How do you disprove physics?

I wouldn't say so. It is consistent to say we don't see what we don't look upon.

What was your purpose for investigation?

 

You could say that it was because I had a problem with Christianity, yet my own mortality/immortality was an issue with me. I remember being 8 years old in a class for baptism (I was raised in a Christian home) and struggling with the judgmental aspect of the religion. A year or so later, my mother caught me bowing down to a Ho Tei (Buddhist) statue---I wanted to see what would happen. I remember a Sunday school class when I was 12 about the early Christians----my reaction to the dogmatic lessons was to spend the class drawing in the lesson book---snipers, exploding airplanes, spiders, leeches, I turned the people into morbid sickly things, or mortally wounded victims, bleeding profusely or even with protruding organs from deep wounds. I still have the book today, and I still laugh at those pictures----some of them were cleverly funny.

But what was the real purpose of investigation? In many ways I felt driven to it----it wasn't like an obsession that I was compelled to do no matter how much I hated it, but it was an obsession of sorts----I was always fascinated with the subject, but at the same time, I wanted the fascination to be genuine----I never wanted to chase after illusion, nor did I want to be someone else's pawn, manipulated or scammed for their own political or wealth goals. Somewhere in the first half to mid 1980's I decided that I would never find the proof. Life was exciting, I was making tons of money. I was creating my own sphere of influence. Then came my own hubris---just as I was to be catapulted to my moments of real fame--where I should have reaped the benefits of a very accurate prediction of the crash of the Tokyo Market. After what I considered, a lucky life, I was thrust, almost overnight, from the top of the heap, to the very bottom. It had a lot to do with a manipulative and vengeful ex-wife, and a very insecure and jealous mistress turned wife.

But it seemed to me that not only was there possibly no God, but if there was, I had little to do with him. Physical reality was concrete, and empirical, and all that I had done, I had achieved myself, by the exercise of my own existential freedom. All the bad that happened was again the result of exercising my own existential freedom---there was no miracle waiting to save the day. I had almost achieved a second fortune, but then found myself stuck in the Philippines broke as could be, trying to support a family---I had lost most everything, my wife was unable to pursue her once lucrative acting career (she was a TV actress in Japan), our Philippine business turned from making money to the victim of scams and breaches of contracts, I had acquired adult onset asthma, and had lost a lot of weight due to a bad bout with diarrhea. The immigration laws had changed in the US requiring an extensive FBI/Interpol/etc background check for all immigrants, and due to a clerical error, and the smearing of my wife's fingerprints---my family's immigration paperwork to the US fell through the cracks, and our ability to come to the US (and for me to return with my family) became a state of limbo lasting for several years. Every day became a struggle just to put food on the table. My wife's devout praying and doing the rosary produced no effect.

At that point in particular---there was nothing for me to search for. I had searched it all before. I was an individual, and I had no desire to be a pawn for some big religious institution, or to trust in something that had no impact on my life. Life after death became something I just didn't deal with-----until the strange and instant healing of my stepdaughter, with the even stranger explanation that her soul was lost in the spirit world.

But while that healing blew my mind, the real reason I got back onto the search happened after our immigration problems were solved by a Colorado Senator---coincidentally a Native American Senator---and I returned home with my family. It wasn't the fact that I was able to come home----that was still the result of my choices and actions---the exercise of my own existential freedom. But a month or so after returning home, for the first time in over a decade, I actually experienced fall, and a snowfall. (Even in Tokyo, I never actually experienced a fall season---as most of my life in Japan in the late 80's and early 90's was in a concrete jungle, often at or near the top of a high-rise, or several floors under the ground, passing from station to station in a subway. It had even been years since I spent any time, especially during the winter, in Western or Northern Japan where the snow fell.) But here in the US, I watched the leaves turn. And then my family took us up to their condo in Breckenridge---just as a heavy snow, the first of the season---hit. Coincidentally the night before leaving to Breckenridge, I ran across a couple of old haiku in Japanese that I had composed years ago.

So after so many years, the purpose, or at least, the reason for restarting the investigation: turning leaves, haiku, a snowfall.

And once again it was an obsessive fascination to seek the truth.

 

You could argue that I found my truth, because I searched so hard for it, and it was what I was looking for. I would not disagree with you, but I would point out that I was looking for truth---and for many years as increasingly crazy things would happen---i focused more on disproving them than I did accepting them. I turned to Jungian psychology and the idea of strange synchronicities playing off of archetypes within my own subconscious mind.

