20090702

What is the meaning of curiosity in scientific attitude?

PSI Blog 20090702 What is the meaning of curiosity in scientific attitude?

Results from the James Webb Space Telescope are products of humanity’s infinite curiosity, which, I predict, will lead to our ultimate realization the universe is infinite. That telescope threatens to increase the current 2-trillion galaxy estimate by a factor of 10. With an estimated 400 billion stars in our own galaxy, that is a lot of evidence in support of Infinite Universe Theory. How much more evidence do we need?

 

Yet, cosmogonists (those who assume the universe had a beginning) still believe all that stuff exploded out of nothing (or a “singularity,” as the venerable Professor Hawking mathematized). But, as soon as the first fuzz ball in the night sky was proven to be a galaxy containing a trillion stars, similar to our own Sun, we had a choice:

 

1.    The universe exploded out of nothing, or

2.    The universe is infinite.

 

Neither of those can be completely proven, in the same way our scientific faith that there are “causes for all effects” cannot be completely proven. Infinity requires us to make assumptions. While each thing in the universe had a beginning, the material for constructing each of those things had to come from somewhere else. That is what the 2nd choice provides us. The 1st choice is traditional and amounts to the last gasp of creationism, a myopic construct centered on our pre-Copernican selves.

 

Curiosity involves an inquiry outside oneself. The scientific “attitude” is based on the assumption that the truth may be known through observation and experiment. Dr. Chris Drew considers it the primary human instinct:


The seeking instinct is the instinct within all humans that make us want to explore. It’s built into us because it has evolutionary benefits: by seeking, we find food, shelter, and water. It helps us sustain ourselves. However, we can temporarily pause this instinct during times of fear and depression.


The nonscientific attitude is the belief that truth already is known or that it may be known in ways that do not involve interacting with the external world. The scientific attitude is inherently progressive-and dangerous. The statement “Curiosity killed the cat” is not without wisdom. On the other hand, without interacting with the outside world, nothing gets done. Each step, each bite of food, is an “ex”-periment. The upshot: We are all scientists. 

 

One way to avoid the problems caused by curiosity is to look the other way, like the cosmogonists do. Any examination of the external world will challenge your religious faith while augmenting your scientific faith. Better you should look the other way. Pope Francis sums up the religious viewpoint:

 


Photo Credit: Nacho Arteaga in Unsplash.

 

Excerpts from the Pope’s radio address in 2013 as reported by Laura Ieraci:

 

“…we find ourselves before another spirit, contrary to the wisdom of God: the spirit of curiosity. …The spirit of curiosity distances us from the Spirit of wisdom. …And the spirit of curiosity is not a good spirit. It is the spirit of dispersion, of distancing oneself from God, the spirit of talking too much. …this spirit of curiosity, which is worldly, leads us to confusion. …do not seek strange things, do not seek novelties with this worldly curiosity.”

 

The “confusion” alluded to here is an enduring problem for immaterialists who nonetheless must live in the material world. Would be solipsists expect contact with the world to produce contradictions and paradoxes. Like those who still believe the universe exploded out of nothing, they have learned to live with the cognitive dissonance triggered by curiosity. The alternative is to stifle the engine of science at an early age. ”Dr.” Joyce Meyer leads the battle:



Photo credit: Joyce Meyer.

 

The “battle” here amounts to the one between education and miseducation. It shows up whenever reality is dismissed in favor of dreams and imaginings. It shows up every time there is a fascist demand to ban books that might upset the political/religious applecart. It shows up when students are cloistered to prevent their interactions with the external world. It shows up when xenophobia attempts to prevent contact with people who are different. It shows up when a scientific paradigm allows no criticism from outsiders or upstarts from within the ranks.

 

But, in the end, it is a losing battle. No portions of the universe are completely isolated from the environment — including the people within any particular portion. As the human population grows, interactions with the external world become ever more intense, and therefore increasingly scientific. Humanity’s curiosity and penchant for observation and experiment is progressive. In the long run, the regression demanded by the Pope and by Meyer is not possible. What we have seen cannot be unseen.

 

The myopism of the current cosmology is only a phase. Today, each examination of the universe adds trillions more cosmological objects, with no end in sight. Humanity’s curiosity, like the universe, knows no bounds.

6 comments:

Glenn Borchardt said...

