I understand the appeal of all these high-tech goodies, Jees. The geek in me is very much alive! I'm just very cynical about things now, as you can tell
They'll make some strides sure but I don't see it breaking past its own hype, in the same way AI won't either. We're not going to have personal quantum computing any time soon. What difference would it make to us anyway when all everyone just wants computers for is to stream Love Island and the football!
dragonrider said:
I don't think truly holistic science is possible. You are always working from a certain perspective.
This is where I'm not cynical but optimistic. Sooner or later someone, or nature, will unleash something that will fundamentally shake the scientific paradigm to its foundations. I see it as an inevitability.
Science is a trip. But it's become like one of those thought loops that you sometimes get caught up in, where either someone pulls you out by shaking you or you shake yourself out of it by taking a step back to evaluate the situation. That's what science needs. It has become too head strong with the mathematics and needs some philosophical intuition, some feeling, to pull it out of the loop it has found itself in. Though I think a large part of the issue is both financing and the military industrial complex that both have a monopoly over the scientific process in the modern world, it's not a free humanitarian enterprise that people assume it to be.
The fact that mathematics even works at all suggests it has some connection to the ontology of our reality. We see geometry absolutely everywhere in nature, especially the golden ratio. It also permeates visionary and psychedelic states heavily. It is one of the reasons why I unsubscribed from the atheist school of thought. It is like the fingerprint of God, but not God itself.
But whilst a fingerprint may identify the subject it isn't much more than a hint, a signpost, to the subject. That's why I think the over reliance on mathematics to describe the universe is a failed endeavor and should only be used in a predictive fashion in physics when caution is applied. You can not take mathematics or use it in isolation to determine the movement or motivation of the whole system, in my opinion.
Incidentally I was reading about Roger Joseph Boscovich after finding out it was his book
Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis that Tesla was reading in one of his iconic photographs. Boscovich was a Jesuit, very interesting and smart fellow. Anyway, he had this idea about determinism - from wikipedia;
In philosophy and physics, Laplace's demon is a thought experiment supporting the concept of determinism. It suggests that if someone (the Demon) knew the precise location and momentum of every particle in the universe, he could in principle calculate the history and future of every particle. For a long time it was believed that Pierre-Simon Laplace, an influential French scholar, was the first one to propose this type of determinism. Recently it has been shown that the first person who offered the image of a super-powerful calculating intelligence was Boscovich, whose formulation of the principle of determinism in his 1758 Theoria philosophiae naturalis turns out not only to be temporally prior to Laplace's but also—being founded on fewer metaphysical principles and more rooted in and elaborated by physical assumptions—to be more precise, complete, and comprehensive than Laplace's somewhat parenthetical statement of the doctrine.[15]
That train of thought still permeates science today I feel. Not the idea itself, the determinism, but that you can analyze the system in part (or in that case the whole thing) and determine using mathematics the movement and motivation of the whole system. It presumes that the system is not a dynamic one in any way, with a creator or spontaneous/organic evolution for example.
