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From: glg@sfsup.UUCP (G.Gleason)
Newsgroups: sci.misc,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Where do you find the future? (was Re: Omni-Americans)
Message-ID: <2885@sfsup.UUCP>
Date: 10 Mar 88 23:10:30 GMT
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In article <2724@ihlpe.ATT.COM> res@ihlpe.ATT.COM (Rich Strebendt, AT&T-DSG @ Indian Hill West) writes:
>As to the futurism aspect, I feel that the future will NOT be based on the
>wishful thinking embodied in the pseudosciences (telepathic communications,
>the world saved by noble UFO pilots, ones future foretold by ones birthdate,
>etc.).  Rather, the future depends on applying our knowledge to the problems
>at hand with undiluted vigor.  Such problems as AIDS, world hunger, 
>diminishing energy resources, and fundamental inhumanity of man toward one
>another, will not be solved by the Uri Gellers of the world, or by
>consulting the "predictions" of a Jean Dixon.  They will be solved by the
>application of the sciences (both hard and soft) to these problems.  The 
>more energy is diverted into bogus "sciences" the longer it will take to
>solve these problems.

While I agree that the future will not be based on wishfull thinking, I
would be careful about automatically labelling everything that does not
fit into the conventional model pseudoscience.  There is a pretty good
chance that new ways of thinking will revolutionize our world view in
the near future.  I say this because lately physicists are beginning to
sound like they did at the end of the last century, just before clasical
physics was stood on its head.  Quantum mechanics works so well (at least
where it does work), and people are saying, "in a few years we will have
a complete unified theory."

Just like last time, the "clasical" theory is very powerful and compelling
but there are a couple of pieces of evidence that could unravel the whole
thing, start a whole new ball game.  Einstien disliked the uncertainty
priciple so much that he kept trying to push it to the limits of absurdity.
The amazing thing is that the results just kept getting more absurd,
rather than finding anything inconsistent with quantum mechanics.

I'm not a physicist, so I can't adaquatly bring these arguments to their
conclusion but consider:

The ERP paradox (Einstien, etc. I don't remember the other names, but
	it is the one about two particles originating from the same
	original particle, so they are constrained to have opposite
	spins, and therefore measuring one means the other must
	instantaniously have the correct spin.)

Bell's inequality, which implies:
	Quantum mechanics fails
and/or	Objectivity fails
and/or	Locality fails

Any one of these failing may mean the world is a lot stranger than
originally thought.  There are holes that can cover almost any of
the popular pseudosciences.  This is not proof, but it opens the
door, and real experiments will eventually tell us something about
what is going on.

I was reading about this stuff in Robert Anton Wilson's _Cosmic_Triggers_.
Admittedly, he is not a "hard" scientist, and in this book he asks the
reader to consider the possibility of a number of things that are pretty
strange, but there is also growing evidence that there is no such thing
as an "objective" investigator, and he even suggests that we try on
different world views from time to time.  If we do not we risk being
trapped in a dogmatic stance that makes further investigation impossible.
Wilson says in his preface, "I don't believe in anything."  He says this
in response to letters he received after the first edition of the book
from people asking him if what he wrote was "true" or whether he
believed it.  Beliefs effectively block the possibility of learning
anything new.

What is my point?  Only that a lot of what gets passed off as science
is nothing but conventional dogma.  When Timothy Leary was experimenting
with using psychedelic drugs in therapy and mind research he ran afoul
of conventional dogma.  It didn't matter that in his work with prisoners,
85-90% of those he worked with stayed out of jail after being released
compared to the normal statistics where that number are soon back in
jail.  According to the standard model, his experiments should have
been repeated and either verified, or refuted.  Instead conventional
wisdom says these drugs are dangerous, and cannot be used by anyone,
not even a scientific investigator, and everyone thinks Leary is nothing
but a drugged out crackpot.

So, I ask you, what is reality, and who defines it?

Gerry Gleason