Science Plays God

[Christopher Simon]

And by "listen" do you mean meditate on, in an abstract and poetic way? Scientific knowledge (when I understand it) inspires awe and wonder in me, when I look at the universe. It is a brand of poetry, in that sense.

-----Original Message-----
From: "alice wellintown" <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
Sent: ‎6/‎7/‎2013 7:16 PM
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: Science Plays God

We need to listen to the grass. To the spring meadow. 



On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 7:16 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

But the camera, the technologies of science, only allow us to see a part of nature's power. The spring in the meadow is not captured on the film. We have but an image. The spring in the meadow is infinitely more complex than what we can discover from the film, but we are so impressed with the complexity of our machine, with the complexity of our image, with the work of the camera, with the science, that we forget all that is beyond its view, all that it can't capture, reproduce. We dismiss all that nature is, all that is  beyond the logic, the method of science. Because science tells us it can explain nature, but it fails to remind us how limited its explanations are, how inherently flawed its methods are, how much more powerful and complex nature is. Science puts the parts together, one into the next, puts them into the clockwork and shows us that we can, with time, control nature, synchronize her, others, ourselves, take from nature what we desire. But nature is not a clock. So what have we got? A computer world? And there is something far more insidious in this new science. When the Greeks spun the world on a potter's wheel, made a world in the image of their tools, they were doing much the same. But that insidiously extended science that Pynchon describes in 1984 Foreword, is science with computer. And with computers we are enticed to leave the earth behind, to change how we think about earth, so we destroy more of it, and work at understanding it less and less.  We do this in the hope of making it better for our growing population, but we ignore so much that the camera can't capture, that science can't explain. Science is not the answer. It's the problem. We need to listen to the wind. 



On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:33 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

When did humans first think about nature as a machine? Long before Newton, but hard to say for sure. But we can say that the meaning of this concept (nature as machine) has changed over time. We can also say that science has influenced what we claim to know about nature, about powers in nature that are greater than any power we have, and about what in nature is very powerful and why, and what is  beyond our immediate control, but not beyond our control in the future. 
Does science redesign nature to make it fit scientific expectations and needs? Nature certainly does not remain constant, does not retain its meaning as theories evolve, as theories are abandoned, replaced with new ones. As science evolves and changes, nature’s features change. 
Put a camera in the meadow for a season. Make a film. A reflection of nature’s secrets, once hidden, is now exposed. Nature is somehow more real. We see so much that nature does, its power, but what we see is not nature, but a film, an imitation. How powerful is the meadow! But science has power too. The more power science has, the more powerful and persuasive its ideas about nature. The camera is quite a powerful technology. Like the hammer, and extension, the camera too extends. In this case, it is not the hand, nor even the eye so much that is extended, but the mind. Thinking with the machine changes how we think about nature. Does thinking with the machine make us think of nature as a machine? And if so, does the thinking with a clock make nature a clock, thinking with a text…a computer…thinking with …and is it in our nature to formulate our scientific explanations of how nature works with what works for us, what can be reproduced, reliably, without ambiguity, again and again. Use a machine not an idea because ideas are not as easy to control. Science must control, therefore, it controls nature by making it a machine. And, we do the same to others who inhabit the earth, and we do so to ourselves. The machine is powerful method for taking hold of complexities in nature, like the meadow in spring, which we cannot make. That we can’t make Spring, is a challenge to science, especially in the West, because science making, creating, bringing to nature something that was not there before, is an expression of free will.  This idea, of course, has its roots, not in science, but in religion, in Genesis. God makes us in his image and we therefore make things in ours. 
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