No, it is not possible for us to trigger major earthquakes at this time. We produce small events all the time by removing or injecting fluids into the subsurface. Quarrying and mining also can cause events to occur by removal of confining materials. Most of these are non-destructive.

The Haiti earthquake definitely was not human-caused. That area around the Caribbean plate has had at least a dozen major events during historical times.

Your link to conspiracy nevertheless is instructive. As determinists, all of us want to determine the causes for events ("We are all scientists," as the book says.) Conspiracy theory, however, is an age-old method of scapegoating sociological problems. The problem is, that any such problem has an infinite number of causes. Those who believe in conspiracy hope to find a bad guy or a few bad guys, annihilate them, and return to a former paradise. It is a tale told over and over again in the superhero myths. Superman, James Bond, Obama, or some other "Great Man" will rescue us from those who seek to harm us. It is a simple and attractive theory for adolescents and adolescent societies, but it isn't, by any chance, the way the world really works. Scapegoating simply is a rejection of responsibility. Paradise never will be achieved, but an improved society always is possible. Blaming folks is part of this (that's what the justice system is for), but ultimately it is the job of each and everyone of us.

Unknown said...

Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire. See the link below for more info.


#fiery
www.ufgop.org


joogabah said...

Have you seen Judy Wood's presentation on the events of 9/11? She attempts to make a dispassionate appeal to the evidence without resorting to conspiracy theory and she ends up pointing out some rather frightening possibilities regarding directed energy weapons using technology developed by Nicola Tesla. Did you know there was a category 3 hurricane just off the coast of NYC as the events of 9/11 were occurring?

Glenn Borchardt said...

Joogabah:

Sorry, but there was no hurricane near NYC on 9/11/01:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_hurricanes#2000.E2.80.932009

Wood's title is: "Where Did the Towers Go? Evidence of Directed Free-energy Technology on 9/11." Conspiracy theorists love this kind of stuff, but the only "Directed Free-energy Technology" I could see in the videos of the event were airplanes.

If you like to know more about 0911, read the negative reviews at: https://www.amazon.com/Towers-Evidence-Directed-Free-energy-Technology/dp/0615412564/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Menorah Matrix said...

Don't listen to that imbecile that sits in Rome. Curiosity has been the most important characteristic of a person for understanding life around us and the Creator of it all as well. In Christianity it is written to be as children. Children are the best representation for what it means to have curiosity. Even in other religions such as Sanatama Dharma (what many wrongly refer to as Hinduism), curiosity is the number one, again the first quality necessary to achieve enlightenment.
That buffoon that sits in Rome hardly even believe in a Creator but surely is a Marxist in heart, as many of his ideas and background confirms, never mind being a deranged Jesuit, if you know how evil those are...

George Coyne said...

This article discusses Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology model which has no starting point for the repeating cycles. By not having a beginning to the cyclic Universe, Penrose avoids having it arise from nothing although he accepts that what astronomers observe today is the result of a Big Bang. The writer of the article states: "To truly answer the question of how something could arise from nothing, we would need to explain the quantum state of the entire Universe at the beginning of the Planck epoch. All attempts to do this remain highly speculative. Some of them appeal to supernatural forces like a designer…. The 2020 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose has proposed one intriguing but controversial model for a cyclical Universe dubbed conformal cyclic cosmology.… In this view, the Big Bang arises from an almost nothing. That's what's left over when all the matter in a universe has been consumed into black holes, which have in turn boiled away into photons – lost in a void.”
https://www.sciencealert.com/how-did-the-big-bang-explode-out-of-nothing-this-could-be-the-way

Penrose states: "There was actually another universe existing before the present one and the Big Bang merely marked the end of that universe. Evidence of that previous universe can still be observed these days."
https://www.outlookindia.com/national/big-bang-did-not-start-the-present-universe-physicist-roger-penrose-news-195972

Writing in "Inside Penrose's Universe" physicist Julian Barbour criticized Penrose's model: "There are numerous problems to be overcome in this proposal, which involves a radical rethinking of Penrose’s own ideas about the second law. One serious difficulty is that it relies heavily on all particle masses, including that of the electron, becoming exactly zero in the very distant future. Many particle physicists will question that. But the biggest difficulty of all is that even if the shapes of the aeons match, how does the transition from an infinitely large scale before crossover to an infinitely small scale after crossover occur? This is where the argumentation and mathematics get tough..."
https://physicsworld.com/a/inside-penroses-universe/