 

That wouldn't be my argument but i am glad you let me in on it. As to focusing on disproving that never occurred to me not that I wouldn't question assertions if they were beyond my experience.I just never felt I really had the goods until I could have an authentic association to compare it to. That comes from the experience of embellishing accounts when I was a young teenager and being found out. i learned a difference between being cool and acting cool when your not.

I would say that the respect they accorded you in allowing you to participate was received in kind. In so doing we appreciate with sincerity what is there. In so many venues we are faced with conflicting paradigms for attention.

 

That explanation is significant. We all develop a symbolism that is locally impressed so we comprehend things in different terms but we can learn each others language.

I had a similar on and off and on again kind of journey in the pursuit of truth and similarly it had it's origins in christian hypocrisy. I came to the church initially as young boy I would say 8 as well. I was sent not because of belief at home but because those at home didn't feel or demonstrate they had the capacity to look out for my welfare and i was told I was sent because this is what people in the larger world do. They were shy people who kept to themselves and I never saw any neighbor or stranger come to visit that wasn't regarded with suspicion. I didn't understand the tension. Any way I was immediately impressed by a children's song stating that jesus loved the little children all the children of the world. I never lost that inspiration but I kept quiet about it while i lived with hardness of heart from my dearest relations. I would try and preform a balancing act of appeasement until one day I figured out that I was damned if I did and damned if I didn't and that is when I began to think there must be a better way and if not then life is not worth it to me. I don't want to be damned in life but free to live. Turns out the truth sets us free from every demeaning verdict.

 

Yes---I must definitely say that the message of love never left me, despite the judgmental and contradictory messages that I had trouble with. In my most agnostic point of being, if there was no God, then the love became something we needed to hold for each other---as in the existentialism of Sartre.

 

Yes---I can certainly relate to that----all the embellished Bullshit and the disengenuity is what made it so difficult for me to accept what was happening to me, and why I was so dead set on denying everything. I can certainly understand how so many who rebel and reject religion, after seeing all the BS and manipulation, hold so much animosity towards it. I don't like being lied to. Discovering the lies closes off so much of the irrational realities of life to us.

By the same token, I don't expect people to believe any or all of the crazy things that happen to me. Before that tail on the hill I have written about---I wouldn't have believed any of this----and I tried over and over to figure out how that did not happen.

 

When I look back at my youth, I see someone feeling around in the dark. Most, if not all, of the adults who surrounded me were also feeling around in the dark. They were hypocrites, but it was unintentional. The darkness they were feeling their way around in kept them from being aware of even their own hypocrisy. Their fear of the unknown was sincere and not contrived, and their illogical solution to this problem of fear was the projection of, and belief in, something even more oppressing and dangerous than death itself. And that something was God--a glorified, souped-up version of the male ego who held the keys to Heaven and Hell--God the ally! I latched onto their projection because my ego saw the wisdom in such a move.

I can't really say that I pursued truth. It was more like a long succession of lies exposed and then forsaken, clearing the way to see what is. I'm not sure whether I'm finding truth, or it's finding me. Either way, I believe it's the result of my intention. And the more I think about it, the more I see that it's all inside me . . . because it is me, and it's you.

 

I agree with you storch about hypocrisy being unintentional and with your comments about the darkness. If the light in you be darkness, then how great the darkness.

There is an old russian story that i'm sure I'm not going to relay entirely accurately not speaking russian but we will get the gist of it.

Seems a sorcerer with a ravenous taste for mutton cast a spell on a flock of sheep because he was lazy and didn't want to go collect them to eat because they had a tendency to wander far and wide of their own. So he made the sheep think that they were any kind of animal that ate meat, something other than sheep and he was the one with the supply of meat and as they ran to dinner they didn't realize they were consuming themselves.

 

What an excellent story.

Now I'm going to have to rethink my attitude toward russians.

 

lol, and if you watched Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, you might find exactly that; gravity, for all it's surety, may just be an illusion.

Why be so black and white? We have a whole universe to work with, an incomprehensible amount of mystery, questions, and possibilities

 

The great thing is, you don't have to.

