Weird Studies/Lem's New Cosmogony

30 Mar 2022 01:36 - 05 Aug 2023 05:24
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    • Ending the deadlock of science and religion by postulating emergent entities that can rewrite the rules of physics.
    • 41:00 Lem at hear a scientific naturalist, but something of a heresiarch
    • Science and religion, conccious neutrality, resulting the blindness of science...closely connected with intentionality...such stuff became taboo in science...sealed the lips and brains of science...
    • Weirdosphere is definitionally theistic? Uh-oh. Lem trying to introduce intention without god.
    • Reason and Wonder, David Pruitt (also on split of science religion and how coming back together)
      • anti-entropy as love?
    • Creation as ongoing (Teilhard)
    • His Master's Voice (Lem novel)
    • From the book:
      • The sciences of the time held, more or less, to the following schema: if we wish to know the mechanism of a clock, the fact of whether or not there are bacteria on its cogs and counterweights has not the least significance, either for the structure or for the kinematics of its works. Bacteria certainly cannot influence the movement of a clock! In precisely the same way it was con­sidered that intelligent beings could not interfere in the move­ment of the cosmic mechanism, and hence that that mechanism should be studied with complete disregard for the conceivable presence of beings in it.
      • This unpleasant, even vexing impression derives, I think, from our regarding any synthesis of physics and the will to be inadmissible—I would even say, indecent—to the rational mind. For myths are a pro­ jection of the will. The ancient cosmogonic myths, in solemn tones, and with a simple-hearted innocence that is the lost para­dise of humanity, tell how Being sprang from the conflict of demiurgic elements, elements clothed by legend in various forms and incarnations, how the world was born of the love- hate embrace of god-beasts, god-spirits, or supermen; and the suspicion that precisely this clash, being the purest projection of anthropomorphism onto the blank space of the cosmic enigma, that this reducing of Physics to Desires was the prototype the author made use of—such a suspicion can never be altogether overcome....the attempt to expound it in the language of empiricism smacks of incest, of a vulgar inability to keep separate concepts and categories that have no business being joined in an indiscriminate union
      • He converted me; I can even point to the place in A New Cosmogony that accomplished this. I refer to Section Seventeen of the sixth chapter of the book, the one which speaks of the marvelment of the Newtons, Einsteins, Jeanses, and Eddingtons at the fact that the laws of nature were amenable to mathematical expression, that mathematics— the fruit of the pure exercise of the logical mind—could prove a match for the Universe. Some of those greats, like Eddington and Jeans, believed that the Creator Himself was a mathema­tician and that we descried, in the work of creation, the signs of this His characteristic.,,Mathematics, an approximation of the structure of the Universum, somehow never quite manages to hit the nail squarely on the head hut is always just a little of! the mark...Mathematics and the world will converge,... when the work of creation has reached its goal, and it is still in progress. The laws of nature are not yet what they are “supposed” to be; they will become such not as a result of the perfecting of mathematics, but as a result of actual transformations in the Macrocosm!
        • also not to be a spoilsport but this implies that the macrocosm is evolving in time, which leaves time out of the theory...
      • For it is purely by reflex that we think of the entire material world as yielding to the following sharp logical dichot­ omy: either it was created by Someone (and then, standing on the ground of faith, we name that Someone the Absolute, God, the First Cause) or, on the other hand, it was created by no one, which means, as when we deal with the world as scien­ tists, that no one created it. But Acheropoulos says: Tertium datur. The world was created by No One, but all the same it was created; the Universe possesses Makers.
        • This is key
      • such disciplines as game theory or the algebra of conflict struc­tures
      • Wonder what "algebra of conflict structures" refers to, sounds intriguing.
      • At last a state of cautious neu­trality was reached between Science and Faith, the one endeavoring not to get in the way of the other. It was as a result of this coexistence, touchy enough, tense enough, that the blindness of Science came about, evident in Science’s avoidance of the ground on which rests the idea of the New Cosmogony. This idea is closely connected with the notion of intentionality —in other words, with what is part and parcel of a faith in a personal God. For intentionality constitutes the foundation of such a faith. According to religion, after all, God created the world by an act of will and design—that is to say, by an intentional act. And so Science declared the notion to be sus­ pect and even forbade it outright. It became, in Science, taboo; one was not permitted even to make the least mention of it, lest one fall into the mortal sin of irrationalistic deviation. That fear not only sealed the lips of the scientists; it sealed their brains as well.
      • The Cosmogonic Game proceeds differently from that of chess, for in it the rules change—that is, the manner of the moves, and the pieces themselves, and the board.
      • My procedure was heretical in the extreme, because science’s first premise is the thesis that the world comes “ready-made” and “finished” in its laws, whereas I was assuming that our present Physics represented a transitional stage on the way to particular transformations.
      • Gödel’s proof could not have been drawn, because then the laws governing the constructibility of mathematical systems were different from what they are today.
      • OK, don't like, because Gödel doesn't depend on any physics, and math cannot be different in different universes.