THE TEN NON-SCIENTIFIC COMMANDMENTS

The fading of ‘science’ allows creativity to soar.

1. The Ancient Greeks were wrong – the bewildering variety all around us can no longer comfortably be explained by unseen micro-billiard balls.  The ‘a-tom’, the ‘un-cuttable’, has been split – taking this naïve view with it, never to return.

2. In 1739, David Hume undermined our notion of cause and effect.  We ‘know’ a matchstick burns ‘because’ of  (by-the-cause-of) the solar energy in the wood.  The sun has energy, by-the-cause-of its thermonuclear reactions.  But all these links are (1) unreliable, as Hume observed, but also (2) there are too many such chains (multi-threads) and (3) none has a First Cause – absolute knowledge withers. 

3. In 1887, the speed of light ambushed us.  Unlike everything else, it doesn’t matter how fast its source, light always travels at the same speed –unpredictable, inexplicable, illogical, and therefore utterly beyond our ken.

4. In 1900 Planck concluded that energy travelled in packages, not waves. Thus like the Royal Mail, you can never predict when the next parcel will arrive.  Even calling these entities wave/particles leaves them indelibly Uncertain.

5. Each radioactive atom has its own half life, but which atom is going to radiate next, is utterly and forever indeterminate – i.e. we have no way of knowing.

6. Dark Matter and Dark Energy constitute the vast majority of our cosmos.  We could be full of them, with no conceivable  way of telling if we were.

7 Hawking Radiation is unworldly. There’s no such thing as a vacuum – particles and anti-particles appear and disappear all the time – why or when or how is unknowable.  If this happens near a Black Hole, one is sucked in, while the other ‘escapes’, causing the Hole itself to shrink over time.

8 Wittgenstein failed. He trusted words to be infallible, but none are even reliably definable.  This is the Wittgenstein Fallacy. Pain, fear and intent are the most important of all words – maximum meaning – zero definition.  Quakerism’s aversion to written creeds is a godsend.

9 Random Control Trials distort reality away from intent by squeezing our multi-causal, multi-threaded world through the eye of a mono threaded needle.  It’s so our mono-focussed reasoning can begin to cope – but the cost is too high – we lose out on the significance of intent.

10 ‘Nentropy’ – all non-living systems decay, their entropy (disorganisation) inexorably and always increases.  Negative entropy – nentropy – reverses this, but only in living things, until they die, when they too disintegrate.  While alive, we can deploy our intent – whatever that is.

NOTE – these points were all valid before I was born, and will remain so long after.  It’s quite a wrench to concede just how ignorant we are, and always will be – but as any good engineer will tell you – do the best you can with what you’ve got.  And in this case we have the miracle of life which, if we act responsibly, we can fill with delight and joy – rare enough in today’s conventional wisdom.