Shouldered by a Giant Turtle

We cannot know anything. That's what both books that I am reading proclaim. Book number one is the Modern Mind by Peter Watson, an unbelievably expansive summary of the movements in thought in the 20th century, mainly detailing how scientific thinking dominated our minds these past 100 years, infiltrating every discipline from art to music to philosophy. Yet it is starting to show signs that we may be at an apex, a peak that may signal a dead-end in terms of our ability to understand the universe through deductive logic. Bear with me if you can, I know this is heavy. Here's a comic:

The other book is One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese scientist turned farmer who applies a Taoist philosophy to agriculture, advocating do-nothing farming consistent with his philosophy that nature cannot be improved upon by man and that we know nothing and the best way to think and act is with a non-discriminating knowledge which is not arrived at through critical analysis and deduction. That means accepting wood as wood and not examining it from it's most basic building blocks. The books are more nuanced but these two wise men are in agreement on at least one point, that deductive thinking has flaws and science cannot provide an answer to everything.

Watson's book goes further, summarising the ideas of John Maddox, a long-time editor of the academic journal Nature. No one can deny that science has brought technological advance. But the progress in pure science (mainly physics) and the search for a Unifying Theory of Everything while trying to dissect everything down to the smallest pieces is exposing limits to our understanding. Maddox, a lifetime scientist and editor of the most recognisable science journal says that at this stage, concepts like the big bang, string theory, quarks (and neutrinos and whatever we discover next that proves to be even smaller) and the multitude of other concepts that most of us laypeople don't understand, that even to scientists these are just extended metaphors for scientists to try to make sense of the universe.

http://www.xkcd.com

How can anyone picture what came before the universe or what is beyond space or what an electron is made of? These are unanswerable questions to which science attempts to answer with increasingly inexact theories. String theory is completely unsubstantiated. Merely the process of observing electrons in orbit around an atom introduces error making it only possible to know the probability that the electron is there. So the universe isn't being carried on the back of a giant turtle nor was it created in six days, but where does the big bang get me? I've been having this feeling lately that you can choose what you believe in regarding the big questions (like the existence God, what happens to you after you die, what's the point of it all, the inherent good or bad of people etc.) and you won't ever be proven wrong. Of course, it's not easy to choose to believe something so we look to the world around us to clue us in the right direction.

So what do you think happens after you die? My grandfather recently passed away, the first time I have experienced the death of a loved one and certainly not the last. I saw the life force slowly ebb from his body and though I didn't see the ultimate end, I knew where it was leading. It's funny that we have the intellect to contemplate our own deaths but no way to know anything about what happens after that last breath. And it's the biggest elephant in the room, the great unknown, the after life, the thing that few people can ever accept despite it's inevitability.

It's also fall here in farm country, a beautiful time and harvest time. Time is up for the annuals, plants whose life cycles last one season are returning to earth in decomposing stalks and dispersed seed. From dandelion to corn to beans, how do they feel about death?

Quoting Wikipedia, "precise medical definitions of death become more problematic as science and medicine advance." Is plant death like human death? Just because we're smart enough to think about it doesn't mean we experience it any different. A termination in function of the heart and the brain means you're dead but many of the cells of which you are constituted are still alive. A person can be revived by a defibrillator after being clinically dead for several minutes. A person can be brain dead while the rest of the body functions are kept alive. Where is your soul held? Where were you before you were born and where will you go after?

What I'm questioning is how much the acceptance of science as the only authority is helping us come to terms with the world. Consider death as the permanent cessation of of vital bodily functions vs. death as the soul leaving the body.

In the final chapters of One Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka revels in the joy that is held in a grain of rice come winter though the rice plant has withered away. People can't prove most of the things they talk about today yet most would dismiss this without a second thought. And this is where scientific thinking fails us, telling us no evidence means no reason to believe. I think an exuberant grain of rice sounds nice, and if you want, you can see death as just a different expression of life. Science won't ever reassure us about death, resolve our queries of whether our spirits live on or if humans are inherently good. Science won't give us faith in karma or that someone is smiling down on you from above. But just because you have no evidence to believe in something doesn't mean there's nothing to believe in.