Torah and Jewish Idea > Torah and Jewish Idea
Ticket to Heaven Daily Dose
Hrvatski Noahid:
--- Quote from: Nachus on June 07, 2024, 12:58:06 PM --- :usa+israel: :fist:
Kol hakavod on these interesting, well
thought out posts reflecting a conside-
arable level of gravitas and “intelligentsia!”
--- End quote ---
The book is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Ticket-Heaven-Destruction-Reclamation-Realization/dp/B0CC7H2MNL
Hrvatski Noahid:
While aesthetic considerations are rarely relevant when discussing the mating habits of jungle frogs or mathematical theory, they do become important in matters of human life.
Although this is something that many modern people fail to fully appreciate, there has long been such a concept of a beautiful life or a life well lived, which lie somewhat outside of the domain of ethics and concerns the subjective aesthetic appreciations of what makes life enjoyable, worthwhile, joyful, and productive. Because opinions on such matters are intensely personal, they can only be understood as aesthetic judgements and not ethical ones.
It could be said that proceeding directly from metaphysics to ethics, as many Western philosophers and arts students might be predisposed to do, is one of the root causes of Vervaeke’s so-called meaning crisis. A high modernist overfocus on what ought to be done neglected the very important discussions of what ought to be valued, with the idols of growth and progress becoming the default Western values following the Industrial Revolution and the fall of Christian metaphysics.
This means that in addition to discovering behavioral constraints that may be yielded by this process, it is also possible that the realities of human nature may imply or necessitate the existence of certain aesthetic values – things that humans ought to value for purposes of survival and flourishing. While such concerns have historically been the domain of philosophy, an evidence-based approach that grounds abstract moral ideas in the realities of human life should identify several important items that contribute to our understanding of these matters.
Getting to the beauty of human life is precisely the kind of work that Abraham Maslow, the founder of third-force psychology, was primarily concerned with. Indeed, it was the kind of research work that he implored his colleagues to support and the topics that he studied most towards the end of his career, most famously leading to the concept of self actualization. The problems with incorporating moral ideas into psychology and the sciences, however, are many, not least of which is the fact that the scientific process is not designed to answer questions about values. This can be seen by the gain-of-function research in Wuhan which seems to have sparked a global health emergency or the systematic destruction of children by the modern medical system.
Indeed, whereas questions of values are rarely relevant in the affairs of chemists or geologists, the intersection of the scientific method, human needs, and human rights has been an extremely problematic area for both researchers and practitioners in psychology. Given the incredible diversity of behaviors, customs, beliefs, thinking patterns, and personalities in homo sapiens, the obvious fact that many different kinds of cultures and societies have achieved success, and tireless activism from certain minorities seeking to legitimize their conditions, the trend has been towards a pluralistic stance of non-judgementalism. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 97-98)
Hrvatski Noahid:
Despite the positions taken by the mainstream, however, Maslow’s passionate advocacy for the inseparability of values and human research can be corroborated by a very simple appeal to the existence of the laws of physics themselves – revealing yet another tremendous oversight in modern psychology. Consider, for example, that the universe exists and is governed by a set of laws, such as gravity and electromagnetism. Further consider that these laws, when applied to biological systems, seem to cause some organisms to thrive and others to perish. This means that in any given situation, a human being is faced with a range of choices that could be ranked by their contribution to the human’s environmental fitness, ability to reproduce, or even ability to survive.
If taken to its logical extreme, this would mean that there are “better” and “worse” courses of action, in terms of acting according to the laws of the universe or against them. It would also imply that there are “superior” ways of living that correspond with natural laws, and moreover that every action a human being takes either corresponds to these ways of living, and therefore reality, or is therefore divorced from them. This would be the case regardless of the desires, wishes, or beliefs of the organism, a conclusion stands in stark contrast to the neo-Marxists who claim that reality is socially constructed and therefore malleable.
Although simple thought experiment does not provide a “proof” for any specific ethical system, it does hint at the possibility for the existence of such a system. This is an early indication that Abraham Maslow’s concern with values was not misplaced, and moreover that a careful analysis of the universe’s functioning could lead to the elucidation of values conducive to human flourishing.
The best-case scenario, of course, is that not only can the metaphysics and aesthetics of human nature be deduced with a consilience-based approach, but that the principles discovered facilitate joy and happiness in addition to mere survival. Indeed, given the last two hundred years of Western history, it would be comforting to look deep into human nature and discover something that is truly beautiful.
Although this approach will be laborious, lengthy, and involves a kaleidoscope of references to different disciplines, events, and theories, as can be seen it yields rapid and powerful insights – such as the potential existence of “superior” behaviors and societal structures. In much the same way, it can yield an understanding of what human nature is like, in the most general sense, and how people grow and develop throughout their lives. Of particular interest will be the fundamental mechanisms that underlie mental activity, as they will dictate the parameters of downstream phenomena like trauma and creativity.
