Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Flip It, Call It, Science Face Up

The world has a new religion, and it's been in development for quite a while. Unlike religions of the past, this one is built off of numbers and figures, it obeys all laws of logic and more, and despite our limited grasp and capability of understanding all things that are, ultimately this religion can develop to understand exactly half of it(which is a LOT). We call this religion science. It is a religion since religions are simply guides on how to understand and deal with the world around you, and also on a higher level, to guide the organization of people in a productive way, as all religions do. It also has many counterarguments based within its own findings that refute and "disprove" all other religions, as all religions do. It is a wonderful thing, but is also probably the most volatile religion the world has ever suffered through, since those who follow it(and it's hard NOT to follow at least some part of it, since its explanations are so all-encompassing) historically persecute those who don't(albeit in a slightly different manner than other religions have).
Science as a religions is based on nature,  and natural patterns and abstractions such as numbers(ultimately just a placeholder abstraction for difference) and many, many, many observable laws of nature can be understood and reasoned with and even applied in new contexts through this numeric understanding of reality. Of course, I use the term "Science" abstractly by its primal definition to be all things definable and understood by logic. By applying the laws of logic and interactions and relations between numbers, you can learn a law, calculate it to a semi-concrete value, and use this value to apply the law to new concepts and ideas(such as using gravity and momentum equations to figure out how much fuel a vehicle would need to burn in order to achieve escape velocity from a larger body). All fields of science have their own natural patterns they are built upon: physics has numbers, chemistry has elements(also a concept based upon numeric relations and patterns, like the periodic table for arranging relations between different electrically charged particles and how their interactions correlate to changing the number of sub-particles the particles in question consist of), etc. All of the fields of science are bullet proof within themselves because they are based on these numeric relations and laws, and thus they all support one-another and patterns in one field can be applied in other fields( such as our rough equations for gravitic force between two bodies and the electric force between charged particles, which is more or less the same equation/relation in a different dimension(/scale maybe? Dim. Isn't really the right word) with a different constant, and shows a parallel between how different kinds of forces occur), and since all of these things are based on logic, they don't logically interfere with one another. Thus, it is a field that one uses to understand the world around them and relate to it in a meaningful, accurate, and applicable way.
Science also conflicts with other religions, as anybody who knows the story of Galileo would be quite aware of. When other religions dominated society, scientific study was, you could say, frowned upon, because it provided a means of understanding the world in a different way(think Roman Catholic Church and the Dark Ages, when so much information was lost, we may still be behind informationally speaking what was known before it occurred, but have since convinced ourselves otherwise due to advances in technology and harnessing industrial power). Now, in those days, heretics were shamed by the masses, persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and often killed for their blasphemy against the commonly agreed upon "lens" for reality. In short, the dominant religion sought to preserve itself, so it constantly persecuted those who worshipped otherwise, to maintain a "louder voice" in the world, so to speak. The way science slipped through was by somehow denoting itself as something that was not religious at all, and it was especially simple because of how much the church deviated over thousands of years from its natural roots into a means of control through its own web of self-supporting concepts, which in those days was as creditable as logic is today. Due to this deviation, a general idea that religion and nature no longer had reconciliation allowed science to take the placeholder as it's own self-defined field of understanding the world, and able to gather followers from other religions without heavily conflicting enough concepts that would require the converted to keep their old religion along with the new one. (This also has to do with religions as we know them defining spirituality, which science has yet to sufficiently explain, and instead refutes since spirituality does not follow the laws of logic, but is still based in its own set of natural observable laws regardless, which is why I consider it the other half of reality that science cannot really touch, at least not yet). This way, religion was maintained and science was established and spread throughout the world. It even had it's own means of persecution, which target the individual from within rather than from without.
