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Benjamin Cohen is an Asst. Professor of Science, Tech., and Society at the University of Virginia. He studies the place of S & T in environmental history, policy, and ethics. He also writes other stuff.
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Category: Links to interesting sites and discussion of them • The Art/Science (Non?)Divide Building
Posted on: August 7, 2008 12:00 PM, by Benjamin Cohen
From friend-of-The-World's-Fair WJG comes a link to The Grass Seed, a graphic story/comic strip by Claudia Davila at Ballyhoo Stories.
Read on from the link above. It's a five-sheet story. A meditation, in part, on embodied knowledge, sensory limitations, or the limits of knowledge. One composed from a view other than that of the practicing scientist. You'll have your own take.
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Comments
I know about aleph-sub-one, by definition unmeasurable. I didn't come to understand it by sensory evidence. I resent the attempted use of a tragic car accident to turn an otherwise sophomoric little musing into propaganda.
Posted by: speedwell | August 7, 2008 5:06 PM
It's a meditative perspective, to some degree.
I appreciate the sense of wonder.
What it has to do with science I am not sure.
I think we have limited understanding and we understand stuff according to our nature. A dog or a cat understands their existence in accordance with their nature, the perceptions, the way their physiology filters perceptions, and the way they are geared to interpret their perceptions. Humans, being animals, are in the same boat. The difference is of degree, not kind. We are animals from a certain kind of environment, and our senses perceive certain, limited, ranges of experience, and our minds think within certain parameters.
My belief is that we don't experience a large portion of the existence. Instruments can help us peer into realms beyond our normal experience. It's good that we strive for knowledge and seek to understand our existence.
But I think anyone who thinks we have accomplished more than just scratching the surface is naive.
The existence has a lot we haven't seen, and can't even conceptualize, just as your cat cannot conceive of realities that seem important, - or heck, just obvious - to humans.
Our sun has another five billion years before it dies. What will we evolve into in that time, and what will our level of understanding and exploration of the existence be in say, two or three billion years?
But I don't rue the instruments as in the cartoon. Instruments are great things. Don't knock the instruments and techniques of our exploration just because we don't have all the big answers yet.
Meditation provides a particular kind of experience and a particular type of wisdom. Though its arguable whether the wisdom is different, scientific explorations with its instruments and calculations provides a very different type of knowledge.
In my view, both are needed. It is not a question of one or the other, but of using our minds and bodies, our instruments and our calculations. Whether or not there is a God, we have a side of us that seeks out beauty and meaning in life. Qualities like compassion, a sense of beauty, a striving to find out what's true about our existence must be developed along with intellectual knowledge.
Posted by: yogi-one | August 8, 2008 3:28 AM