On Aug 31, 2005, at 9:23 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:
Read Nabokov's Pale Fire.
Pale Fire
"There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings."
Pale Fire is one of the most singular and unusual novels ever published;
no synopsis could hope to suggest its ingenious layers of meaning. The
core of the novel is a poem of 999 lines entitled Pale Fire, by American
poet John Francis Shade. Collateral to Shade's poem are a Foreword,
Commentary, and Index compiled by the pompous and pedantic scholar
Charles Kinbote. Kinbote, an unabashedly solipsistic émigré from Zembla,
'a distant northern land,' has a personal and distinctive interpretation
of Pale Fire the poem, which makes Pale Fire the novel a comical and
inventive piece of fiction and one of Nabokov's most treasured works.
"Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of
the very great works of art of this century . . ."
Mary McCarthy
"It is like nothing on God's Earth."
Virgilia Peterson
". . . his true joy is the amassing of bits of coloured glass, strangely
shaped stones, old customs, weird words. Nabokov was a skilled
butterfly-collector. Pale Fire is a brilliant confection."
Anthony Burgess
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/wpale.htm
On Aug 31, 2005, at 8:49 PM, Dan Smith wrote:
Jack,
I caught you this time, napping in Filawsofazi 101!
Absolute truth? Nonsense. Science is pragmatic a lattice of nested
sequences of approximations.<<
Science presupposes that every new theory is a closer approximation to the
Platonic Truth, even if that ideal goal is unreachable in a finite time.
That Platonic, eternal truth is purely objective and perfectly dead.
Rational theism, however, is the eternal pursuit of the living truth.
In that pursuit it is trust and then verify, but trust necessarily goes
before verification. Thus can we never transcend our need for faith. Faith
is an essential aspect of our humanity. For Jack and Science, faith is just
the 'patient etherized upon the table',
http://www.ladyofthecake.com/mel/frank/images/franksmall.jpg
the butterfly stuck on a pin.
Dan
". . . his true joy is the amassing of bits of coloured glass, strangely
shaped stones, old customs, weird words. Nabokov was a skilled
butterfly-collector. Pale Fire is a brilliant confection."
Anthony Burgess
-----Original Message-----
From: Jack Sarfatti [mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 11:22 PM
To: Dan Smith
Subject: Re: The Education of Dan Smith
On Aug 31, 2005, at 7:35 PM, Dan Smith wrote:
Hank,
The implication here is that science is the final religion, that
science is ultimately omniscient.
This is a logical fallacy. Science is logically self-limiting
because of its necessary presupposition of an objective, absolute truth.
Absolute truth? Nonsense. Science is pragmatic a lattice of nested
sequences of approximations
A related self-limiting aspect of science is its necessary
adherence to analysis and reductionism.
"Reductionism"? Not always.
The emergent, holistic, teleological nature of reality thus logically
transcends the fundamental self-limitations of science, for such
properties are irreducibly inter-subjective.
WRONG! Teleology, advanced action presponse, signal nonlocality are
all INSIDE physics.
Faith, hope and charity are fundamental and irreducible aspects of any
coherent reality.
Hogwash. Moral principles have no place in the structure of physical
theory.
If you don't like that, you'll just have to get used to
it.
Or what? You will cut his head off to defend the Faith?
-----Original Message-----
From: Jack Sarfatti [mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 4:45 PM
To: Dan Smith
Subject: Fwd: The Education of Dan Smith
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Hank Harrison" <hankharrison916@hotmail.com>
Date: August 31, 2005 1:37:52 PM PDT
To:
Subject: Re: The Education of Dan Smith
Dan: Science "is" a religion, probably the best one we have. There
is no conflict between science and religion, because science will
always give in to truth even when it is couched in religion. It wil
always eschew illogical faith assumptions and accept logical ones.
Logic is a truth table in itself. Religion created science. Science
evolved out of religion. Just like the Catholic Church evolved out
of the Roman Empire. All of the older religions have elements of
modern science seeded within them-even Biblical Cosmology. Genesis
Theory is probably correct, God Created everything, including
science and scientists. Time both does and does not exist. Here is
a classic example of this paradox in action, The Ancient Celts were
both illiterate and Heliocentric simultaneously.
.
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