Out of Mythic into Rational consciousness, the EX-JW Journey

by jst2laws 123 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Midget-Sasquatch

  This quote first:

  What was not rational about our WT experience is not that the arguments of the WT were totally irrational, but that we set aside rationality in choosing what data to include and who to trust for accurate information. Believing the GB spoke for God was a myth. Those in the mythical level WANT to believe God speaks to them and will trust the message without question. When we begin to question the message we are at least becoming more rational about the source of truth.

  Second quote (wow...alot of meaning succinctly but also poetically put):

  Science (through perception and interpretation, hence ever open to doubt and reinterpretation) is concerned with what is. That there is, is a certainty. Perhaps the only one. But it is not a what. Hence it is not scientific and not even thinkable, except through the admitted inaccuracy of poetical metaphors. Like, the murmur of a spring in the night.

  And because of the possible differences in interpretation and experiences, its very important for people in science to use agreed upon definitions and terminology. So as Terry and Six already stressed, the language needs to be as explicit and as specific as possible for us to reliably build upon each other's interactions with our surroundings. But as LittleToe and Narkissos point out, fundamentally we're all modelling whats external to us. I optimistically believe though that science is doing a great job of bringing those models closer to that is.
• 

  LittleToe

  Midget:

  I optimistically believe though that science is doing a great job of bringing those models closer to that is.

  I have to agree

  I'm also going to add just one more analogy, building on that chosen by others:

  In the alien environment of diving in water certain parts of the light spectrum are progressively filtered out at depth, with blue being one of the last to disappear from our observation. Our eyes interpolate, and we don't get a true picture of what we're actually seeing unless we take a white light under water with us.

  I believe that our minds can play similar tricks on us, when experiencing something new. The deeper we go into an alien subject, the more that is filtered out to make sense of what our senses are presenting us with. We attempt (often vainly) to build on previous experience to make sense of the new input, making links that might need later revising (such as the Earth being the centre of the universe).

  I would posit that this dichotomy occurs entirely because we think rationally...
• 

  new boy

  A new world is coming (its not the one the JWs are dreaming of).................The "mythics" are leaving the monasterys

  The planet is changing.........and the time is NOW!
• 

  jst2laws

  Terry,

  Remember how our old friend the WT used to take a piece of a quote and building an argument against the out of context quote? Yes, I said "THERE IS NOTHING SOLID ANYWHERE." It seems solid to us because, as I continued:

  We simply perceive (interpret) it to be solid. It IS our experience that it is solid and that makes it real to us.

  Why, considering the facts is it '"downright silly to say "THERE IS NOTHING SOLID ANYWHERE." Just silly!" as you say.

  Like different levels of consciousness, which may be the problem we are having here, we are talking about different levels of the physical world that make up our reality. A human body is made up of many organs, made up of different tissues, made of different cells made of different molicules made of different atoms. But when we go lower than that level EVERYTHING CHANGES. Even the rules that govern their behavior. No more classical (Newtonian) physics, no more matter as we know it. Just E=MC squared. If this change took place at the organ or even the tissue level you would not be able to avoid it. All things are made of atoms and atoms are made of NON-stuff, it is NOT solid in any way.

  Our eyes see patterns of photons emited from or reflected off the atoms of what we know as 'objects', the eye converts these Waves to electro/chemical messages and sends them to the brain. The brain INTERPRETS these signals into an IMAGE of something that we think of as REAL. Yes, it IS REAL because it is our human sensory experience of what is happening, the only way we can experience it at this point.

  Yes, it has to do with language, because we touch what has mass (in our world of perception) and we do not fall into the empty space of the atoms (only because of the electro/mag force) and we assign a word (language) to describe that reality: "solid". Yet, contrary to our macro experience, it is actually as 'hard' as a holograph. We are simply talking about the difference in our space/time experience and the non space/time components that give us this experience. The only way we can avoid this quandary is to ignore the science of quantum physics and close our eyes to the strange discoveries raising questions about our reality and what comprises it.

  Steve
• 

  TopHat

  The only way we can avoid this quandary is to ignore the science of quantum physics and close our eyes to the strange discoveries raising questions about our reality and what comprises it.

  Steve

  What strange discoveries?
• 

  SixofNine

  Steve, I don't think I said welcome back to the forum. Welcome back to the forum! Hope life is treating you like the gentleman scholar you are ;) :blows kiss to steve: :sees mick jaggers lipstick on steve's collar:

  "But when we go lower than that level EVERYTHING CHANGES."

  I'll be honest; I get the sense when reading you about the-nature-of-things, that while you obviously know the first part of that sentence (you wrote it afterall), you almost seem to forget it when in discussions such as this one. "WHEN WE GO LOWER THAN THAT LEVEL, everything changes". Above that level, everything seems to be working about as it did before these fascinating discoveries.

