[MD] Metaphysical issues: DQ

[ml]

dmb,

Nice post, thoughtful.

...and stimulating to mind, so a riff on a piece is in order.

Water and the scientist.


----- Original Message -----
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2008 10:08 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Metaphysical issues: DQ


>
>
> Christoffer said:
> The Question we need to focus on here is "what should we say about DQ in
order to make the MOQ work best?" <snip>

<snip>
>To physicists and chemists, water is nothing but H2O but such assertions
 >forget to mention that water is experienced as wet, cool, slippery,
thirst-
>quenching, crop-saving, cleansing, flowing, etc..

This is an interesting assertion for the metaphor you were building, but
as a chemist of sorts who spent years in a laboratory running analytical
equipment and modeling results against, within, and from the biological
and gological perspectives, it is not quite like the above in regards to
water.
(Maybe Hawking would have a similar response, I don't know.)

To the chemist H2O, or more often H-OH, is, aside form carbon, the
most f-ing magical stuff there is.  Eternally surprising just what it does,
can do, has done, and how changeable.  It is thief, mother, and lover;
treasure, creator, and destroyer; lubricant, glue, and wedge.

Tracing the effects of water as it passes over and through the earth's
crust and in and out of biological and geological provinces is to witness
immense dynamic effects that boggle the modeling capability of  both
the mind and the power of the available computational recources the
world possesses.

The lay person looks at say, rocks and sees a very static reality, but
the chemist studying those same rocks watches the way water at play
in the medium of stone performs a constant dynamic dance of change,
sweeping, capturing, leaving, moving; opening and sealing qualities,
and attributes, content and concentration in the rocks.

We who garden have heard of the way earthworms in their collective
numbers turn tons of soil per acre (tonnes per hectare) of ground and
it is indeed impressive, but the dance of water is moving the components
of the earth's crust in even more impressive numbers and over huge areas.

So, even in the presumedly static level of the physical, the dynamic
runs riot, ranges free, and dances at its own raves, reinventing itself and
all around it.




> "Reality, which is value, is understood by every infant. It is a universal
starting place of experience that everyone is confronted with all the time.
Within a MOQ, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing
this reality, but the patterns are NOT the reality they describe." (Lila,
page 103)

Within the MOQ, science, the methodology, is also a wicked, tricked-out
kayak, sled,  parachute, glider, surf board that lets us bust-blast-sail on
the
dynamic crest of the unknnown. shouting, shrieking like banshees, and
dropping the world right out from under us in a tumbling melee that
sometimes
rises to a tsunami wave of awe.  It is so obvious that REALITY is so much
f-ing more immense than the merest comprehension of which is possible.

That's the view from within the labcoat.

>
> Just driving by,
> dmb
>


thanks--mel