🚀 go-pugleaf

Please forgive the new base note.  Disk space seems to be at a
premium here, and notes don't last but about a week.

This is replies and amplifications to people who responded to my
first note.  I don't mean to offend anyone but am brutally honest
for rhetorical effect on occasion.

To markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu who wrote:

> ... So, of course, science is not logical at the bottommost level.  ...

A good point.  He also wrote:

> ... or the way the Library of Alexandria was burned down because of a deep-
> seated prejudice against people who seek knowledge. ...

Are you sure that you have correctly identified the reason that the
library burned?  I do not have a reference to hand but my often
faulty memory has Livy saying it was an accident connected with
the wars that followed Ceaser's murder.  There are larger points here.
A prejudice against people who seek knowledge is not so much a phenomenon
of the classical world as it is of the modern, and knowledge of antiquity
(like so many other kinds of knowledge) is sorely lacking amoung scientists.

He also wrote:
> ...
> Future (and present) generations will definitely look upon us as primitive,
> but they will not possess the obsolete arrogance to regard us in disgust and
> contempt. 
> ...

But I only asserted that they might look upon science in disgust.  It
is impossible for me to state what will actually be the case.  For all
I know they will regard us a race of Gods who created life and destroyed
it too.  My point is that there is evil (for want of a better word)
in science as a social instution--please do not confuse this statement
with the assertion that science is evil, whatever that might mean.  I am
only pointing out an imperfection.  I am willing to tolerate the
less than perfect, but I am not willing to tolerate imperfection
worshiped as its antithesis.

And lindsay@K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU writing about science and modern medicine said :

> ... But they beat the hell out of the way it used to be. ...

I used to think that.  A seminary student I once knew suggested to
me that maybe people really led better lives in the middle ages.
I thought he was crazy.  How could I even talk to someone so dense
as that.  But now, older and wiser, having seen something of our
modern world--not just the fairy land campuses, not just the hedonistic
narcissistic yuppiedoms, I have grave doubts.

Those words--narcissist, hedonist--come from antiquity.  Those were
scienceless times but deeper and more intellectual as our language still shows.

rob@amadeus.TEK.COM writes:

> I don't understand.  What possible connection could high Tc
> superconductivity have with cosmology? ...
> ...

I will explain.  The point I am making is that the widely published
and popularized discussions of what happened during the first instants
of the universe (if you can believe that there ever was such a thing)
are not science in the sense generating hypotheses that can be tested
by experiment but are very much science in the sense of religion.
And my argument to support both assertions is that discussions
about this primordial instant can only be so much nonsense.  Why?
because we don't even know about the world around us (witness
high Tc superconductivity--there is even talk now of a fifth force!!!!!)
So how on earth :-) can someone pontificate about a time billions
of years distant, at densities of matter never otherwise attained,
and when the whole fabric of the universe was small enough to dance on the
head of an extra-universal pin.  
Any physicist who seriously proposes that the laws
of physics as observed from earth are just as valid then and there
as they are here should be shot.  Such discussion is, as science, absurd,
but as religion, right at home.

And edk@gryphon.CTS.COM writes:

> 	The God of Science differs from all others in favoring the
> intelligent, well-informed, and skeptical. For them she performs 
> miracles. All other gods seem to avoid these people for their 
> demonstrations.

A sentiment
which everyone must recognize is not science but religion.  In fact,
this is the very creed I imagine being intoned on NOVA every time
I watch it.  :-)

From fmm@princeton.edu :

> ...
> Velikovsky's "speculations" conflict with some of our most
> basic scientific knowledge in a variety of disciplines.  
> ...

Of course.  The controversy with Velikovsky was over pre-publication
censorship and his "unscientific" but reasonable methodology which
was based on finding similarities in the mythologies of widely dispersed
cultures.  His claims are no worse than those about the great
primordial instant--both are bunk, but Velikovsky was a lot more 
original about it.

fmm@princeton also explained how the supercollider can not benifit
from the recent discoveries in high Tc superconductivity,
and while I am skeptical I must admit he may be right.
Nevertheles he was silent on the issue
of why we have to do this research now and can't wait
til a time when we can better afford it.
Personally, if we are talking about big projects, I would rather
see an effort to decode the human genetic code, and after that
other species too or maybe even first.  There are many things that
I would put at a higher priority: superconductivity,
peace in the middle east, truth, justice, better networks, parallel
computing, ....
Maybe planetary missions, I'd like one of these guys that knows so
much about what happened during the first second of the universe
to tell me what its like at Neptune's core, or for
that matter two inches below the surface of Venus.

fmm@princeton also says:

> What?  It may be that the life expectancy of a healthy adult has not
> increased much.  But because of the dramatic decline in infant and child
> mortality, the life expectancy of a newborn is much greater in a modern
> society than in a primitive one.

This may or may not be so, live birth statistics are notoriously 
uninterpretable--what constitutes a live birth and what does not?
Everyone figures it differently.
That's the problem.  And even if true, I am no right to lifer, and
it takes a more compelling argument to influence me.

fmm@princeton adds:

> In any case, mortality is not the sole measure of health!  You might
> also consider what modern medicine has done to alleviate physical
> suffering.

This is truely dubious!  I don't mean to be insulting, but 
you must have your eyes closed to be so remarkably naive.
Don't you know there is a debate raging right now in the medical community
over mercy killing?  Doctors are getting to the point where they
can't take it any more and
are rebelling against the pain they cause to the terminally ill.
This is a new phenomenon, people were never tortured like this before.
Another debate is raging over the
so called cancer cures.  People go through hell to be 'cured' from
cancer, but the survival rates mostly have not gone up.
Many people who have been 'cured' of cancer say that if 
they get it again they will die instead.
And of course you can't get morphine over the counter anymore.
Physical suffering florishes today.

fmm@princeton also suggested that the suicide rate is not what it
is because of the empty lives we live but because we have higher
expectations.

There might be so.  But, I think it is the empty lives.

Finally fmm@princeton said I was welcome to go live the life
of a savage.  More naivity, 
if fmm@princeton would think about it instead of
comming back with a knee-jerk jingoism he would realize himself that
no one has such an option.  Indeed there are no savages left, at all.
Primitive societies have been 
destroyed; the subjugated remains are at feeble caracatures.

And govett@avsd.UUCP writes:

> I think you NEED science to be a religion.  You are looking for absolutes
> that only dogma can provide.

You are part right.  I am looking for absolutes.  And on reflection,
while I reserve the right to change my mind, I think all men, 
especially scientists, are looking for absolutes right along with me.
If someone says otherwise, you will see me giving an askance glance.
But I don't need science to be a religion.  You miss my whole complaint.
I complain that science IS religion.  I want science to be science.
I want religion to be religion.
Alas, religions like primitive
societies have become caracatures of themselves;
and alas that is another issue.

More important, science is a bad religion--it completely
ignores many areas religions usually address.
And look at what that has done to the world.

govett@avsd.UUCP adds:

> The scientific method (more specifically, mathematics) is the only
> reasonably effective technique man has developed for understanding 
> the universe, however imperfectly. 

I have no patience for confusing mathematics with science.
If you knew what you were saying, you wouldn't say it.

And if the scientific method is, as you say, the unique
effective technique for understanding, why aren't we all 
president? Do you exclude politics from your 'universe',
or do you regard it as part of the scientific method?