We have a way of 'quantifying' ones grasp of science, and it is a very powerful thing. Our society has developed to where the masses of people identify themselves ultimately and in some cases totally by this idea, and it causes just as many drawbacks and hindrances in terms of human development and grasp of information as a whole as previous methods of developmental interference between religions, and we call this value intelligence. Intelligence, especially judgements of one's own intelligence against others, is only a drawback, since it keeps self-esteem for those who have been deemed as non-intellectuals at an all-time low, and prevents the creation and flow of ideas from occurring from as much as 90% of the race as a whole(I made that figure up, but imagine how many books have been written by gas-station clerks and you can see what I'm getting at). Of course, the devout are still rewarded, as they always have been, and a lot of the time, the most intelligent are also the most wealthy or privileged in a given society( some exceptions to this, as there always are, remembering how much murder, war, and famine happened at the hands of popes should indicate that this margin of exception is nothing new ). Now, since we place one's value to society in intelligence, and we tell some people their intelligence is quite low( as it may be, we don't exactly know quantum physics from birth ), a general idea that those with low intelligence are not useful developed, damaging self-esteem,  and creating a caste system in the modern day, which still propogates since science has convinced people that it's 50% is actually the whole pie, and those who can't understand any part of the 50% cannot grow or develop and thus become stuck in their growth and kinda "grow up dumb", often admitting to this as if it is something they cannot change. Now, to understand what I mean by this halt of development, consider someone learning multiplication, such as multiplication by hand between two three-digit numbers.(this is the entire next paragraph, and is somewhat lengthy and exhaustive, so if you would like to skip it, I will summarize it at the beginning of the next, but the explanation is as follows)
The "scientific-linear" way of approaching this 123x321, is to add 123 to itself 321 times, which yields the answer 39483 after 321 additions. Since single-digit multiplication is rather simple to perform, someone attempting to calculate this could use a sort of "scientific-quadratic" approach, by multiplying the first digit of the second number across the digits of the first number, saving that value somewhere, adding a place value 0, and doing the same for the next digit of the second number, and upon completing all digits, adding the final list of saved values to itself, giving you your result of 39483 exponentially faster than the "linear" approach( these have been named by the way they define the concepts applied. Linear meaning it uses multiplication which is defined as a long string of additions. Quadratic meaning it uses long-multiplication, which is multiple multiplications followed by a much shorter string of additions ). To somebody who doesn't know what I'm talking about, these may sound incredibly complicated and partially meaningless due to the exhaustive definition, but of course I am defining the vertical method of multiplication I (and probably you as well) was taught in elementary arithmetic. However, this explanation is difficult and getting hung up on details of this process makes this process very difficult for some people to learn, especially those who are less "math-minded" and logically ground. Yet this is the method we are taught, and thus it is gospel, and those who don't understand the gospel are held back. Now, there is another form of multiplication, which I will call "visual multiplication" that isn't "Science", as it has been defined per-say. In this method, you simple draw groupings of diagonal lines for each digit value, with the first number going diagonally right and the second numbers' lines going diagonally left, so that all lines of one value cross all the lines from the other value, and you simply count the number of times they cross, grouping these intersections vertically, and the number of intersections going from left to right is your solution 39483(carrying for values larger than 9 of course). In a simpler example, such as 12x13, you would have three lines going diagonally to the right, grouped 1 then 2 top to bottom, and four lines going diagonally to the left, grouped 1 then 3 bottom to top(or from left to right if that helps, I'll try to include a picture, for reasons I will explain shortly). By grouping the intersections vertically, you end up with, from left to right, 1, 5(3+2), and 6, with 156 being your answer. 

