An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything
So after reading MacIntyre, I really think I can use scale to reconcile Aristotle, Liberalism, and Christianity.* Christy, it would seem, agrees with me. My wife does not. Or at least, she wishes that I would go about doing so in a "normal" way ... like, um, going to school. Reading on the bus doesn't count for some reason.
Jessica: I love you, but ... BLAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
:^D
Printed it out for the bus ride tomorrow.
* Christianity and Liberalism are easy: The basic justification for Jesus, Paul and John is, "God told me so." Preference. The force of personality. (See also.)
And MacIntyre's Aristotle? Scale explains tradition really well: Traditions are composed of persons, and these interact with each other. So traditions do resolve into the force of personality ("preferences" in MacIntyre), but to rationally justify a course of action is precisely to fit that preference into a conceptual scheme that is larger than the preferring person. Traditions are necessarily in conflict because abstraction always forces one to emphasize certain low-level realities over others.
2 comments:
Yeesh ... a few thoughts:
- I couldn't have read this on the bus without a Kindle, because I needed Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia is truly amazing: ten years ago it would have taken me several orders of magnitude longer to even read this at all.
- The guy both has a Ph.D. and is kind of quack-ish, while also being poor. So my wife isn't necessarily wrong, per se...
- I got this joke: "4 simultaneous 24 hour Days within only 1 rotation of 4 quadrant Earth!"
- Traditions are everywhere.
- "Always" is too strong, and I need to understand Aristotle on accuracy.
Ok, I can't stop. Here's a sane-seeming write-up (via). Bottom line: No new non-specific TOE is news, and the real news is the LHC:
"Everyone agrees that the first step in validating any of the potential Theories of Everything, or TOEs (including Dr Lisi's), will
be the results from the truly fantastic Large Hadron Collider at CERN. ...
"And from this truly colossal enterprise, involving thousands of people, millions of pounds, kilometres of tunnel, and machines 80 metres high built to tolerances of a couple of dozen protons across, we may learn just a very little more about the structure of the world we live in, at a level very much smaller than the merely subatomic.
"As it happens, CERN has also brought us the World Wide Web (free) and all manner of other benefits, including better MRI scanners and other material improvements in industry, healthcare, and dozens of other sectors.
"But what matters is that they are asking questions just in order to know more. And they're prepared to go to extraordinary lengths just to know that little bit more. As I said, it makes you proud to be human."
It does make me proud! I wonder if we'll blow ourselves up first, though. :^(
At least we invented e-books first.
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