Rational vs. magical thought

I watch many science podcasts by serious scientists, steeped in the scientific method. The best astound me with the rigour of their analysis, by how hard they push themselves to undermine their own hypotheses, looking for flaws in data or methodology. Only if they can't overturn their own findings do they claim they have something. I appreciate this approach; it leaves no room for cognitive bias, in particular wishful thinking.

One can only grow spiritually by understanding science as far as possible – not just science at our human scale (limited by our 0.8x10² years lifespan and our five senses), but at the subatomic and galactic scale.

Here, we can either posit that our subjective conscious experience is merely a cosmic accident, an epiphenomenon of evolution, a by-product of abiogenesis on our planet – or something deeper... something metaphysical.

I favour the latter worldview.

Building one’s own worldview, something that ought to happen spontaneously as we grow, requires its constant exposure to strong counter-arguments – ‘steel-man’ (as opposed to ‘straw-man’) arguments.

Our minds fall into two flavours – those open to the magical, and those rooted in reality.

Philosophy appeals to me because of its ability to straddle the two.

“God is dead”, declared Nietzsche in 1885. God was replaced by Matter and Reality. The reality described by classic Newtonian physics – cause and effect. ‘Every action has an opposite and equal reaction’. And so, by the early 20th century, God was no longer required to explain that which science had already explained. Physics, it was said, was only a handful of equations from solving everything.

But then along came quantum mechanics. And after two and half centuries, uncertainty returned. The Cosmos was no longer a series of billiard-balls predictably bumping into each other. 

Is an electron a particle or a wave? You need an observer to find out. When will a nucleus with a given half-life decay? It's a matter of probability, not a certainty. More and more questions began to appear as the 20th century progressed. The observable universe is made up of many galaxies, not just our Milky Way. The observable universe had a finite beginning – the Big Bang. What happened before? There’s no scientific consensus. Galaxies should be flying apart. Yet they’re not. Why not? Dark matter. What’s that? We can neither see it nor measure it. The Universe should be collapsing in upon itself. Yet it isn’t. Why not? Dark energy. What’s that? We can neither see it nor measure it.

And so we’re left with a host of questions that rational science cannot currently answer.

What’s left? Our deepest intuition. 

Should I posit that dark matter and dark energy are ‘fields of consciousness’, I would be mocked by scientists. It’s nothing more than my intuition. There's no maths involved. I have no formula to cover a blackboard. But then scientists can conjecture as much as they like, and still be as far away/or as close to the truth, as I am.

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