This visual approach isn't as logical as the others and is much more difficult to explain concretely using just words, and thus is a more irrational(as in rational vs irrational numbers)than the others. I could literally go on forever with this wordy explanation and potentially not reach a point where the concept I am describing makes concrete sense with closed logic. It is not gospel, as far as I know, it is not taught in schools, and those who fail to grasp the quadratic approach of delinearizing the problem are held back and ultimately labelled as less intelligent than their peers for not grasping multiplication. Despite them being able to multiply the two numbers completely using the visual method, their intelligence would be graded upon their grasp of the "vertical method" and they would be deemed "incapable of long multiplication", for not "showing their work" the way it is outlined in gospel. Of course, this is an anecdote of my life in Elementary school(where I was luckily not held back) and I pray they have corrected their standards of intellect and grasp in the last 15 years, but from the to-be teachers I know, it hasn't changed much, and the visually minded continue to be labelled as unintelligent and their ideas continue to be scrutinized and defeated in an infantile form for not obeying the exact same logic as Sciences initially. Ideas born of another doctrine are defeated, more than often using explanations based in the closed logic of the more wide-spread religion, as religions do. Now, this was a childishly simple example, but I hope the meaning got across: science refuses to acknowledge or have any respect whatsoever for anything that is not-science. This is a problem. This problem brings us to the not-science, the speculation, the grains of salt:

There are many things innate to us that cannot be defined by science or broken down and quantified, and thus in the modern day they are devalued and often denied to exist at all. A simple example of this is love: innate connection to all things, acts of selflessness that defy economic reason. Love is too innate to us to be defeated by science, but it still cannot be explained and en masse is simply ignored as an important force of creation, to the extent that some doubt it's existence at all. Another thing science can define yet cannot quantify is feeling and sensation, which is just as important to life and survival as thought, and yet is highly marginalized to the point that people doubt their own feelings and instead follow the thoughts of others, more often than not to sadness and their own oblivion( that statement is also an exaggeration but I hope the point got across ). Finally, something science could never EVER explain, by definition, the miracle. Miracles are defined by their lack of imminent possibility and logical orthodoxy, and thus as things that deft science. Those who deny the existence of miracles also defy their possibility, and as a result will never experience one since their life-path will only ever walk within the 50% of the pie that is Science, where miracles simply do not happen, for reason of predictability, and the reproducability of the status quo. Imagination, creativity, dreaming, "interdimensional" travel and out-of-body experience are all things that cannot be explained or brought about by science(lack of reproducability, etc), and thus are often denied entirely from existence. Those who go against science nowadays are persecuted heavily by those devout and somewhat blinded by it. They are labelled as either unintelligent or crazy and this is the true spectrum of their grasp of the other half of reality, yet the science-mind convinces them to be ashamed of it. A faction of science in a highly incomplete field has convinced people that they carry something with them from birth that is eternal to all their life and everything they attach to it is something that cannot be changed. Intelligence, happiness-depression, body weight, mental conditions, and even economic standing(aka relation to scarcity) have all been defined as part of our eternal "genetics" and the general idea about genetics is that it cannot be changed. They find a gene that correlates to unintelligence, they tell you about it, you are convinced that intellectuality isn't for you 'by your nature', and thus you end up not pursuing education, thus you do not learn the sciences, thus you are by definition unintelligent, and you end up in the corresponding economic class. Your genes are passed on to your offspring, he is convinced of the same thing, and perhaps motivated by your lack of success, he could end up one income bracket above or below you, and this is how the cycle goes( with exceptions of course, but consider the number of people with no collegiate relatives, who will likely never see a six-figure salary in their lives ). Thus the underlying caste system of Science reveals itself, a self-fulfilling prophecy based on an incomplete or incorrectly communicates understanding of the branch dealing with the self. I am not sure if genetics as a field has discovered anything about whether genes change over a lifetime, but it is cited in so many control schemes that define people's lives, those things that many sceptics stand against now and will for all time, regardless of how much scientific evidence is produced in the contrary. Something about it is highly incomplete, and it isn't until science reconciles with spirituality that further understanding of the self and the universe can continue. But, they control the information, they control the people, they control the world. The RCC would never let science by at the peak of its power,  and likewise, the Sciences of the world follow the exact same scheme by denying possibilities they do not immediately understand. I would like to see it happen within my lifetime, the not-science enriches possibility and makes the struggles of life worthwhile. It grants hope to those who needs cannot be met by the material. It gives faith to those who believe in beautiful days every day. It gives meaning to the divine. It gives dimension to experience, life to life.

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