[MD] Case's Answer to Marsha

[david buchanan]

Case said:
...almost all human endeavor is aimed at reducing the uneasy feeling we get 
when confronting the unknown. ...To me uncertainty is the elephant under the 
rug, the water in our fishbowl....I have gone on at length about the various 
industries in modern society that are based entirely on dealing with 
uncertainty, insurance, stock market, marketing, government... pretty much 
all of it. ...Since this seems so obvious why do I think it is significant?

dmb replies:
It doesn't seem obvious to me at all. I'm still not even sure if I know what 
you're talking about here. Seems dubious as hell to say its all about that 
uneasy feeling and you're saying it in such a sweeping way too. I mean, 
leaving aside all that you have built on top of it for the moment, this 
starting point is unclear to me. Is this a psychoanalytic notion? Are you 
saying that the search for psychological comfort plays the central role in 
the evolution of human culture? That's pretty much what Freud was saying in 
"The Future of an Illusion". And I guess I don't get what you mean in saying 
its obvious and its under the rug. Maybe its more like a psychospiritual 
thing and all these attempts to suppress the anxiety is the suffering from 
which we need to escape. Maybe the trick is to stop trying to resist 
uncertainty and stop trying to control chaos. Maybe that's what the torments 
of hell are really all about and the trick is to let go of that struggle and 
simply accept the dynamic nature of reality. Maybe then our souls could find 
some peace and some rest.

Nah. Never mind. That can't be right. Its too, um, Forrest Gump.

Case said:
I recently read Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory and he said that 
while Newton had given us a deterministic philosophy and Einstein a 
relativistic one he saw no hope of a meaningful philosophical orientation 
arising from quantum mechanics. I disagree I think quantum mechanics in 
physics and Gödel's theorem on mathematics show us that uncertainty is ever 
present EVEN in physics and math where we would least expect to find it.

dmb says:
Boy, I don't know about this either. At this point, even Fritjof Capra has 
denounced the Tao of Physics. Ken Wilber comes down pretty hard on this sort 
of thing in explicit terms too. He calls it network materialism or some such 
thing, pointing that these systems just put lipstick on the SOM pig, if you 
will. I mean, I'm skeptical about the sort of project that marries physics 
to a grand philosophical scheme. I forget if it was Jung or Campbell, who is 
a Jungian of sorts, but somebody pointed out that this was a huge disaster 
for the Church. The telescope would not have been so damaging if the 
theology hadn't been married to the cosmology in the first place. They 
created the situation in which astronomical observations could upset 
theological positions. Agreement with science is one of those essential 
ingredients, but we don't want to hitch our wagons to the latest theory too 
tightly for one simple reason; science keeps painting a new picture. It 
keeps moving and we like it that way. Philosophy should move forward too, 
but in its own terms and at its own pace.

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