On the verge of it...
I feel like I am really close to writing a coherent post on why the meaning of life doesn't need to be driven by religion. This will answer many of the questions posed by people like xGH and some of his commenters.
Here are some teasers. In general the argument will be organic, leaning on sociological and anthropological studies of higher order mammals and behavior of "primitive cultures" in South America etc, untainted by millenia of civilization. Some sources: Mother Nature, The Language Instinct,...
It will attempt to show why the focus of much of the inquiries so far has been misguided, having always started with a top-down approach of coming up with a theory based on reasoning and then attempting to fit the world into it, vs a more bottom up approach of looking at the data and trying to find the best fitting explanation. This statement is fairly general, and will require quite a bit of qualification.
The soft scientists, like the philosphers and the sociologists, haven't yet learned from the hard scientists that their theories need to be more stochastic, looking at probabilities and statistics, quantum mechanical in a way. The relationship between random and deterministics, along the lines of what I found in this blog post by Brooklin Wolf.
The goal of this is not to forge some kind of magical weapon for religious sceptics to slay religion, yet perhaps this will play into the "G-d of the Gaps" argument. However, if this is how it must be, then it is how it must be.
What sucks about this is that I really don't have the philosophical cred to really prove that this theory has any merit, but at least writing it down will be the first step in a journey of a thousand miles.
Here are some teasers. In general the argument will be organic, leaning on sociological and anthropological studies of higher order mammals and behavior of "primitive cultures" in South America etc, untainted by millenia of civilization. Some sources: Mother Nature, The Language Instinct,...
It will attempt to show why the focus of much of the inquiries so far has been misguided, having always started with a top-down approach of coming up with a theory based on reasoning and then attempting to fit the world into it, vs a more bottom up approach of looking at the data and trying to find the best fitting explanation. This statement is fairly general, and will require quite a bit of qualification.
The soft scientists, like the philosphers and the sociologists, haven't yet learned from the hard scientists that their theories need to be more stochastic, looking at probabilities and statistics, quantum mechanical in a way. The relationship between random and deterministics, along the lines of what I found in this blog post by Brooklin Wolf.
The goal of this is not to forge some kind of magical weapon for religious sceptics to slay religion, yet perhaps this will play into the "G-d of the Gaps" argument. However, if this is how it must be, then it is how it must be.
What sucks about this is that I really don't have the philosophical cred to really prove that this theory has any merit, but at least writing it down will be the first step in a journey of a thousand miles.
posted by e-kvetcher at 9:15 AM
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