"Who could ponder equations when he had the chance to imagine dragons?"
A quote from The Flight of Dragons, which is still a great film.
Ah, me. That is the dilemma, isn't it? The dull mystery of the real world, which requires dogged patience and precision, or the escape into fantasy, which requires its own kind of discipline to master?
TFoD pits man's embrace of science and reason against the need for magic and wonder. A young scientist - who has left academia in order to write a scifi novel - is called back in time, or possibly to another world, in order to defeat the evil wizard who wants to get back at the humans for rejecting magic by helping them use their Reason to effect their own destruction. The good wizards want to retire to a bubble where they will not try to defeat logic, but from which they can inject a little magic into the prosaic life of humans. In the end, the scientist/writer defeats the evil wizard by using logic to break the spell he's under. (Dude is somehow in the body of a dragon, and he's like, "Hang on, this can't really be happening." Not actually so logical seeing as it was happening - the data did not support the model - but it works if you don't think about it too much.)
Best part is when the older dragon is showing the hero dragon how to fly and make fire. The scientist/writer keeps asking how, how, how until he comes up with a reasonble hypothesis for the mechanism of flight. (Again, it makes sense as long as you don't overanalyze it.)
Does that take the magic out of dragon flight? I guess it does - but I feel like it makes understanding it makes it better, that it's not some crazy inexplicable magic thing.
As alluring as dreams are their logic does not hold, despite the sleeping brain's best efforts to formulate a consistent narrative. If a dragon is flying, it's got to be due to chemistry and aerodynamics. Or something quantum. But math has got to enter into it somewhere.
Occasionally, in my more solipstist moments, I wonder if that urge to find patterns and reasons is ... "real". What if the universe is actually magical and nonsensical, but we superimpose logic upon it? I don't think that's true - but as a good scientist/wannabe scifi writer, I have to keep that possibility open. Even if it's not good science. [Wink.]
This tangent brings me to something Springy found the other day. It's a quote by Cotton Mather, one of the founding bigwigs of Massachusetts. Springy was interested to note that the ID-ers of today are using arguments that have been tootling around for over 300 years, in basically the same words.
I think this is interesting, not because it restates the creation myth, bu tbecause it uses the exact arguments of the ID-ers, and shows that anti-creation arguments have been around a long time. From Cotton Mather's 'Wonderful Works of God', 1689:
'Our own bodies are, to use the phrase of the Psalmist, so fearfully and wonderfully made, that one of the ancient heathen at the sight thereof, could not forbear breaking forth into an hymn unto the praise of the great Creator; 'tis impossible that anything should be better shaped! Indeed, all the things that we have every day before our eyes, have a most charming prospect in them; and the very deformities which the Flood has brought upon this terraqueous globe, are made beauties, by the disposals of the Lord that sat upon the Flood. There is not a fly, but what may confuse an atheist.'
Mather was keen on science, even Copernicus, as well as history and theology. The Puritans, for all their pecadillos, were academic types. However, they were also very big into the felt experience, finding truth through personal revelation. Hence the ID classic argument from wonder.
I asked Springy how they reconciled those things, but it was 7:10 in the morning so he wasn't inclined to discuss it.
Scientists can feel wonder - do feel wonder - what can be more awe-inspiring than figuring out how something works? Is a stained glass window less lovely because it was fashioned by a dirty, homely artisan?
Do people to feel the need to justify, rationally, their sense of wonder? To define - to rationalize - the felt experience of beauty by proposing a model in which a Supreme Being or Beings has ... imparted goodness or right aesthetics to that which seems wonderful to us?
I look upon a fly and I am stunned by its magnificent complexity. Do I feel like my appreciation for it is diminished if ... if it is not empirically magnificent? Because then, what is magnificence? How do I confirm the essential validity of my felt experience?
Ah, me. That is the dilemma, isn't it? The dull mystery of the real world, which requires dogged patience and precision, or the escape into fantasy, which requires its own kind of discipline to master?
TFoD pits man's embrace of science and reason against the need for magic and wonder. A young scientist - who has left academia in order to write a scifi novel - is called back in time, or possibly to another world, in order to defeat the evil wizard who wants to get back at the humans for rejecting magic by helping them use their Reason to effect their own destruction. The good wizards want to retire to a bubble where they will not try to defeat logic, but from which they can inject a little magic into the prosaic life of humans. In the end, the scientist/writer defeats the evil wizard by using logic to break the spell he's under. (Dude is somehow in the body of a dragon, and he's like, "Hang on, this can't really be happening." Not actually so logical seeing as it was happening - the data did not support the model - but it works if you don't think about it too much.)
Best part is when the older dragon is showing the hero dragon how to fly and make fire. The scientist/writer keeps asking how, how, how until he comes up with a reasonble hypothesis for the mechanism of flight. (Again, it makes sense as long as you don't overanalyze it.)
Does that take the magic out of dragon flight? I guess it does - but I feel like it makes understanding it makes it better, that it's not some crazy inexplicable magic thing.
As alluring as dreams are their logic does not hold, despite the sleeping brain's best efforts to formulate a consistent narrative. If a dragon is flying, it's got to be due to chemistry and aerodynamics. Or something quantum. But math has got to enter into it somewhere.
Occasionally, in my more solipstist moments, I wonder if that urge to find patterns and reasons is ... "real". What if the universe is actually magical and nonsensical, but we superimpose logic upon it? I don't think that's true - but as a good scientist/wannabe scifi writer, I have to keep that possibility open. Even if it's not good science. [Wink.]
