h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Bit of a broadside that reply. Trying hard to ignore my very intense knee-jerk reaction, trying to be as open-minded as possible, can you answer be this one question - if this word game is played with the original hebrew (which I understand to be a very different language - semantically - to English) then how on earth do you come up with the word 'electricity' and proper names like Hitler and Nazi for which there can be no direct translation. Before one can even begin to talk about this properly you need to make the rules of the game rather more explicit.

As to your first commnets regards melancholy, I am reminded of a beautiful line of Kahlil Gibran from the prophet, something like, "the greater the sorrow that carves into your being, the greater your capacity for joy".

A very skeptical Serendipity

I remember when I was taking my A-levels, I think it was psychology, one of the few things I can actually recall is that my lecturer persistently said, 'Don't believe everything you read' sometimes as many as thirty-eight times in a single day. You strike me as being very much her kind of person!

Your point about semantics is very relevant and very astute. And very awkward for me to answer at this point, I will have to go through Drosnin's book for an answer - if it exists in the book. I don't honestly recall reading anything along those lines.

When I wrote those lines, it wasn't intended as a broadside. I draw your attention again to my remarks about Newton, and how he perceived his own work. I would love to be able to say with some degree of certainty that there is something else other than cold, hard science, but I can't, and that wrankles with me. I do not like not knowing the answers to my own questions - one of two features I share with Dirk Gently (along with a slight portliness of figure!) I only mention the book as a gentle stibb in the ribs for those who appear to have totally forsaken any thoughts of science not being the be-all and end-all of everything. My own opinion, for what it's worth, is that the answers we seek will be found somewhere between religion and science. And yes, I am suffering from splinters in the bum.

Returning to melancholia once more, when I am heading down that path and I have the presence of mind not to blindly grasp for the nearest Cure album, I'll sit and re-read the poem 'Alone' by Edgar Allen Poe. Nothing makes me feel more sedate, and yet more comforted by the fact that despite all my feelings to the contrary, I am not the only one that got the blues that bad.

A rather humbled CD4.

Wow. A caution:
Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to follow this conversation after three hours sleep, sixteen hours work and a few pints. Perhaps I should poke my noggin back in tomorrow...

You've touched on a subject very close to my heart, and I did suspect the rationale behind your 'broadside'. You do make a valid interjection in respect to putting a constraint on the rationality of science. In its inability to embrace the mysteries of time, as well as in its fumbling grasp of the experiential interaction of mind and world, we can see clearly exposed the inadequacy of the rationality of traditional science. I believe that we need to look beyond the dogma which insists that all phenomena are ultimately to be reduced to the interactions of elementary particles, governed by just a few timelessly valid physical laws. There seemed promise once that the universe would indeed yield to such a simple reductive analysis, but it is dawning upon increasingly many people that this promise has now evaporated away. There is more to the universe than can be explained away purely in mathematical terms. The traditional scientific story can no longer be considered reasonable as a total description of the universe.

It could be said that by trying to stretch its rationality too far, science has actually become irrational. Even in the age of quantum physics, we still hanker after solidity. We like to picture things. Most of all, we like easy answers. For the sake of elegance and simplicity, not to mention intellectual pride, science would love for its rational story to be the whole story. And there are still a great many who firmly believe that it is indeed the whole story, to the extent that there has grown up a colossal prejudice, a prejudice which is presently vitiating scientific objectivity.

I can understand this because there are times when I become inflicted with this same habit of mind. As an annoying remnant of my cultural conditioning, I find that the desire to see the whole as a simple collection of rational parts is deeply insistent, sometimes, irresistibly insistent. There are times when my consciousness gets stuck in the rational world of the left hemisphere, the persuasive power of the rationality of Reason consuming my spiritual sensitivity. In moments of epistemological weakness, it is easy to be moved by the siren call of the simple picture that is offered by a standalone mathematical rationality.

Indeed, I would say that the analytical side of my mind remains partially bewitched by the logical elegance and sweep of the scientific theory. I can still remember the smell of the intellectual power that I felt over people who wanted to see supernatural forces at work in the universe. For me, then, such beliefs were taken to betray a certain intellectual feeble-mindedness. When I now take up my counter position, I can see the same glint of power in the eyes of the rationalist that I once must have had sparkling in my own eyes. It is an uncomfortable position for me. Having been on the other side, I only too well appreciate the weight and might of the heavy intellectual artillery that bears down upon me.

Although the prejudice harboured by the rational mind has to be challenged through analysis, ultimately, only an intuitive feeling can encompass the need to sacrifice the inviolacy of scientific rationality. And sacrifice is necessary. I strongly believe analysis does have its limits. There is a deeper rationality present in the universe. I agree with you. Alchemy is at work.

Nevertheless, there is a fine balance to be sought here. In being so critical of the central conceptual dogma of traditional science there is a tendency, perhaps, to lose sight of the essential importance of the very exacting values that guide its inquiry. If the meaning of science is broadened too liberally, there is a danger that prejudice and narrow-mindedness will give way only to deception and woolly-mindedness. Expanding our understanding of the meaning of scientific rationality is not to open a door to irrationality. Sadly, though, in reaction against the sterility of the world-view of traditional science, more and more people do appear to be succumbing to the demon of unreason. Our very sophisticated, hi-tech society is home to a remarkably widespread willingness to believe in what seems like, to me, all sorts of ludicrous nonsense. Which immediately raises a very deep and fascinating question: amidst the confusion of today's world, with popular faith in the rationality of science dissolving away, just how is one to distinguish non-sense from sense? I think this is Twophlag's mission.

We are fortunate to live in a society which has a free market policy in regard to ideas. It is recognized as a basic human right that we each have the freedom to choose our own truth. The trouble is that when it comes to education, a completely open-market approach cannot be adopted for very obvious, practical reasons. Young people require some quite specific frame of reference, some well-defined mythology, to function as a solid foundation for their common sense. What kind of mythology, then, are we to present to them? To ask this question is to step into an uncharted expanse of epistemological quicksand, strewn with all kinds of apparently bottomless questions concerning the nature of truth. The most that I can say here is to suggest that our present vague and contradictory mish-mash of traditional science and naive Christianity is grossly inadequate, and that in replacement we have to begin by looking to a wider vision of science.

Young people need to be taught to respect the power of Reason as well as to understand its limitations. And they need to be encouraged to develop the art of critical thinking. The mythology of science should be their guiding example, and that is why it is so important that it is seen to be founded in a humble and honest skepticism, not skepticism in its popular understanding as disbelief, but skepticism as the unprejudiced doubt which actually conceives the rigorous question and answer dialectic of scientific inquiry. People might then be inspired to doubt, inquire and discover for themselves, and within themselves - for, as I know you understand, the inquiry into our own subjective reality is no less scientific than the inquiry into the reality of the physical world.

By the way, I share the same inclination towards Robert Smith, but also try to resist.