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OT 8

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PART II

Ref: The relationship of Science & Truth

I thought we had better ask an OT VIII to weigh in on this. Here is what they told me:

The last few dozen posts debating the nature of "science" in relation to "truth" should be clay demoed until one has more "arc" and "knowingness" (which is "certainty") and this will lead to "understanding".

On the other hand. . .


einsteinshowphp-1-1.jpg

 
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Anonycat

Crusader
:thumbsup:

Scientology and Hubbard greatly confuse truth and agreement. They are not the same thing (though they are in the minds of many over-indoctrinated Scientologists).

If 10 people agree that there is a white horse standing in a room (when there actually isn't), they share a DELUSION. They agree on a hallucination. They mutually concur on a fictional event or situation.

THAT is what a great deal of Scientology is - agreeing on imaginary claims, statements, events, and situations (both mental and physical).

You can agree all day long that it is raining outside when it is actually a clear day, and while it may be real to you and true for you, that it is raining, it is NOT TRUE in any objective or honest sense.

In the same way, you can agree all day long that states of OT exist, that you are such an OT, and that there are other OTs, and while this may be true for some and real to some, it is NOT TRUE in any objective or honest sense.

What is "real" to somebody, and what is true, are often very very different. Hubbard mixed the two up very much in the subject of Scientology, he confused truth and reality, Hubbard did that VERY well actually, and that is why so many Scientologists have crazy ideas and notions about what is "real" to them. Hubbard, being a fiction writer, confused fiction with non-fiction, and created people who do the same thing unknowingly - the Scientologist. Their minds are often a mish-mash mixture of confusion between fiction and non-fiction.

At some point in my experience with Scientology it seemed that many of them never wanted to grow up and let go of the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. They were hooked on their fictions. So, instead they adopted Marcabs, Theta lines, whole track incidents, nasty SPs, loyal officers, enemy governments, lofty advanced mental states, and on and on and on.

:thumbsup:

And in my example, where it was put forward that there would be a horse - this is what scientology requires of the student. To accept 100% irrationality, to accept this degree unintuitive participation - and to finally believe anything they are told within the cult.

The only thing is, the horse is a lie.
 

Student of Trinity

Silver Meritorious Patron
The fact that a device or technique is seen to produce an effect does not imply that the idea which led to that device or technique was true. Example: Bohr atom. Many products of science & technology can be derived from that model yet it is known not to be true, only a useful and simple model. Also many fortuitous discoveries or breakthroughs of science and technology have later been determined to have been the result of unrecognized mistakes upon the part of their discoverers.

Right, but as I said: the fact that the simple model is useful is itself a solid truth that does not change even if a seemingly very different model is later found to be even more useful. So the issue is not only whether or not some statement is true. The problem also includes some subtlety in deciding just what the statement asserts. Several of the recent posts here are quite insightful about this, even the ones that disagree with each other: this business is partly tangled up with some merely trivial word games, but I think there is also something substantial and profound here.

In my little corner of science, we've dealt with these issues quite a lot, because I work on the foundations of quantum mechanics. We have already long since absorbed some of the basic concepts that have been raised here. What I mean is perhaps well illustrated with the Bohr atom. Bohr gave this picture of electrons as tiny little planets orbiting around the nucleus as a sun, together with an entirely arbitrary rule about which orbits were allowed. In fact the picture of the solar system atom was not really an active ingredient in his theory at all, though. If you wanted to guess the spectral lines of hydrogen, using Bohr's model, you would take your pencil and write a short page of equations, and at the end you would spit out some numbers. A lot of numbers, in a complex pattern, and they would all be awfully close to what you can measure with a sealed bulb of rarefied heated hydrogen.

