higg’s Boson also give the Fermions and other Bosons all of their other differentiated properties, like spin and chirality and flavor, etc.?
Did the “ocean of quanta” and the Higg’s Boson emerge into existence during Inflation and then the Higg’s Boson quantized the “ocean of quanta” into Fermions and the other Bosons, and then it was the oscillating Fermions that created the heat that made the “Big Bang” hot?
Maybe Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity is telling us that Energy and mass are equivalent and interchangeable when the mass in its quantum wave state has a frequency speed of c^2?
Maybe when the mass in its quantum wave state has a frequency speed of just c, then it becomes quantized into the Fermions of Quarks and Leptons?
Anything by Hashem, The Name, I will be what I will be, that certainly influenced the Greeks; that theology predates it by a thousand years, eh?...