This tangent brings me to something Springy found the other day. It's a quote by Cotton Mather, one of the founding bigwigs of Massachusetts. Springy was interested to note that the ID-ers of today are using arguments that have been tootling around for over 300 years, in basically the same words.
I think this is interesting, not because it restates the creation myth, bu tbecause it uses the exact arguments of the ID-ers, and shows that anti-creation arguments have been around a long time. From Cotton Mather's 'Wonderful Works of God', 1689:
'Our own bodies are, to use the phrase of the Psalmist, so fearfully and wonderfully made, that one of the ancient heathen at the sight thereof, could not forbear breaking forth into an hymn unto the praise of the great Creator; 'tis impossible that anything should be better shaped! Indeed, all the things that we have every day before our eyes, have a most charming prospect in them; and the very deformities which the Flood has brought upon this terraqueous globe, are made beauties, by the disposals of the Lord that sat upon the Flood. There is not a fly, but what may confuse an atheist.'
Mather was keen on science, even Copernicus, as well as history and theology. The Puritans, for all their pecadillos, were academic types. However, they were also very big into the felt experience, finding truth through personal revelation. Hence the ID classic argument from wonder.
I asked Springy how they reconciled those things, but it was 7:10 in the morning so he wasn't inclined to discuss it.
Scientists can feel wonder - do feel wonder - what can be more awe-inspiring than figuring out how something works? Is a stained glass window less lovely because it was fashioned by a dirty, homely artisan?
Do people to feel the need to justify, rationally, their sense of wonder? To define - to rationalize - the felt experience of beauty by proposing a model in which a Supreme Being or Beings has ... imparted goodness or right aesthetics to that which seems wonderful to us?
I look upon a fly and I am stunned by its magnificent complexity. Do I feel like my appreciation for it is diminished if ... if it is not empirically magnificent? Because then, what is magnificence? How do I confirm the essential validity of my felt experience?
posted by Joolya at
1:20 PM
12 Comments:
I gave up English Lit at undergrad for this very reason - novels and poetry becoming things to analyse rather than to be drawn into, to live in as though they were yourself. I've since learned that both objective and subjective thought and feeling are in fact not mutually exclusive, and you can't understand "Life" fully just through empirical study or feeling things or deductive reasoning.
PS. Puritans were helluva keen on science - in fact there is a book(the "Merton thesis") which tries to explain why in a slightly silly sociological way. The Royal Society was set up by a bunch of nonconformists. They had no conception, unlike us "moderns," that science and religion were antagonistic, mostly because Newton, the European Enlightenment and Darwin hadn't happened yet.
PPS. You're absolutely right, the felt experience vs. empirical study thing was a very big deal, and they had all sorts of arguments and fights about it. They banished a bunch of people who were a bit too into the mystical thing - the Antinomians - and hanged Quakers. The way they got around it is complex, and probably a bit boring, but suffice to say that God was supposed to talk to you in a very small voice, which was only detectable once you'd beaten back the self. Beating back the self was done by listening to Puritan ministers harangue you, reading books of "practical divinity," reading scripture, and thoroughly despising yourself. Then, and only then, might you feel God "assuring" you that you were saved. Poor buggers.
Right; it seems like a lot of early modern philosophers, and pre-Enlightenment philosophers, were very interested in categorizing and ranking things, e.g. the most beautiful, the most perfect, without coming up with rigorous definitions of what those categories meant.
Maybe that blanket statement is unfair, though, because categorizing is useful and those people still had notions about ultimate and absolute truth.
But that takes us right back to where the religionists of today start getting on my nerves: namely, claiming a corner on the market of truth!
What gets me is people now, in our po-mo times, using "logic" and "reason" to rationalize mystical experiences.
At least neuropsychologists call a spade a spade when they do that!
Well, mostly the charge that the 18th-century empiricists made against previous logicians was that they spent too much time on definitions - what words meant and whether one could make a particular syllogism or not, and whether that syllogism was true, given the words' definition. Much like the charge scientists make today against the humanities.
I still have notions of absolute truth - it is absolutely true that our appartment has walls. Whether God exists is less clear. Whether modern revolutions are class wars or clashes of culture, is (I would say) even less clear. That's when you've got to start dealing with language, and it all gets really messy.
There seemed (seems?) to be something with the old European logicians about words having particular powers, or ineffable qualities or something ... Wait, maybe that is postmodern ... Ah!
This is why I am a scientist, it's much less difficult to get one's head around.
[long discourse on science, magic, logic, and grammar deleted because it made me look a bit insufferable]
Remember how the green wizard turned his meade in to milk for his ulcer in TFOD? That was freaking awesome.
Oh oh! and the grinding rocks in the craw! That was also totally awesome. I am sending this entire post to Randy.
i totally wanted to eat bags of gems and limestone after that for years! that is why i know baout birds having craws.
remember in the last unicorn when she's in the creepy zoo and the old woman is there and the scary birds are flying around?
sir peter IS gorbache!!!
dude, but he can't be himself and gorbach at the same time - at least, that's the logic that defeats the evil wizard.
we could argue about whether that's really true - a new post perhaps?
Boomy, I want to hear the long discourse on magic and science! I could do with a specialist on this. If you don't want to sound insufferable on Joolya's blog then we should discuss this over champagne on Friday. (!)
Also I don't know what TFOD is, so I can't join in the irreverent mixing of high and low culture. Gah!
I mean, I know what TFOD is, but I haven't seen it... Sorry, the puritans are frying my brain.
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