The Science Delusion - Rupert Sheldrake

[sMartins]

The problem here, from what I'm seeing, is a language barrier ... there is lot of confusion about what is rational and what is irrational.
Irrational is not only a bad word, love and beauty are irrational also, not only death and destruction .. to give you a brief idea, irrational is usually identified with the gods or the sacred.
What you need to understand first is we set the rules for rationality that these days we have all internalized and we don't even think about them anymore, we just use them.
We cannot even talk about the irrational, cause to talk we use a rational system, that is the language ..... can you see it? (that's why they use gods or inexplicable things, don't use the Lord's name in vain)
Irrationality is simply how things are, the rationality is the construct that we added, we crafted it for our own convenience.

[MagicManICT]

Irrational is literally the opposite of rational--that which doesn't make logical sense.

Discussions of deity, religion, and such fall outside of what is rational and irrational because we have no way of knowing what ancient man's experiences were. Certain people have taken this to mean that the gods couldn't have existed, and therefore religion is just a hoax. That is itself a fallacy in the assumption that prior observations of experiences are all wrong. (They probably are, but who are we to say that they are just on face value because it doesn't fit the logic of what we expect?)

[sMartins]

It's not like that, you are trying to rationalize the irrational, it's not just the opposite of rational in philosophy .... that is just the common meaning we are used to, and of course make sense that way .... irrational doesn't make any sense, it's everything and nothing, the lack of any direction, good and bad at the same time, straight and opposite .... nobody knows, nobody can tell, we cannot understand it, we can just feel it.
For example, that time when you was so happy (or sad) for something and so you wanted to tell everybody what happened, but while you were speaking you realized that was not that funny talking about it, you were not really able to express yourself about that feeling just with the language. That is the irrational.
If I have to choose a word, I'd say the "indistinct".
Edit:
And also it's our specificity, all of us ... if we were only rational we would be all the same, like machines.
We all knows what we are talking about but we cannot name it.

[mvgulik]

Escape, Cave, Shadows ...

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O wait, wrong subject.

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[shubla]

For those that dont know, I think that this is from Game of Life.

[sMartins]

Escape, Cave, Shadows ...

[1]

O wait, wrong subject.

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ehhheheh , thx a lot, that explains much better than a lot of words.

[Trappin]

Richard Feynman
Take the world from another point of view
Part 1/4

https://youtu.be/PsgBtOVzHKI

I linked an introduction to the man. Why not start from the beginning? In later videos unconnected to the video series linked here Feynman uses ordinary words, but from that palate of common words he paints complex impressionistic concepts. Watch all of his videos, not just this intro stuff.

[Jalpha]

Medicine is not a hard science. Math is. There is no alternative to the addition operation for example. Different cultures throughout history have come up with exact same mathematical rules totally independent of each other. That's because math isn't invented, it's discovered. If we discover intelligent extraterrestrial life, it's going to use those same basic rules of mathematics as foundation for all their science.

The same value can be reached via a more complicated formula without using addition, I'm fairly certain. So there is an alternative. When I look at the pages of symbols mathematicians use to explain their theories it looks to me like we are overcomplicating what should be very simple.

I find it highly likely that any extraterrestrial species would use a radically different system of performing sums. As someone else said we created the rules and that defines and limits our perceptions of what is and is not possible.

[MagicManICT]

When I look at the pages of symbols mathematicians use to explain their theories it looks to me like we are overcomplicating what should be very simple.

What they're doing is taking a very complicated thought and distilling it into a simple symbol. Anyone with a knowledge of algebra knows that 10^9 = 10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10. Anyone with a knowledge of calculus knows certain shorthand symbols (such as integrals) that can be expressed algebraically, but it's much easier to write a single symbol. Compound that over and over and you get some very odd shorthand for some very complex concepts. Looks like chicken scratch to the non-math guy, but it's the "easy way" to explain a concept. The problem is you have to take the hard road to learn how to read it.

[sMartins]

...we created the rules

And it's not even that long time ago, since Greeks pretty much, Aristotle. We were not thinking like we do now before Greeks.
But for example we don't share the same idea of time that Greeks had, cause we are Christians, for us time is linear(Eschatologic), for Greeks it was cyclic, and if you look at recent science discoveries a cyclic time makes much more sense than a linear one .