Indeed, by beginning with the most basic and fundamental principles in physics and introducing elements of greater complexity thereafter, it becomes much easier to identify general mechanisms that govern individual psychology and group behavior. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 99)
Hrvatski Noahid:
As opposed to experimental approaches popular in present times, where psychologists search for trends in data obtained from test subjects, moving from the fundamental principles of physics to known complexities of human behavior facilitates the identification of deeper and more obscure forces that would elude the kinds of hyper-focused studies being funded today.
A tangible example of these kinds of “hidden laws” of the universe, at least pertaining to their expression in human contexts, is economics and free market theory. As opposed to communist systems, where bureaucrats vainly attempt to defy computational limits by controlling every aspect of the economy, Adam Smith’s concept of the “invisible hand” of the free market is the philosophical expression of a distributed computation system where everyone makes their own choices.
The effects of Smith’s invisible hand are said to be the sum of the effects of individual choices, like internet sensations Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black, made famous by millions of independent viewing choices and peer-to-peer sharing actions that added up quickly. Although the teenagers taking part in the elevation of these viral sensations may have never heard of Adam Smith, the concepts, forces, and “laws” at work in social situations apply to not only their group behavior, but the factors driving their individual choices as well.
In a world where science and technology are unimaginably advanced, it can be difficult to imagine that there may be “laws of the universe” that remain undiscovered by scientists. Yet, even physics, the most venerable of the sciences, continues to push the boundaries of knowledge with high-speed particle colliders and high-powered telescopes, the findings from which have driven new discoveries in theoretical physics and cosmology.
This means there is no reason why the rest of the sciences, as well as the social sciences and the humanities, could not make similar strides. Furthermore, it is not inconceivable that the kinds of unorthodox consiliences developed by reconciling these disparate fields are themselves innovations, at least in the sense of settling on laws and principles that could be considered as inviolable as Newton’s laws of motion. When new connections are made in this way, the true value can be found in the newly-appreciated relationships between the disciplines at hand, and not necessarily within any one field.
As it turns out, a definition of life that is grounded in physical laws was a topic of great interest among many physicists before the popularization of Freudian psychoanalysis. Polymathic scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz in the nineteenth century, and later Erwin Schrödinger in the twentieth, sought to ground striking discoveries made in biology within the domain of physics, chemistry, and other more established sciences. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 99-100)
Hrvatski Noahid:
Their efforts, along with the hard work of other researchers like Karl J. Friston and Jordan B. Peterson, will form the foundations of a consilience-based paradigm in the social sciences and the beginning strokes of a sustainable utopian blueprint.
Once the existence of the universe and a set of laws that governs its activities have been accepted, attention can be devoted to one of the most enduring human preoccupations – the passage of time, which was likely the inspiration for tools like the prehistoric Ishango Bone and is still considered one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of physics. Indeed, the time has proven to be one of the most fundamental and indescribable aspects of our universe, and the fact that living creatures only have a limited amount of it has been the cause of great concern and study throughout the ages.
Although many animals will follow seasonal migration patterns and have been generally observed to have some sense of time, only humans have developed mechanisms for tracking time, only humans have developed explicit schedules for how their days will be structured, and only humans take great care in marking beginnings and conclusions. From new year celebrations to elaborate burial and grieving rituals, and from calendars to clocks, humans very much live in a world of time, especially since industrialization. Indeed, the introduction of global time zones around the time of the First World War, and quartz oscillator clocks installed at the United States Bureau of Standards in 1929, proved to be hidden systemic influences that standardized the world.
But what is time? The physicists, and scientists more generally, would describe time as an independent variable by which everything else is measured. Given the unique properties of time, especially its predictable and inexorable progression “forward”, it serves as the perfect foundation by which to measure changes in physical systems on Earth and in the skies. Indeed, there are cause-and-effect relationships between past states of systems and present states – for example, a teacup shatters on a concrete floor because it was dropped by accident, and it was the interaction between the floor and the teacup that caused the shattering – preceded by the gravitational acceleration between the teacup and Earth.
An example of these changes happening in a living context would be the growing seasons in agriculture, where light energy and chemicals are photosynthesized into plant matter – a slow but beautiful process. These mechanisms, although similar in many ways to non-living processes like erosion and gravity, represent a very different kind of cause-and-effect relationship that cascades into new life over time. This general relationship between past organisms and their descendants is rather special in that Earth is the only planet in the known universe to have it, a source of great wonder and speculation since our species gained interstellar awareness. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 100-102)
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