http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?_r=2&8dpc&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Interesting article. Anybody have any thoughts about it?
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9 comments:
I refute it, thus.
Aha.
So I read the article. Then, the next morning, I thought about it while I stood in the shower. Here's what I thought:
1. The genealogy behind this kind of thinking and that which stands behind my thinking are so far diverged from one another that we seem to be different species.
2. From my vantage point, such notions of bubbling universes and brains in space are less interesting as cosmological possibilities and more interesting as emergent metaphors of the sociology which produced them. Think about it: you've got these research institutions funded and driven by a seemingly infinite scope of resource, you have strange grammar of closed-system naturalism on the other hand, then you throw in the wild card of incredibly creative and smart brains. It's kind of like turning on a hose and then holding your thumb against the top of it. No, no, that's not the image. It's kind of like brains--brains floating in the strange vacuum of "possibility," one that, by its very nature, bubbles out in hopefully infinite iterations of itself in seemingly random explosions of creativity.
My reaction amounted to "what kind of science is this?" Rather than going with what the obvious explanation of what and where we are, let's throw in infinite dimensions to impress people with out math skills. Plus, we can suggest that there are random brains popping in and out of existence. Someone listened to the third verse of the Wheaton College hymn a few too many times.
My reaction amounted to "what kind of science is this?" Rather than going with what the obvious explanation of what and where we are, let's throw in infinite dimensions to impress people with out math skills. Plus, we can suggest that there are random brains popping in and out of existence. Someone listened to the third verse of the Wheaton College hymn a few too many times.
What I take away from stuff like this is: Since we ARE here and obviously experience, maybe more of our efforts should be turned at exploring what we actually do experience. There is a place for the theoretical, but the human condition, whether a bubble or not, is here, and we should pay more attention to it.
Well said, Aeijtzsche.
yep. I tended to agree with Dave (and later Aeijtzsche). What matters is human experience (I'm also baffled at how we think we can peel back the curtain and see "the world" beyond that experience, as if we weren't experiencing the "naked" universe), and, while our descriptions of that experience can and should be carefully refined (it is better to say that the earth revolves around the sun and not visa versa), there is a dangerous arrogance to believing our description IS the world and trying to map "existence" onto our favorite equations. I finally end with a resounding "SO WHAT?" If this is (as the stoics said a couple thousand years ago) only a repetition of an endlessly repeating universe, what does that matter? Does it change what I experience? How I live? What I ought do? Or, on the other hand, is it mathematical masturbation? I'll take a human phenomenonology over this cosmological splooge any day.
Cosmological splooge!
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