  LT said, "Taking up the subject of Quantum Physics, much of what we previously were trained to believe about the universe seems to be contested". I just don't see it. (Hence my question for LT)

  Thinking for instance, about solid steel, in past years, I knew little personally about the chemical makeup of steel, but I knew it was solid. Common sense and observation told me it could be melted, and seem less solid. Common sense and observation told me it could be ground up, and made into very small pieces, so small that the pieces would be almost like a coating of ultra fine dust. That seems even less solid, intuitively, than the liquid of molten steel (I know I'm off the official definition of "solid" at this point, speaking about my intuitive perception of steel particles, but then so are you, when you get into q/p). The point being that below that level, I didn't really have much in the way of preconceived notions about steel (I did realize, even non-geek that I am, that waveforms could travel thru it). And once we went smaller than the atomic level, why should we (scientist) have strongly preconceived notions about what would/will happen?

  Hey, I know it's freaky, I know it's wild, I know at this point it's non-intuitive. But you know what that makes it? IMO, it just makes it very, very interesting. It's not the lair of god or mystics. It hasn't changed the world or universe as we know it, it's given us better understanding of the world we know (like any discovery). Yes, it's raised far more questions than it's answered, but those are questions about things we didn't even know to ask previous to our ability to observe at the quantum level.
• 

  jst2laws

  Hello Tophat,

  What strange discoveries?

  Everything we experience is actually a wave, traveling and behaving as a wave until something, usually us interacting with them, causes the particle/wave collapse. Particles pop in and out of existence unexplainably, and like the quantum leap of energies, we do not know where these wave/particles go between these jumps. There is a Zero Point Field that should have no energy in it yet it seems to be boiling with energy at zero degrees. We could talk at length about the Bells inequalities being proven by John Aspect that demolished Einstein's objections to QM. It proved that entangled particles do communicate/interact somehow while moving away from each other at twice the speed of light, which by laws of classical physics is impossible. Neils Bohr answered Albert E's objections and probably accurately explained the phenomena 50 years before Aspect proved it: "They don't have to communicate. They are connected". Even worse is the 'delayed choice' experiment where the observer unfailingly predicts which screen a photon will show up on defying the law of large numbers. Even the concept of electrons orbiting a nucleus is a mental construct trying to explain what is happening, all the while we know they probably do NOT orbit, and they are NOT little 'things' but rather events, We do not even know what mass is. We do suspect it is a form of kenitic energy but why we perceive it the way we do defies science. Chaos rules in the atom and yet it is overall steady and makes up are reality we wake up to each day. That' s just a start. Steve
• 

  jst2laws

  Six,

  Thanks for the welcome, and the lipstick smudges.

  Thinking for instance, about solid steel, in past years, I knew little personally about the chemical makeup of steel, but I knew it was solid. Common sense and observation told me it could be melted, and seem less solid.

  What you are observing is only a change of state, not a chemical change to a different element. None of the physical states (solid, liquid or gaseous) change the fact that the atom has the same number of given subatomic particles in the same arrangement. To change the number of electrons, protons will change the chemical make up and it will no longer be steel, but it will still be what we refer to as 'solid'. The solidity comes not from the stuff in the atom but is an impenetrability that experience due to the strong electro/magnetic force that keeps our atoms (tip of our fingers) from encroaching on the space of the steel atom. Actually the space inside the steel atom is 99.9995 % empty by our sense of what we think of as empty (it is actually filled, apparently, with unmeasurable energy of the ZPF)

  So think about that, by every measure we use in our macro world the atom is almost completely empty and yet what fills the small .0005% that we say is NOT empty is only a couple of waves of energy that we can measure but when we do the change state, into a particle. Nothing there but a little bit of organized energy, and yet these atoms are the combinations of events that make up a pound of steel that to us is solid, heavy and so totally real it can be formed into a hammer that hits me in the head, as Terry says. Yes, that is real, but it's composition and why it seems solid to me is almost spooky. As I have said, this makes reality all the more wonderous to me, not less real.

  Steve
• 

  Narkissos

  Side comments:

  I recently came across a book by Palle Yourgrau about Kurt Gödel in my local library. Just started it, but it looks quite promising and I suspect some of it will relate to this topic. I may bring it up later on.

  What Steve just wrote about "things" and "events" meets one old thought of mine that has been increasingly recurring in my mind for some time, from a different (philosophical) angle. In a relativistic universe (time-space) and world (or, rather history-world) vision, the conceptual distinction between "things" and "events" (grammatically, nouns/names and verbs) completely vanishes. This is obvious but mind-blowing, as language (and the accompanying imaginary map) largely depends on the distinction between them. The intuitive idea of "events" happening to "things" is completely artificial, we know it, still we haven't (yet?) developed the linguistical and conceptual tools to dispense with it -- although some literary "cases" like Kafka and Borges insistently point to that possibility. Will it be the next collective "step"?
• 

  TopHat

  The intuitive idea of "events" happening to "things" is completely artificial, we know it, still we haven't (yet?) developed the linguistical and conceptual tools to dispense with it -- although some literary "cases" like Kafka and Borges insistently point to that possibility. Will it be the next collective "step"?

  Yes, If we live long enough to collect,...there, lies the problem!