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NancySD's avatar

Thank you for putting this out there for your readers! I was initially 100% skeptical but as I am listening I am amazed.

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Joe Panzica's avatar

Isn’t it as much a trick of language that we tend to equate what we can measure, taste, see, hear, and smell as ‘real’ and what we can’t sense as something “less” than ‘real’?

I’m interested in exploring the difference between “tricks of language” - akin to the kinds of ‘hallucinations’ made by an AI chat box (but which all sentient humans are also subject to MOST of the time) from certain types of “stories”.

THEN AGAIN, humans do tend to grab onto certain types of “stories” the same way a chatbot might - without any deep critical or multi-dimensional analysis. But these types of stories are often vast simplifications of complex issues or phenomena. For example we continue to tell (and continue to be told) the story of an apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head even though it explains nothing new about gravity that most children don’t already know. We continue to remember that story EVEN after we may learn that the tale was probably false from the beginning. We hear the story about Einstein scoffing about “spooky action at a distance” and perhaps imagine he was more hard headed than Newton, forgetting that Isaac was as disturbed as Albert about “influence without contact” and that Einstein’s own theories suggested even stranger examples of “spookiness” that have been confirmed (but NOT explained) by demonstrations.

Under stress or talking to children (which can also be stressful) and especially when we don’t want to think too much, we may resort to the comforts of certain simple types of stories. (We often do this in adult discourse when we don’t want to take social risks.) Those simple types of stories may also be “sticky” the way a pointless silly song can sometimes become a persistent earworm which we can decide is oppressively annoying — or divertingly silly and amusing — depending on our circumstances. But other types of stories (and other types of music) can be more captivating. These often contain mysteries or paradoxes that are difficult to put into everyday language. This is definitionally true of music and other art forms — and even of poetry which is often NOT composed in everyday ordinary language. But it is also true of certain stories even when the words and sentence structures are not particularly estranging.

I think the author here is building a case that there are truths and realities that cannot be communicated clearly via language any more than they can be touched, smelled, seen, or heard. She seems to be correctly insinuating that there are truths and realities that cannot be proven or disproven by mathematics, inference, or logic. In Timothy Snyder’s recent book “On Freedom” he devotes ink to addressing what Edith Stein and others have referred to as “The World of Values” which could be related to deep seated human intentions or to “The “World of Virtues” which could also be “naturalistic” needs and intentions of humanity — or something else. Whether of NOT “Virtues” are the same as “Values”, they are both often perceived as airy abstractions (and therefore dismissed as being without “substance”) but are still often experienced in galvanizing (sometimes horrifying, sometimes with awesome intimations of the sublime) ways that have lasting (empirically measurable) impacts on those who subjectively experienced them and even momentous historical and world shaking consequences when they become entangled with religious or political symbols — or when they inspire new such symbols that are part of the revolutionary creation of new religions or new movements.

Snyder refers “The World of Values” as a “Fifth Dimension” of reality. Others may call them “supernatural” or superNATURAL - or SUPER-natural to avoid letting their “spookiness” verge into conventional notions of divinity, paganism, or monotheism. The idea is that there is more to nature (or philosophy if we think of poor Horatio on the ramparts of Elsinore with Hamlet and his ghostly Da) than our everyday thinking can encompass. Others LEAP to use the commonly accepted notion that life and the cosmos are beyond normal understanding to justify every conventional folk belief of their particular world religion.

The idea that science can (and someday WILL) explain EVERYTHING is something of a sticky meme that we all may resort (or succumb) to in moments of distraction or when we don’t want to go against what we imagine to be acceptable discourse, but such an idea is only a matter of galvanizing faith to very few (and even fewer thoughtful people who know a lot about science whether they are actively engaged in creating new knowledge or not). And EVEN IF someone came up with a “theory of everything” that could be expressed as an equation to fit on a t-shirt, only very FEW adepts and charlatans would dare to assert that they were sure it was valid and complete even if they were justifiably confident that their assertions were safe from challenge. To the extent such a “theory” was valid, it would definitely open up new opportunities for advanced technology. It might even generate the kind of jargon that could be cleverly used to sell old fashioned versions of charms and snake oil. But so far, every theoretical advance that has had practical consequences has also opened up vaster new fields of research and allowed us to stand on the shoulders of giants to contemplate old and new mysteries from a fresher perspective.

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