
Life Is More Meaningful Than Mere Facts Can Convey - robg
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/01/18/132786407/life-is-more-meaningful-than-mere-facts-can-convey?ft=1&f=114424647
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splat
I am reminded of this footnote in Feynman's Lectures on Physics:

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas
atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel
them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my
imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-
old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the
meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more
about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past
imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are
poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense
spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

~~~
bluekeybox
Physics is a rabbit hole and we are going deeper every year, but I doubt we
will ever hit its bottom. One of the main outcomes of the 20th century physics
was that it was shown that this hole is deeper than anyone has ever imagined.
I don't think that any mystery has been taken away by this outcome, and I
think that something much bigger has been added. The reason poets of the times
past wrote verses about stars and not quarks is because they could not see
quarks.

~~~
glhaynes
I personally bet that we _will_ hit bottom, and pretty soon. But that's
totally an unsupportable gut feeling (and certainly could be said to go
contrary to experience thus far).

This is really nice; thank you: "The reason poets of the times past wrote
verses about stars and not quarks is because they could not see quarks."

~~~
bluekeybox
No problem. I would like to explain though why I think there is not going to
be a bottom: physics is an experimental science; all physical theories have to
be tested by experimental evidence.

I'm sure you know how much trouble string theory has had -- not because it is
bad science, but simply because it is hard to come up with a way to test
something that makes claims that lie at the limits of our understanding.
Suppose though after decades of painstaking experiments we do come up with a
Unified Theory (UT). But then one fine day someone notices some strange effect
beneath that is not explained by the UT. What then? When Max Planck decided to
become a physicist (end of 19th century), his advisor told him that basically
"everything in physics has already been discovered, physics now is only
concerned about details." We may feel the same way after we come up with UT,
but even UT may be "the tip of an iceberg" that is actual deep reality.

As another illustration, the space-time is expanding at an ever increasing
rate, and that space-time expansion is not limited by the speed of light. Some
time in the distant future (a few billion years?), the background radiation we
now see from the time of the Big Bang will be off limits because the
Universe's boundary will have expanded faster than light. So the future
scientists will be forever in the dark about how the Universe came about. They
will generate some theories about it, maybe even close to correct ones, but
they will never _really_ know what happened in the beginning.

There are certain physical bounds (computational complexity, irreversibility
of entropy/time, uncertainty principle, the speed-of-light limit, cosmological
constant) that prevent us from knowing everything and which may be impossible
to overcome. We should remain cautiously optimistic though, since pessimism is
counter-productive. Also, hey, it looks like strong AI will be a reality one
day, maybe it will answer those questions for us.

------
araneae
For the most part that was completely incomprehensible to me. I read it three
times, though, and I think he was saying that knowledge was irrelevant when it
came to spirituality, and that spirituality has to do with how we experience
life. This I will politely disagree with, if that's what he actually said.

Since he brought up Rumi, I thought I'd use him as an example. Rumi has said
"I died a mineral, and became a plant. I died a plant and rose an animal. I
died an animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?"

Here he is pulling in knowledge; knowledge of nutrient cycling, maybe even
evolution.

But I can respond in kind; I could answer his question, saying that "you're
less by dying when you die a man and become minerals." Here I too am pulling
from knowledge again; if it's true that "you" become "more" by going from
plant to an animal- then surely it follows that you become "less" by
traversing the opposite direction. And that is most definitely what happens
when men die; they are reduced to their components by the process of
decomposition.

I don't see how anyone can completely decouple "spirituality" from knowledge,
since all forms of spirituality I've encountered speak in the language of
knowledge. And I don't see Rumi's statement is less or more spiritual than
mine, either. Perhaps his is more optimistic, but there's plenty of pessimism
in some forms of spiritualism.

~~~
justsee
No, he is saying that knowledge on its own ('academic "knowing"'), separate
from the experience, is insufficient.

This is straight from the school of thought that says any great truths have to
be understood at the experiential level, not just the intellectual level. A
pedestrian codification of this is the "Child has to learn it for themselves"
statement when parents attempt to impart life wisdom on offspring but realise
that in itself is not enough. They see, perhaps for the first time, the real
difference between understanding and Understanding.

A more specific example is love. An observer studying the biological /
physiological mechanisms involved, and immersing themselves in second-hand
accounts of new romance could allow themselves to intellectually approximate
human love, but experiencing it directly gives them a much deeper, experiental
understanding than would otherwise be possible.

The case is no different when it comes to the meaning of life. The answer to
that question cannot be extracted and written down as knowledge, and instead
must be derived from the full life experiences of each individual seeking an
answer. As the author states 'the essence of the question is about experience,
not facts'.

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msg
When is knowledge more than mere facts? When it's taken for truth and lived.

The war between science and religion is only real for people who believe that
science precludes a religious outlook, and vice versa. Science is about
pattern recognition from observation. Religion is about living life from
revealed or derived wisdom. Religion can be informed by science if it accepts
science as part of wisdom. Science has obvious limitations to only what can be
observed and explained or duplicated, and it can't get outside that box.

But if you take a fact and intend to spend your limited life pursuing it, it
should be real. It should be the truth. You shouldn't be wasting your life
working from faulty assumptions, because as far as we can observe (pace
Hinduism), this one life is our only chance to do some damage.

Are there major differences in the life you live if you have a different set
of facts? Do you have to decide? I would say yes for myself. But apathy like
that of the editorialist will kill any amount of wisdom.

------
jonsen
"... modem examples like Martin Luther King or Ghandi"

For sure they were great communicators. But ... ;)

~~~
michael_dorfman
Every time I see "Gandhi" spelled as "Ghandi", I die a little inside.

(And, just to be clear, it was NPR who got it wrong, not the poster above.)

~~~
exit
why? both spellings are pretty close to the same pronunciation.

~~~
shrikant
In English, yeah probably. In Hindi, not so much - the position of the 'h'
matters.

In any case, is that rule one applies to names? That it's okay to mangle the
true spelling as long as the pronunciation remains the same?

