Vedantic creationism

You have to be impressed by a guy who, by the time he's writing his second paragraph, can't even remember how he started his first.

Oh, and BTW, as a materialist I want to say sorry. It is all our fault.

Bob

That's quite a moderate view. take a look at this

You won't find any zeroes in the Vedas. The oldest known zero symbol in India is on a stone tablet from 876, when the written form of Vedas was already a thousand years old - and the oral form is far older.

BTW, the Mayas of Yucatan used zero much earlier.

but what have the Vedas done for us lately (apart from sectarian violence)?
The Aqueduct? (You knew some fool would post it!)

One of the things about the Vedantic religion is that it was born partly out of a reaction against the materialism known as Carvakism or Lokayata, which was very like Epicureanism. And like their western theist counterparts, religious authorities and their boosters have always used it as a punching bag for the ills of society.

While I have to admit not being intersted enough to do anything more than a superficial scan of this essay, I did notice that "life from life" was called a "profound" statement. I immediately wondered how Harvey's "omnia ex ovo" ("all from an egg") compares in profundity.

By the way (and I'm confident that John is aware of this), there is a lot more in the history of Indian mathematics than just the zero. There was considerable advance toward calculus, for example. And then there is the formalization of grammar by Panini.

And, as the example of Carvakism shows, there is a lot more depth and variety to Indian intellectual life than the "Eastern mysticism" image.

While the author claims the philospohy to be "vedantic", it appears to be the ISKCON version of Hindu philosophy (which was created explicitly to reduce Hinduism to a single book religion for countering Christian prosetylisation). The article is shabby, and makes rather excessive claims about things.

FWIW, Carvakism is a legitimate school of Vedantic philosophy (See Indian Philosophy, vol 2 by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. I don't have the books on hand, so I can't quote page numbers).

There are people who claim that the Vedas are the source of ultimate knowledge, but the vedas themselves make no such claim.

FWIW, I could read this as a nice poem, or I _could_ interpret it as a poem about the big bang: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv10129.htm

The vedas are not science though, they are philosophy and descriptions of how to live life. As philosophy, they are good, as science, they are not.

*chuckle*
Well, I'm sure you (ie. John) recall a certain t.o poster who pushed some sort of Hindu-ish creationism, and when challenged by you, delivered what is apparently the worst insult in his vocabulary: he accused you of sexual self-pleasuring.

The horror!

Old news, to those of us led by Sokal and Dennett to Meera Nanda. . . .

Some early quantum scientists (Schrodinger, Wigner, etc) were influenced by, or interested in Vedanta. Most likely the consciousness stuff, and what is "fundamental".

And Johannes Stark, 1919 Nobel laureate in physics, for whom the "Stark Effect" studied in intermediate quantum mechanics is named, was a Nazi.

That's very nice Blake, but we're talking about Vedanta. Did naziism influence or relate to Stark's work in the same way that Vedanta did to Schrodinger?

To be honest, not having a biography of Stark close at hand, I don't know. He certainly went out of his way to attack all theoretical physics as, in a word, "Jewish", which probably influenced his own career choices. On top of that, Nazi hostility to Jewish scientists, expressed both by the state and by scientists themselves, drove those Jewish intellectuals to places like the United States, with highly significant effects upon twentieth-century science and, arguably, the outcome of the Second World War.

So, yes, Stark's Nazism is certainly part of something very big and important.

Nor have I found any trustworthy resources on exactly how influential Vedanta and all that influenced Schrödinger and the others of his period who expressed an interest in it. Everything I've seen on that point so far has, quite painfully, played up the "mysterious ways of the Orient" to the exclusion of the actual physical problems which at that time had to be explained.

(A minor point: no one person invented quantum mechanics. In addition to Schrödinger, we had Heisenberg, Dirac, Jordan, Born, etc., etc. The differing approaches taken by the first two survive today in the "Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures", for which see Chapter 11 of Zwiebach's First Course in String Theory, to pick one reference among many.)

What matters most is not the fact that person X read some books and thought about Vedanta, not even that X might have been thinking about Vedanta while working on solutions to wave equations, but rather that the personal contemplations of X are completely irrelevant to understanding what quantum physics actually is.

but rather that the personal contemplations of X are completely irrelevant to understanding what quantum physics actually is.

How do you know that scientist X comtemplating the Vedas didn't lead, by some personal insight or association of some kind, to a scientific revelation? (Kekule's benzene-snake ring dream would be a classic example.) And despite our best efforts to keep science impersonal, are you so certain that individual personalities can ever be completely divorced from science? If Einstein had died at birth, our science might be a bit different. Someone else may have come up with similar insights, but from another perspective. Maybe we'd might still have relativity, but perceive it a bit differently.

In any case, some element of quantum mysticism (or whatever you want to call it) persists to this day. A substantial minority of physicists feel that decoherence does not solve the measurement problem. One of them (Leggett) predicts, "experimental work related to the measurement paradox will become progressively more sophisticated and eventually advance into the areas of the brain and of consciousness."

