Re: How many main religious Festivities are there?
From: donald j haarmann (donald-haarmann_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 12/18/04
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Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 15:39:53 GMT
"Dirk Bruere at Neopax"
>
> IMO we are rather overdue for a new scientific revolution in fundamental
> physics. The position seems to be just like it was almost exactly 100yrs ago.
>
> --
> Dirk
>
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Daedalus [David Jones]
Spiritual matters
Nature 22 April 1999
The connection between matter and spirit has been debated for millennia. The
central mystery is that certain material objects (human beings) contrive to be
conscious and to possess a spiritual dimension. This implies that matter itself
has some rudimentary spiritual character.
Daedalus reckons that the spiritual world occupies the same space as the
material one, but at most points is very weakly coupled to it. Nonetheless, over
cosmological space and time, this weak coupling must have brought the two
realms into thermodynamic equilibrium. So the spirit world will have acquired the
average temperature of the physical universe - 3 K, the temperature of the
Creation, microwave background. (This explains why a ghost, an invasion of the
material world by the spirit one, tends to cool the room.)
So Daedalus is looking for the weak thermodynamic coupling between the two
worlds. A warm material object, even in a perfect vacuum and surrounded by a
perfect reflector, should slowly cool down by thermal leakage into the spiritual
world. The experiment will test modern thermometry and high-vacuum and
techniques to their limits; but success would open a whole new field
of discovery.
Daedalus is already planning his exploration of it. He hopes to discover whether
holy relics and ritual objects, imbued with spiritual significance, cooling faster
than more mundane ones. He expects that biological materials, especially the
neurotransmitters and proteins of brain chemistry; will cool faster still. They are
part of the secret of human consciousness, and should be quite tightly coupled to
the spiritual world. This coupling might take the form of strong spectroscopic
emission at the 3 K black body peak in the millimetre-wave region, or it might be
far more subtle. But detailed experiments, aided by such insights, should reveal
the spiritual capacity of a wide range of objects and substances.
Perhaps the most interesting objects for testing will be semiconductors, either as
bulk solids or in the form of integrated circuits and microprocessors. If they cool
no faster than common minerals, this will demonstrate their lack of a spiritual
dimension - in which case no computer, however powerful, could be conscious.
But if they turn out to cool as fast as the neurotransmitters, then conscious
technological monsters like Hal and Deep Thought should indeed be possible
---------------------
Daedalus
Theological chemistry
Nature 29 April 1999
The most convincing evidence for religious belief is subjective. Many people
claim to sense the presence of God, to be able to communicate with Him in
prayer, or receive comfort from Him in trouble. But to others, praying simply feels
like talking into a dead telephone. Even devout believers sometimes suffer 'the
dark night of the soul' when the divine presence cannot be sensed.
One theory is that the religious sense is chemical. Many primitive religions use
psychotropic drugs and hallucinogens in their rituals. Nitrous oxide, ether and
LSD have also been claimed to open the user's mind to higher reality.
Daedalus disagrees. Such intoxicants, he reckons, merely stir up noise and
nonsense inside the brain. He wants to get past the 'earthquake, wind and fire' to
reach the 'still, small voice' of the authentic spiritual experience.
So he plans to conduct brain scans on monks and nuns at prayer, to identify the
active region of the brain. Successful prayers and 'dark night' failures should
show different patterns. With very good luck, an NMR scan might even be able to
identify the molecule metabolized in a successful religious experience.
Another way of identifying it depends on Daedalus's theory of last week, that the
spirit world shares the 3 K temperature of the cosmic microwave background,
and that spiritually important molecules radiate spontaneously into that world.
The black-body peak at 3 K is at 310 GHz, a frequency band in which molecular
rotational and librational resonance's occur. Isotopically substituted molecules
with shifted resonance's should therefore be spiritually less effective. By
synthesizing candidate substances enriched with 2-H, 13-C or 15-N, and
injecting them into the test monks and nuns, the crucial religious metabolite could
be identified. People in whom it is richly present will be believers, those without it
will be hard-boiled materialists. A simple tablet or injection will then enable the
latter to feel religious experience for themselves.
Daedalus's Theological Prozac will at last open the private, subjective claims of
religion and mysticism to scientific study. It will make spiritual experiences freely
accessible and reproducible, allowing them to be classified and their implications
understood. With luck, the resulting illumination will bestow spiritual comfort
on the users, unaccompanied by the stern orthodox convictions attached to it by
the more doctrinal aspects of religion.
donald haarmann
----------------------------------
Science is a differential equation.
Religion is a boundary condition.
Alan Turing
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