complexitystudies

There’s a blog entry at FXQI by William Orem nicely summing up a few points which are important to me: FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, News

First of all, much of confusion in Western Philosophy and thinking can be dissolved by looking beyond our culture - in that way we can see what are only our biases and where invariants of nature begin:

Will writes:

I spoke with an Indian philosopher a few years ago who argued compellingly that we western thinkers are all hopelessly confused in our ontology by the simple fact that it is possible to employ “be verbs” in English without any object in the predicate. (Hang on – it’s painless.) We can say “the peach trees are,” for example, and stop there, without having to say *what* they are: green, fresh, tall, over here. Such a construction isn’t possible in all languages, and it may not be irrelevant. The tacit implication is that “the peach trees are” has meaning, which, when you think about it, cannot be demonstrated; and inasmuch as language is naturally assumed by speakers to reflect reality, the second implication is that “are” is therefore a quality among other qualities.

What I didn’t know was that the late pope John Paul II opposed certain scientific investigations:

After all, it was only a few years ago that Pope John Paul II warned Stephen Hawking against studying the beginning of the universe, as this region was thought to be off-limits to mere mortals. Sinister consequences have often been dreamed to lurk behind the limits of the known, and surely the Big Bang is the ultimate limit. If not impious, asking what came before the Beginning must at least be hopeless, as nonsensical as hunting for those married bachelors.

But the history of the scientific enterprise has been one of relentless expansion – not just of knowledge, but of the horizons of knowledge. Thanks to people such as Erickcek, partly thanks to sites such as this one, the question of what that “nothingness” that came before everything actually was — what nature looked like in the time before Time — is becoming a little more commonplace.

The press entry of the Hawking/Pope exchange can be found here.

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