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Classic Books of Science?
half_cocked_jack writes "What are the classic books of science from throughout history? I'm currently reading On the Origin of Species on my Kindle 2, and it's sparked an interest in digging up some of the classic books of science. I'm looking for books from the ancient and medieval worlds and books from the golden ages of scientific discovery. Books like: Galileo's The Starry Messenger; Newton's Principia; Copernicus's On The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres; and Faraday's The Chemical History of a Candle. I know that I can likely find these books in a format I can use on my Kindle (found a few on Gutenberg already), but what I need is a checklist of these books to guide my reading. Suggestions?"
And you would replace the fundie influence with a scientism that says humans are nothing but collections of atoms. That all religion is self-delusion and inarguably bad. That science is the only domain of knowledge.
I see your straw men got you modded insightful. I'm afraid mine will just get me set on fire.
Your brain is not a computer.
My God, why do I even try?
I am not arguing for fundamentalist influence in education. I am cautioning you who would take the opposite extreme of scientism and parade it as the hallmark standard of human existence (as if there could be such a thing). You have already misread me.
Well, until someone can prove that one or more gods actually exist, self-delusion seems to be a good contender for "best explanation", though others, such as fraud and greed, also work.
I didn't come here to debate religion. The fact that you are apparently unaware of atheistic religions and that you are blind to the real and positive influence that religion has had on the lives of many individuals shows me that you are unprepared for such a debate anyway. Given your displayed email address I should assume you are simply trolling, but you've given me a vehicle to defend my original remarks and I am going to make use of it.
last I heard, people did believe that humans are collections of atoms
I did not say that we were not collections of atoms. My exemplary straw man said that we are "nothing but" collections of atoms, and it is an important difference. We think. We feel. We strive for purposes that are real whether they are God-given or self-invented. I find it hard to believe that this element of human life would be eradicated en masse (though it is routinely ignored, especially when science is in the room), which made it a good counterpoint to your original straw man of fundamentalist education leading to dinosaurs roaming the '60s.
and science certainly has a better record of imparting knowledge than religion.
People tied shoe laces before we developed knot theory. More often than not, scientific analysis comes after someone simply doing something that works. This is not to diminish the role of such analyses or the improvements that they have given us, but we used gravity as a tool long before Newton. Knowledge is only useful as it is applied, meaning that there is a great deal more to existence than knowledge; namely, experience. Knowing and doing are two vastly different ways of understanding: ask any geek with a vast porn collection and no sexual experience. Why isn't the knowledge good enough for him?
The rest of your reply is nonsense about Biblical nonsense, the stuff that only fundamentalists and their polar opposites argue about. The rest of us (of all walks and creeds) view the Bible with widely varying degrees of respect but are very aware that it is an old and organic set of documents touched by many hands and not a direct download from God. In short, you're wasting your time and mine on that subject.
To be clear, should you or anyone else care to respond, I am not a fundamentalist of any stripe, and I have zero interest in Religion 101 debates. I responded in a failed effort to stop the Slashdot groupthink from asserting itself, trying to get some people to think about the kinds of posts that deserve upmods instead of just reacting with "fundies bad and rediculous [sic] == insighful." I thought if I was really lucky, some person out there might think carefully about what he believes, be it about God or the Singularity or really how he came to any particular belief, and by doing so improve his understanding of both himself and of his belief.
That is the answer to my opening question. I try because I know that there are others like me who do our best to sidestep mutual incomprehension, to push for a better standard of meaningful discussion, and to be open to examining (and reexamining!) things in detail rather than repeating the same pre-packaged rants and aphorisms to anyone who doesn't look like they belong in "our camp." There is more to life than getting people to agree with you.
Obviously my first message failed to reach you, at least. Maybe this one will do better.
Your brain is not a computer.
This is the best response you've written in this thread so far, and I will stay true to my word and converse as we now have something of substance to discuss. I apologize for the length, but some things cannot be said briefly.
There is no "greater power", no "meaning to life" except that which we choose to make it. Anyone who claims otherwise has to show at least SOME proof that there is "more" - not just argue that there must be more, which is what you do when you claim that we are more than just a collection of atoms.
...
When you get down to it, we're just an organization of atoms into molecules into cells into tissues into people; our conscience is a by-product of chemical reactions and electrical impulses, probably with effects at the quantum level. There's no need for more than that to explain everything we are, and everything we feel, how we came to be, and there is no hidden meaning to life and the universe, not even the number 42.
The fact that we can choose to make our lives have meaning is what I am getting at. When I say that we are more than just a collection of atoms, I am not speaking of a magical spiritual substance. To give an example, if you have a spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, child, or best friend, you do not think of him in terms of all the chemical processes that make up his being; you think of him in terms of his personality, tastes, shared experiences, etc. Yes, it is very true that all of these things are possible because of his atomic makeup and chemical interactions (and even solely caused by them if you're a determinist), but those are quite peripheral to his value as a human being whom you know and love. In other words, there is a vast difference between explaining the mechanism behind how we feel something and the act of feeling something, and learning the mechanism does not invalidate the feeling or make it less real. If this were not the case, love and friendship would by necessity be self-delusion and "inarguably bad." There is no place for personality in chemistry, and to quote Jacques Barzun, "nor does science touch human beings directly through affirmations about ethics, religion, art, politics, history, and the cosmos--affirmations that must be believed and felt before they can affect life."
Let me give a much simpler example that may clarify my point: an analog wall clock. The wall clock on its own, if shown to a stranger who has never encountered our system of hours and minutes for measuring time, will appear as a circle of evenly spaced, unique squiggles with two (or three) sticks anchored at the center and rotating around it at different speeds. You or I look at the wall clock and almost instantaneously know "it is four thirty-five." This is most obviously a self-made meaning; it is not inherent in the wall clock or else the stranger would have grasped the same meaning. That the meaning is made by us does not make it any less real, otherwise it would have no effect on anything when in reality we see that it is 4:35 and run out of the room because we are late for an appointment. An interesting thought involves the trustworthiness of this wall clock: if we know or suspect that that clock is set to the wrong time, the thought changes from "it is four thirty-five" to "that clock reads four thirty-five." The level of meaning has gone from a broad statement about the current time to a narrow statement about the wall clock, yet both are true statements about reality that depend on some meaning other than what is provided by physics and chemistry.
(Incidentally, you and I are both in the minority that hasn't written off a quantum component of consciousness.)
Religion gives them a purpose. It's a crutch; some people need a crutch, and for them, fine. However, they have no right to ask the rest of us to accomodate their false reality. For too long, we've done so, in the name of "religious tolerance", and we've seen it subvert national and foreign policy. We've seen it di
Your brain is not a computer.