Back in the 1960's, high school teachers of ancient Greek history would tell us (Greek kids) that most of the Greek philosophers had slaves which brought to them their native philosophies. India was mentioned in particular. I guess national pride has silenced such extracurricular rumours nowadays. Credit should be given to where credit is due.

Anyway I like John's phrase "from the Greeks to the modern day". Makes me feel I came a long way.

How do you know that scientist X comtemplating the Vedas didn't lead, by some personal insight or association of some kind, to a scientific revelation?

How do you know that scientist X didn't receive an insight from the Invisible Pink Unicorn, working in tandem with the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Clearly, then, you cannot say that neither deity was involved in the beginnings of the theories of quantum mechanics.

How do you know that scientist X didn't receive an insight from the Invisible Pink Unicorn, working in tandem with the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Vedanta ideas about consciousness had some philosophical overlap with the state of QM at that time, or it wouldn't attracted the scientists that it did. Not sure about FSM or unicorns - maybe you can comment.

And then there is the formalization of grammar by Panini.

he developed them into a collectable set of stickers.

Bob
(currently looking for an inessive. I've got 15 articles I can swap.

I've always found the Vedas, and the Upanishads to absolutely fascinating mythology - much richer and more imaginative then the Hebrew myths. The "life from life" speculation is surprisingly parallel to some modern speculations about panspermia (e.g. arXiv:astro-ph/0504648 v1 29 Apr 2005
Lithopanspermia in Star Forming Clusters; Fred C. Adams and David N. Spergel). In addition, the life essence in the Vedas might be considered in the light of "Life as an Emergent" phenomena: perhaps most easily (although obviously simplistically) expressed as: "No atoms in my body are alive, yet I am alive." However, there are less simplistic reasons to consider emergence; for example P C W Davies in "Emergent Biological Principles and the Computational Properties of the Universe" (Sorry, I've lost the arXiv reference but you could try contacting Davies at pdavies@els.mq.edu.au.) argues that proteins, DNA etc have a greater "computational capacity" then the physical universe itself and therefore life could potentially contain/generate more information that the physical universe including all physical laws, thus life is an emergent phenomena!

The Vedas might well inspire various research paths, providing they are not considered to be valid descriptions of reality.

Davies at pdavies@els.mq.edu.au.) argues that proteins, DNA etc have a greater "computational capacity" then the physical universe itself and therefore life could potentially contain/generate more information that the physical universe including all physical laws,

Assuming that DNA carries any information at all (don't get John started), how could a subset of the universe have greater information capacity than the entire universe? Unless perhaps you are considering different points in time. Or maybe a top-down vs bottom-up universe (don't ask me to explain that - and it would kill emergence anyway).

Blake Stacey,
Old news, to those of us led by Sokal and Dennett to Meera Nanda...

...there is always an explanation to every problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong

One of the things about the Vedantic religion is that it was born partly out of a reaction against the materialism known as Carvakism or Lokayata, which was very like Epicureanism. And like their western theist counterparts, religious authorities and their boosters have always used it as a punching bag for the ills of society.

John that is an assertion that has no historical basis whatsoever. Zip. It is troublesome using terms founded in one tradition in another. "Vedantic religion" or "vedic Creationism" are simply meaningless. Check out "The Heathen in His Blindness". The entire book is available in pdf at colonialconsciousness.googlepages.com.

In the meanwhile check out this article by a physicist at
http://www.iucaa.ernet.in/~paddy/answer/article.htm

I've had the misfortune of sitting through an extramural lecture on Vedic Devolution organized by my university in India.

naiyayika, the above mentioned example is as clear an example of Vedic creationism that you'll get (google "Human Devolution" for the nasty details). It's disconcerting how so many people I speak to claim that parts of modern science, such as the speed of light in vacuum, the theory of special relativity, etc are present in the vedas.

Old news, to those of us led by Sokal and Dennett to Meera Nanda. . . .

Oh, and while talking about Meera Nanda, here's an article where she specifically talks about Vedic "Science". I think this is quite relevant to this post.

Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and `Vedic science'

An excerpt,

Indeed the BJP government can teach a thing or two to the creation scientists in the U.S. Creationists, old and new, are trying to smuggle in Christian dogma into secular schools in the U.S. by redefining science in a way that allows God to be brought in as a cause of natural phenomena. This "theistic science" is meant to serve as the thin-edge of the wedge that will pry open the secular establishment. Unlike the creationists who have to contend with the courts and the legislatures in the U.S., the Indian government itself wields the wedge of Vedic science intended to dismantle the (admittedly half-hearted) secularist education policies. By teaching Vedic Hinduism as "science", the Indian state and elites can portray India as "secular" and "modern", a model of sobriety and responsibility in contrast with those obscurantist Islamic fundamentalists across the border who insist on keeping science out of their madrassas. How useful is this appellation of "science", for it dresses up so much religious indoctrination as "secular education".

Parseval, that is a truly marvellous and insightful essay. I may have to get Nanda's book by interlibrary loan. Thanks for the link.

Parseval and John,

Meera Nanda apears to assume that her readers will stop at what she has written and take her at her word. I am amused that the two of you who should know better are behaving exactly as she wants you to.

All the best.