Science Plays God

[Joseph Tracy]

Completely agree  that differences and divergences appear everywhere, but  with the current dominance and continued ascendence of the western, agonistic, competitive markets complex  and a science that serves that model I'm wondering if there is a distinctive difference in the "science" of cultures that are more oriented to  harmony, cyclical pattern, balance.  Something as simple as the difference between vellum and paper. Perhaps not .  Tesla wanted to solve mankind's energy challenge much more than to get rich .  His marketable ideas made millions for others , his low cost energy plan was canned. Maybe the rapid spread of any technology that contributes to commercial success obliterates any difference.  
Bill Mollison, who coined the term permaculture, suggests that there are some fundamental differences in the approach to designing habitat and communities that provide for their own food and technologies. He got many of his ideas from local and often tribal economies. 
On Jun 8, 2013, at 1:05 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> Joseph, on perspective, we can, as you suggest, find profound differences when we look East, or to Africa, and so on...but even when we look at the West we discover profound differences as well. Even in America we find profound differences.
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> We can treat neither East nor West as monolith. Consider Locke and Hobbes. These two, often studied with Newton and others, stressed the scientific approach, the logical approach to creation, to the free will. Locke stressed the placing of morality among the sciences because he looked at the world and at man through the lens of science, objectively--he stressed the free exercise of reason.  Hobbes did not. In the free will Hobbes identified a danger that must be tempered by a ruler or assembly of men.   That free will, that creative power, that image of god, of making from nothing but what a man might conceive in his mind through his tools or his machines must be thwarted, not by ethics in science, but by a powerful government. And this is not unknown to the East. Consider the Legalist School.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(Chinese_philosophy)
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> On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 12:51 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> On this East and West, we do well to recall that P looks to Watts, to Africa and to African Americans, and again, I suggest Clontz, chapter 2, Ellison and Pynchon.
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> Clontz, Ted L. "Chapter 2. Ellison and Pynchon: The Chaotic and Fabulous Cities." Wilderness City: The Post World War II American Urban Novel from Algren to Wideman . Routledge, New York, New York, United States (2005): 39-62.
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> On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> As a pattern of thought, the creation story you are describing works as a powerfully influential paradigm  for  western science. But taken literally it presupposes great age for the biblical story, which story requires that the symbolic science of language and the practical science of agriculture be in place without a trial and error scientific process evident. What emerges in most  western and several eastern cultures are stories where a great deal of technology exists as a given - swords,  agriculture and food storage, clothing, language  - or is wrested from the gods as part of the emergence of fully human societies.
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> One thing you become aware of as an artist at an early stage is the impossibility of "creating anything that adequately rivals, represents or imitates what is seen in nature. What humans add more than anything to compensate is drama and abstraction( the manipulation of patterns both geometric and organic).  In this sense the artist priest author shaman is a kind of scientist naturalist observer interpreter of the dramatic cycles of nature and of the perceived ideals and boundaries of human behavior. The question of where this leads may hinge on whether the story teller, scientist, chieftain seeks to rival nature and direct the perception of divine truth,   or channel nature and allow a free and open-ended experience of divinity. It seems to depend on whether they see themselves as high priests of a greater order or as servants of a shared medicine, facilitators of survival, healthy boundaries, healing.
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> One of the great divergences that one can see between east(including shamanic tribalism) and west(including all agonistic beliefs)  is between a cosmology that is fundamentally self stabilizing and whose dynamics are coming from an inherent balance, and a cosmology of  dramatic directionality where beginning middle and end are all radically different  and particularly grim in the current scientific cosmology.   In the first the ideals tend to be harmonies, balance with nature. In the second the ideals are expansive, invasive, heirarchical, a product of struggle and competition.  Both have science. Is there a difference?
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> > In the West, God is a creator, the perfect expression of Free Will, and He makes Man in his image, a creator as well, with Free Will. But the Western God likes order, has a plan for his creation, this plan fixes man in a subordinate position, placing man's plans for the creation, and thus man's creations, under God's.  Man, however, is not content in this position and so he exercises his free will, thus frustrating, disturbing, the plans of his god. The creative man is given charge of the creation, and with it he does some good, but he is flawed, and he can't use his free creative power to do more good than evil, so the order the god has made is disturbed; the god wipes the slate with a flood, establishes a new order, cleaning the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, establishing the love of Judah for Benjamin. And so it goes. God and Man create. The myth of creation, of sin and re-creation is important because it will serve as the foundation of science, of modern science, of modernity without restraint. The story is a long one, but we can look at the chapters that address the period when Calvin merges with Newton, so the 16th and 17th centuries. Why begin here? Well, I would like to get to Pynchon and America, to the Puritans, and their machine, the printing machine and the text (Slothrop's ancestors), and to the Science of government in the early American states (Mason and Dixon).  If we start with Locke and Calvin , we can get to Weber and Blicero, by rocket, of course, and land on the dark side of Darwin and Dewey and...the theater/theatre...the dark passages, as one critic call them, of P's history of science gone mad. Gone mad with its powerful envy of nature's creative chaos.
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> > On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 8:01 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > Thoughtful, provocative, insightful and  clear. Not sure if it is that the idea has roots in religion or that the urge to understand, rival and control natural forces  are the roots of both science as a practical expression and religion as the explaining story.
> > On Jun 7, 2013, at 6:33 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
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> > > 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.
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> > > 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.
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> > > 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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