All you have to do is bluster about it, and take the fox news tack: say shit - it doesn't have to be true or credible, it doesn't even have to SOUND true or credible, it just has to be noise. Somehow, it still acts in the minds to many to paint a picture of a debate or discussion with two legitimate sides.

"Science is all lies and has no hard evidence, unlike the truth of religion!"

Are you convinced? Doesn't matter, that bullshit still throws a monkey wrench in any legitimate discussion, and drags it off course so you have to argue with ridiculous shit.

It's like the argumentative version of a five year old you don't know running up and kicking you in the shins and stealing your wallet. Maybe there's no real chance of losing it.... but you still have to demean yourself chasing down a fucking child for what's yours, and everyone's outraged when you grab the little shit.

 

If they were my kids I would engage them in their game and ask for my wallet back once we had become friends. No demeaning assaults on anyone's sense of decorum.

 

Are you lied to? I don't think it is possible to hide reality except through imagination. For one you imagine people have a level of integrity to live up to. You are the only measure. As living creature we need so many calories to preserve integrity.

 

What the heck; still stuck here, agreed you are led in you family as well as I for the judgment at schooling. However, according to such middle ages thinkers as St. Thomas Acquinas there are two and solely two Revelations for the truth of physical change. Divine revelation obeys the imagination from literal and constantly improving Word; maybe it doesn't happen, our love of being animals endowing with rational thinking. But alternatively revealed is the integrity by the explanation from without: coming to be and passing away. The fix is for the mind unrevealed of virtue; the virtue is the Knowledge you learn. I don't know. It could not be otherwise that religions occur and persist to motivate people for or against science.

 

As far as being stuck I have no desire to go anywhere. Rationality comes when belief coincides with reason to believe or actions conform to reason for action. No confirmation can overwhelm a lack of consideration, blessed he who believes who has not seen. Knowledge is being shared. We become familiar as we grow regardless whether we collect facts or not. We are both teaching and learning without ceasing as we find our way in life but in-formation is never outside.

As to thomas aquinas you know how I feel about academics and dominican order for that matter. I'm a middle aged thinker too, the thought comes first. Gravity is an intent. We are inherently devoted, godly inclined. The reason for religion is the conviction we are not godly endowed. If you know you are inclined because you are a true reflection then there is no need of religion only good works. We are created as creation of and to create the good and the holy.

 

Come on. Who can do good works from the material realmed cause to the final Cause of belonging to the support of one's tradition? These are extraordinary people from work at learning goodness and what Goodness IS.

THe morals of the French Revolution were alive for the upper and middle classes. ANd there were also awful scoundrels. THEY WERE allowed to exist then for initial Material Causes which the Final Cause really, really fell misfit for.

 

There are men. Sometimes a man is a scoundrel sometimes the same man is a saint. "Great men do not do so much great things as great things happen around them" Having and being are the same, everything else is contestable. Do men go to war for good reasons? I think it is because they think they must not knowing what they have. Tradition does not replace or change condition nor can it. It is shadow boxing with a past that doesn't exist. Collecting many seeds is a way to grasp tradition in a useful way and seeing them grow is a work of seasoning. We are the salt of the world.

 

Don't get me wrong about Thomas. We are all enlightened. Thomas was also affiliated.

 

I'm currently reading a book called Farewell To Reality which so far makes a compelling argument that a lot of the popular theoretical physics stuff such as Multiverses and the Holographic Principle should not even technically be considered science. For instance if you take these statements you made below...

and apply to them to say the multiverse for instance, The book claims that there is no observational or empirical evidence for something like a multiverse, so it can't really be tested. The argument is something to the effect that all measurements for such a concept of a multiverse, will to this point, necessarily come from our universe therefore negating the very premise of the multiverse. The 'reasoned' ideas for such notions as a multiverse come based off other concepts with shaky grounding such as String Theory. So what we have is speculative theories being built off speculative theories to rectify particular holes in the initial speculative theory and then these theories are being presented in scientific magazines and articles. However I do know more recently than this book was written, that there is a claim made in an article of supposed evidence for a multiverse, but that may be part of the authors warning, to be wary of some of the popular articles on such concepts, as he suggests they are presenting concepts as facts without really any supporting scientific evidence.

So it seems that if some of these concepts are rather nebulous and not subject to strict scientific tests, then religious viewpoints could easily dismiss some of the concepts of physics or perhaps even integrate them into their own paradigm.