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The easiest way to test the theory is to go into the unknown and find out for yourself. You can walk into life situations with a predisposition (which is a usef

The easiest way to test the theory is to go into the unknown and find out for yourself. You can walk into life situations with a predisposition (which is a useful skill to have) and then see the feedback that you get in return. By and large, to really have success with this is to learn meditation (not master it by any means), because even basic meditation will naturally provide insight that is outside of the scope of the mental framework you are accustomed to as a mind. Even in science, there is a lot of focus on what happens to the person on a physical and a mental level, but little on what happens outside of it, which can only be learned by being quiet/still. I like your reply and it is balanced, and I am not sure that I could reply to it in any other way than I did now. My personal experiences transcend a lot of such discussion, even what I am saying myself, but those are the elements of being human, being bound by something. I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution!

Nevermark 2y ago
I am not exactly sure what you are saying! :) My response is staying with science, which just means staying with evidence and reasoning that avoids our unbounded ability to fool ourselves. I.e. repeatable experiments by others, tested model predictions, mathematical and statistical checks, etc. That is all science and math are. An accumulation of tools and systems that improve the reliability of our thinking. They increasingly help us mitigate our exceptional talent for fooling ourselves. If we find another way to "know", it will get included into science too. I am a big believer that our personal experience and relationship with life is improved by meditation, staring by learning to quiet our minds and focus/refocus on one simple thing at a time (breathing for instance, or nothing). Then use our ability to focus to mindfully listen to our bodies, then our feelings, then our beliefs, our values, our situations, finally what it all means. But our minds/brains don't internally track providence of information. What is real and beyond us, vs. what we imagine or want. It is all mixed up in our heads, thus the ease with which we trick ourselfs, and others. I am a big believer in imagination, to the sky and beyond anything we see. But the very unboundedness of imagination is why just because we can imagine something, and it seems right, fulfills some deep balance, and seems vivid, desirable, and makes clear sense that must be true, ... that doesn't actually make it true, real, or coherent, not even a little bit. > I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution! Evolution created multicellular creatures, nervous systems, and brains, which in turn have created a species/society that is actively searching for knowledge and putting it to work for survival at higher orders of organization. I.e. science, economics, politics, technology, etc. Limited resources (at any given time) continue to drive us to solve new problems and learn more, to continue surviving even as we complicate and expand the environment we survive in. So in that sense, life is already moving past biological chemistry into other substrates, and we are already learning to harness the arrangement of atoms to go further. And eventually, perhaps, harness the fine structure of space-time, and beyond.

Nevermark 2y ago

I am not exactly sure what you are saying! :) My response is staying with science, which just means staying with evidence and reasoning that avoids our unbounded ability to fool ourselves. I.e. repeatable experiments by others, tested model predictions, mathematical and statistical checks, etc. That is all science and math are. An accumulation of tools and systems that improve the reliability of our thinking. They increasingly help us mitigate our exceptional talent for fooling ourselves. If we find another way to "know", it will get included into science too. I am a big believer that our personal experience and relationship with life is improved by meditation, staring by learning to quiet our minds and focus/refocus on one simple thing at a time (breathing for instance, or nothing). Then use our ability to focus to mindfully listen to our bodies, then our feelings, then our beliefs, our values, our situations, finally what it all means. But our minds/brains don't internally track providence of information. What is real and beyond us, vs. what we imagine or want. It is all mixed up in our heads, thus the ease with which we trick ourselfs, and others. I am a big believer in imagination, to the sky and beyond anything we see. But the very unboundedness of imagination is why just because we can imagine something, and it seems right, fulfills some deep balance, and seems vivid, desirable, and makes clear sense that must be true, ... that doesn't actually make it true, real, or coherent, not even a little bit. > I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution! Evolution created multicellular creatures, nervous systems, and brains, which in turn have created a species/society that is actively searching for knowledge and putting it to work for survival at higher orders of organization. I.e. science, economics, politics, technology, etc. Limited resources (at any given time) continue to drive us to solve new problems and learn more, to continue surviving even as we complicate and expand the environment we survive in. So in that sense, life is already moving past biological chemistry into other substrates, and we are already learning to harness the arrangement of atoms to go further. And eventually, perhaps, harness the fine structure of space-time, and beyond.