Brain Fertilizer

Who's Afraid of Schrodinger's Cat?, by Ian Marshall and Danah Zohar.

One review:

The meat of the book does exactly what it says, it introduces the reader to the most advanced scientific principles of today. However, what I became even more interested in, (although I was plenty interested in the new ideas) was the epistimological difference between newtonian physics and quantum physics. In sparked in me an interest into the philosophy of science.

I'm finding that quite accurate.

Furthermore...

...it is providing me with the vocabulary to explain and express some thoughts I've had about the world and about science.

Yeah, I've taken some flack for my criticisms of science and evolution. It's not that I've ever denied the truths of science and evolution, it's just that I've found them to be inadequate to explain the world I see around me. "God" helps explain much that science and evolution don't. I've been called a loon/kook and worse, but I admit I didn't express my objections all that well, so perhaps I deserved it.

See, science has been wrong 99.9999% of the time, if not worse. The chance that science has everything right even now approaches zero. Why? Because the more we learn, the more we have to learn. Along with the lousy success rate and the near-certainty that science is wrong in everything it is telling us now, science also explains more about the world around us in a way we can fathom than any other paradigm.

...but which science? Aye, there's the rub. This book describes Newtonian physics, and describes it as Mechanistic and Deterministic. Just as the prevalent attitudes toward science, evolution, society, politics, etc, are. The problem is, Newtonian physics has pretty much been proven wrong, as has evolution. That is, they are both wonderful tools for describing most of what we see in the world...but science breaks down when you look at the very small or the very big, or when mass quantities of energy get involved, and evolution breaks down when you look at the macro level (the world probably isn't old enough to have produced the diversity of life we see, although nowhere near as young as the 6000 years that Bible-literalist Creationists insist). Newtonian physics (Science!, as I like to call it) adherents point to the unsupportability of some Creationist theories and take that as proof that Evolution is correct.

But you see, that's Science! again. Either/or. Fish or fowl. New Science is fuzzy logic, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, and especially Schrodinger's Cat, which is an analogy meant to help explain "both/and" states of quantum theory. It's quite possible that evolution was a part of the process, but that it wasn't the smooth, gradual differentiation that evolutionists insist on. The Butterfly Effect says that a very minor change at one point of a system can lead to catastrophic changes somewhere else...has evolution been considered much through that lens...?

From the book:

What is a mind? What can minds do? Are minds the products of brains? How does the brain give rise to the mind? Do animals have minds? Do computers? Are computers good models for brains? Is biology important in studying the brain? What is awareness? Consciousness? Must a mind, to be a mind, be conscious? Can biology or physics or thoeries of computation explain consciousness?

From me, before I even started reading the book:

Measure "anger" for me. How replicable is "happiness"? Prove to me that your bump on the head hurt as much as mine. Science! is absolutely and 100% incapable of measuring any of these intangibles, but people still insist that prayer is meaningless and there is no God because they can't be measured by Science!

The book also points out that the development of Newtonian physics leeched the soul out of the world, that in its clockwork description of the universe, there was no room for God. The New Science of New Thinking returns that space to "God". There's no need to ascribe to a specific one, but New Thinking scientists pointed out that "...we are always within a framework, and that therefore no God's-eye view of order is possible." As I said earlier in this piece, Newtonian Science breaks down when you deal with the very, very small and very, very big or extreme amounts of energy. Another way of saying that is that the Laws of Physics work very differently for a force the size/power of God, to the point that anything at that level of power/size pretty much is God and thus, is pretty much beyond our ability to measure or fathom. It is somewhat circular logic, yes. But it works better than foolishly clinging to Newtonian Physics as an explanation for the universe when it is, at best, merely a useful approximation of only one portion of the universe.

Anyway, the book is worth reading, if only to have your thinking challenged and expanded.