lbeing789 said:
See this is where I can't really argue further because the definitions are slipping again, if the I is only part of spirituality... then I'm just trying to find out what is exclusive to spirituality... forgive me if I'm misreading, but it sounds like you think science can't tell you anything about meaning, morals, ethics, etc... surely not?
This is that emmanual kant view that we're unable to understand reason, but please don't forget that has been rebuked many times by different philosophers... I just think it's up in the air, we don't know so I wouldn't work on that assumption, it is my feeling that humans can understand all those things completely using scientific rigor.. but hey maybe we're all living in a personal matrix... i wouldn't argue it with you.
I'm really curious as to what really seperates these two types of people, theres certainly something different, I just don't think it's a spiritual outlook, moralistic viewpoint or scientifc mindset.
Yes I am essentially making Kant's argument of Pure Reason (Science), Practical Reason (Morals), and Judgement (Aesthetics, Art). Or one can go all the way back to Plato; The Good (Morals), the True (Science), and the Beautiful (The beauty in the eye of the beholder) for this same division of the reality we experience. In more recent times Ken Wilbur calls these three; The I, the We, the It.
This knowledge has been rebuked, and new knowledge has come into place. But you as a scientist should embrace this philosophy as it was the beginning of the rational mind, the enlightenment, and the age of science, the age of Modernity. Where much of the debate comes in is that this philosophy is 200+ years old, and thought has gone from this Modern one, to post Modern, and even post post Modern. The problem is that we split them up and differentiated them, but never realized how they worked in conjunction with eachother, that they were all important parts of the whole.
Instead the "It" side went a little beserk and took over the whole paradigm. Everything in nature can now be quantified, there must be a law or mechanism which makes this work. There is no "I", it is nothing more than a random bunch of chemicals squirting in the brain. There is no meaning to culture "We", it is just a bunch of activities to maintain social cohesion. Everything in the world became an "It" overnight, and if you cannot provide evidence of something's "Itness" then it doesn't really exist at all! Existence became all function, and no meaning.
Spirit is in action throughout all three quadrants of existence, it is the backbone on which everything is built. The "I" can find spirit in the moment of now, in that space between thoughts, from the emptiness which begets all form. The "We" can find spirit in community action, in religion, in togetherness, in realizing that by helping another I am really helping myself as well. But the "It" cannot see spirit, cannot find it because to them it cannot exist. There is no formula, no equation, no tangibile substance to measure or test. But it is all around, every moment just waiting to be realized if one incorporated the whole of their being rather than the narrow portion of the rational mind.
So you see burnt, you will never find the proof you seek, because I don't think your worldview would allow you to accept it even if you found something that intrigued you. You are always searching for proof, and looking in the wrong places. That which you seek is not "out there". The answers are already within you, you just cannot or choose not to see it.
And lbeing789, yes you read me correctly. I said that science and technology cannot tell us anything about morals, ethics, meaning. That is the purvue of the I/We (personal/cultural) legs of our reality construct. You cannot show me empirical evidence that somethig is ethical or not, moral or not, meaningful or not.