While your hand wrote the equations to reach those fine numbers, there might be a little cartoon running through your mind, of tiny planets circling a tiny sun. But this would just be like an in-flight movie, keeping the other part of your brain busy while the working part pushed through the math. If you're not a trained physicist, the equations will be baffling and you'll cling to the picture of planets as the only thing in the model you can understand. To a physicist, however, the equations have a clear and familiar logic of their own, quite independent of the planet picture. Physicists can discard the planet picture entirely, with hardly a shrug, but keep the math. To us, the math is what Bohr's model really means. And the mathematical procedures of Bohr's atomic theory are retained in the fuller theory of quantum mechanics. It is a nice advanced lecture, to show how to find Bohr's theory within Schrödinger's.

Over the past 150 years or so, pictures like Bohr's little planet model have become less and less important in physics. More and more of our theories have had no such pictures at all attached to them, but have been presented in purely mathematical terms. A good first milestone in this "de-intuitioning" process in physics was probably the statement by Heinrich Hertz, "Maxwell's theory is Maxwell's system of equations," referring to the theory of classical electrodynamics that is still in use today. (This famous statement by Hertz is in a paper that was translated into English in a collected edition in 1893, but I haven't been able to track down the date when Hertz originally wrote it.) The process of abandoning intuitive pictures, except as crude pedagogical tools to be picked up and discarded at will, was essentially complete by the 1930s or so, I would say. Quantum mechanics and general relativity don't even try to be pictorial. Feynman introduced diagrams to quantum field theory, but these are literally just hieroglyphics. Each line and intersection stands directly for a certain mathematical expression, and means nothing else than that.

This is not the same as saying that we are not looking for explanations any more now, but only for facts. Think harder about what 'explanation' means. It is not the same as telling Just-So stories that map reality onto things that human intuition can easily picture. As we have learned more about the world, the terms in which our explanations are expressed have become adapted more to the world as we have come to know it. Math is the language of nature, and so our theories are expressed in math. Math can explain just fine. But it is true that math is not about meaning, in the way that normal human languages are. The meaning of a purely mathematical model is only its results. If its results work, then it is a truth that they work. That is the truth we seek and find.
 
Right, but as I said: the fact that the simple model is useful is itself a solid truth that does not change even if a seemingly very different model is later found to be even more useful. So the issue is not only whether or not some statement is true. The problem also includes some subtlety in deciding just what the statement asserts. Several of the recent posts here are quite insightful about this, even the ones that disagree with each other: this business is partly tangled up with some merely trivial word games, but I think there is also something substantial and profound here.

In my little corner of science, we've dealt with these issues quite a lot, because I work on the foundations of quantum mechanics. We have already long since absorbed some of the basic concepts that have been raised here. What I mean is perhaps well illustrated with the Bohr atom. Bohr gave this picture of electrons as tiny little planets orbiting around the nucleus as a sun, together with an entirely arbitrary rule about which orbits were allowed. In fact the picture of the solar system atom was not really an active ingredient in his theory at all, though. If you wanted to guess the spectral lines of hydrogen, using Bohr's model, you would take your pencil and write a short page of equations, and at the end you would spit out some numbers. A lot of numbers, in a complex pattern, and they would all be awfully close to what you can measure with a sealed bulb of rarefied heated hydrogen.

While your hand wrote the equations to reach those fine numbers, there might be a little cartoon running through your mind, of tiny planets circling a tiny sun. But this would just be like an in-flight movie, keeping the other part of your brain busy while the working part pushed through the math. If you're not a trained physicist, the equations will be baffling and you'll cling to the picture of planets as the only thing in the model you can understand. To a physicist, however, the equations have a clear and familiar logic of their own, quite independent of the planet picture. Physicists can discard the planet picture entirely, with hardly a shrug, but keep the math. To us, the math is what Bohr's model really means. And the mathematical procedures of Bohr's atomic theory are retained in the fuller theory of quantum mechanics. It is a nice advanced lecture, to show how to find Bohr's theory within Schrödinger's.

