Excerpts from a beautiful article from sci-am
"In the early 17th century a demon was loosed on the world by Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei when he began swinging pendulums, rolling balls down ramps and observing the moons of Jupiter, all with an aim toward discovering regular-ities that could be codifed into laws of nature. So successful was this mechanical worldview that by the early 19th century French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was able to “imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists.... Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the uni-verse and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence.” By the early 20th century science under-took to become Laplace’s demon. It cast a wide “causal net” linking effects to causes through-out the past and into the future and sought to explain all complex phenomena by reducing them into their simpler component parts. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg captured this philosophy of reductionism poignantly: “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” In such an all-encom-passing and fully explicable cosmos, then, what place for God?Stuart Kauffman has an answer: naturalize the deity. In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary in Alberta and one of the pioneers of complexity theory reverses the reduc-tionist’s causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says “breaks no laws of physics” and yet cannot be explained by them. God “is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,” Kauffman declares.In Kauffman’s emergent universe, reductionism is not wrong so much as incomplete. It has done much of the heavy lifting in the history of science, but reductionism cannot explain a host of as yet unsolved mysteries, such as the origin of life, the biosphere, consciousness, evolution, ethics and economics. It was therefore gratifying to fnd corroboration in Kauffman’s detailed explication of why such phenomena “cannot be deduced from physics, have caus-al powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real entities in the universe.” This creative process of emergence, Kauffman contends, “is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe.” "
What a beauuuuutiful explanation. Its been a very long time, since watching matrix revolutions 5 years back to be precise, I ve always been on the lookout for such explanations. To link science with GOD, the mere thought of it is so exciting. I ve watched the movie so many times that the final dialogues come to my mind instantly.
A series of questions from Agent Smith
"Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting FOR something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose! And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it,Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you persist?"
to which our "ONE" answers:
Because I choose to.
Just shows the creativity GOD, connecting science, spirituality, imagination in a movie - the least expected source. Its such a wonderful world for those who really want to kindle the thinking part of our brains just like I agreed with our great Einstein in my very first blog.I really don't know wher I am going with all this and I don't think that I'll ever know. But still I choose to write this, though this may make no sense to you readers. My only intention is to share some avenues for thinking apart from sitting before this computer crap.
"In the early 17th century a demon was loosed on the world by Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei when he began swinging pendulums, rolling balls down ramps and observing the moons of Jupiter, all with an aim toward discovering regular-ities that could be codifed into laws of nature. So successful was this mechanical worldview that by the early 19th century French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was able to “imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists.... Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the uni-verse and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence.” By the early 20th century science under-took to become Laplace’s demon. It cast a wide “causal net” linking effects to causes through-out the past and into the future and sought to explain all complex phenomena by reducing them into their simpler component parts. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg captured this philosophy of reductionism poignantly: “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” In such an all-encom-passing and fully explicable cosmos, then, what place for God?Stuart Kauffman has an answer: naturalize the deity. In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary in Alberta and one of the pioneers of complexity theory reverses the reduc-tionist’s causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says “breaks no laws of physics” and yet cannot be explained by them. God “is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,” Kauffman declares.In Kauffman’s emergent universe, reductionism is not wrong so much as incomplete. It has done much of the heavy lifting in the history of science, but reductionism cannot explain a host of as yet unsolved mysteries, such as the origin of life, the biosphere, consciousness, evolution, ethics and economics. It was therefore gratifying to fnd corroboration in Kauffman’s detailed explication of why such phenomena “cannot be deduced from physics, have caus-al powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real entities in the universe.” This creative process of emergence, Kauffman contends, “is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe.” "
What a beauuuuutiful explanation. Its been a very long time, since watching matrix revolutions 5 years back to be precise, I ve always been on the lookout for such explanations. To link science with GOD, the mere thought of it is so exciting. I ve watched the movie so many times that the final dialogues come to my mind instantly.
A series of questions from Agent Smith
"Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting FOR something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose! And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it,Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you persist?"
to which our "ONE" answers:
Because I choose to.
Just shows the creativity GOD, connecting science, spirituality, imagination in a movie - the least expected source. Its such a wonderful world for those who really want to kindle the thinking part of our brains just like I agreed with our great Einstein in my very first blog.I really don't know wher I am going with all this and I don't think that I'll ever know. But still I choose to write this, though this may make no sense to you readers. My only intention is to share some avenues for thinking apart from sitting before this computer crap.
