Saturday, December 6, 2014

Science, myth, reality and knowledge


Science is a way of describing the world, a “myth” if you like, and just one among many.  Those that say it is the “truth” don’t understand the nature of language or human knowledge.  Every type of human knowledge is just a lens we place upon reality in an attempt to understand or limit it, but is not reality itself.  A description of something is not the thing itself, and never could be!  Reality is much larger than that!  In the same way, the description of an experience is not the experience itself but just an attempt to communicate some shareable attributes of it to others.

Reality is unknowable in its fullness, however by applying all our senses and feeling nature to our current situation we can experience it as fully as is possible by us.  That is the most we can do!  Having purely an intellectual understanding of something is a poor thing indeed compared to an open-hearted- and minded- experience of something!  And such an open-hearted experience is not something that can be accurately translated into words which our shared knowledge depends upon!  And, for those who don’t grok the word open-hearted, it means having no resistance in our body/mind that would shut us off from experiencing the moment and the world around us.  Basically, it means to not see ourselves as separate from the moment or the thing we are focused upon.  That is the nature of being open-hearted: a soft stance towards life where we don't seek to separate ourselves from it!

(For a more detailed analysis see the work of Mary Midgley and Thomas Kuhn's landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.)

Sharka Todd

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