Over the past 150 years or so, pictures like Bohr's little planet model have become less and less important in physics. More and more of our theories have had no such pictures at all attached to them, but have been presented in purely mathematical terms. A good first milestone in this "de-intuitioning" process in physics was probably the statement by Heinrich Hertz, "Maxwell's theory is Maxwell's system of equations," referring to the theory of classical electrodynamics that is still in use today. (This famous statement by Hertz is in a paper that was translated into English in a collected edition in 1893, but I haven't been able to track down the date when Hertz originally wrote it.) The process of abandoning intuitive pictures, except as crude pedagogical tools to be picked up and discarded at will, was essentially complete by the 1930s or so, I would say. Quantum mechanics and general relativity don't even try to be pictorial. Feynman introduced diagrams to quantum field theory, but these are literally just hieroglyphics. Each line and intersection stands directly for a certain mathematical expression, and means nothing else than that.

This is not the same as saying that we are not looking for explanations any more now, but only for facts. Think harder about what 'explanation' means. It is not the same as telling Just-So stories that map reality onto things that human intuition can easily picture. As we have learned more about the world, the terms in which our explanations are expressed have become adapted more to the world as we have come to know it. Math is the language of nature, and so our theories are expressed in math. Math can explain just fine. But it is true that math is not about meaning, in the way that normal human languages are. The meaning of a purely mathematical model is only its results. If its results work, then it is a truth that they work. That is the truth we seek and find.

No disagreement. However, what you describe is referred in Buddhist theory of the Two Truths as "relative truth". It is that truth which is dependent upon conditioning by phenomena. It is certainly true, as far as it goes, but it also certainly not all that can be said about truth. One obvious example: Plato's Theory of Ideas.

Science is a process for refining man's understanding of physical processes. As such it is a limited discipline, albeit one that has been extraordinarily successful in the last 3 centuries at improving mankind's understanding of physical aspects of his experience.


Mark A. Baker
 

Auditor's Toad

Clear as Mud
<snip>.

Science is a process for refining man's understanding of physical processes. As such it is a limited discipline, albeit one that has been extraordinarily successful in the last 3 centuries at improving mankind's understanding of physical aspects of his experience.


Mark A. Baker

Did you leave out mans best friend on purpose ?






Dogs do have a place in all that !
 

Auditor's Toad

Clear as Mud
Re: Is OT 8 now just so much water under the bridge ?

63 years and no clear or ot in sight yet.

That graph has a long flatline !

Would it be fair to say " Scn lacks stats " ?
 

Hatshepsut

Crusader
Science is a process for refining man's understanding of physical processes. As such it is a limited discipline, albeit one that has been extraordinarily successful in the last 3 centuries at improving mankind's understanding of physical aspects of his experience.


Mark A. Baker

"N mebbe with some s'periences, it's just too erudite to understand :confused2:

images


"Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A fella ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul - the one big soul that belongs to ever'body. Then...then, it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be ever'-where - wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad - I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too"

Character of Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

grapes-splsh.jpg


a bit 'pinko'....but it's a thought. :)
 

Mojo

Silver Meritorious Patron
No disagreement. However, what you describe is referred in Buddhist theory of the Two Truths as "relative truth". It is that truth which is dependent upon conditioning by phenomena. It is certainly true, as far as it goes, but it also certainly not all that can be said about truth. One obvious example: Plato's Theory of Ideas.

Science is a process for refining man's understanding of physical processes. As such it is a limited discipline, albeit one that has been extraordinarily successful in the last 3 centuries at improving mankind's understanding of physical aspects of his experience.


Mark A. Baker

Out gradient 'here'. Lol. Not counting that, nicely spoken.

Mojo
 

Auditor's Toad

Clear as Mud
Scientology & Klu Klux Klan are cut from the same cloth.

As time goes on, I see more & more how the Klu Klux Klan & Scientology do the same thing... promise wonderful, kind & noble things yet in reality do really nasty shit.

There will always be proponets of that kind of behavior, but, fortunately, few and -now becoming - far between.
 
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