Re: Belief, volition, synchrony, understanding

"Truth, beauty, and good are a story wherein humans once more are blind to the foundations of their volition.”

I doubt that’s the substance and/or spirit of Murray’s conviction that greatness results from a “belief in truth, beauty, and good.” And I’m certain that Galileo, Newton, Michelangelo, etc. believed truth, beauty, and good were something far, far greater and more real than “a story wherein humans once more are blind to the foundations of their volition.” (Although your seeming belief in “synchrony” would perhaps resonate with the great ones.)

Perhaps you're just being somewhat binary and/or reductionist. I too can be somewhat binary and/or reductionist, since it often does seem to explain lots of stuff. But it doesn’t begin to explain stuff like wave/particle duality, non-locality, the low entropy at the beginning of the universe, human consciousness, etc.

As I’ve noted before, Roger Penrose, a mathematician/physicist who actually understands/appreciates the most current science, observes, in his Shadows of the Mind : “It is perhaps noteworthy that the physicists, who are more directly familiar with the puzzling and mysterious ways in which matter actually behaves, tend to take a less classically mechanistic view of the world than do biologists.”

Wouldn’t you agree that Penrose’s POV has far more science and weight behind it than say the typical biologist’s classically mechanistic view of the world? With all due respect, JimB, I doubt you understand nearly as much as you believe you understand. Wake up and smell the mystery.

But if you’re right that we’re truly “blind to the foundations of our volition,” then, almost certainly, none of us understands what we believe we understand…except that you'd probably be right that Michelangelo’s work isn’t much different than termite crap cathedrals.

Replies:

Re: Belief, volition, synchrony, understanding, by James Brody, 06/16/04 Re: Fantasies, by Fred H., 06/17/04 Re: Boundaries, by Fred H., 06/17/04

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