Wisdom, science and waking up

Article on Independent.co.uk "Scientist who mapped human genome says we will be able to 'print' alien life from Mars

J. Craig Venter says the next revolution in genetics will come from synthetic biology, as we learn to design and 'print' organisms with computers

Biotechnological interventions and manipulations coupled with a lack of wisdom fuelled by corporate greed...
Why do I say a lack of wisdom?
Science is bereft of wisdom - in fact it does not really recognize it exists nor indeed any of the heart's qualities.
It put everything that it could not measure to one side and ignored it while getting to know an awful lot about an awful little.

Q1:

peterainbow responded to my original comment:

sorry but you can't tar everyone in science with that, some clearly are idiots, the man above being one of them, but he was stopped from patenting and making it closed knowledge by the human genome project which was carried out by other scientists opposed to his views.

so in conclusion just like everywhere else there are good people and bad people

A1: to peterainbow

Of course individuals exhibits varying characteristics - including those of an integrated consciousness - or lack thereof. So blame is not my game - but simply to point out that a greatly increased capacity to mess with fundamentally powerful aspects of our Biosphere - with a greatly decreased capacity to deal with the wholeness of any given situation. Good intentions pave the way to hell! Wisdom can discern where the motivations that are within the ideas are coming from. Private self interest uses 'public works' like a trojan horse! But while everyone is essentially playing the same game - they think its the only game in town! Responsibility is a capacity to respond - but without first discerning WHAT the current situation IS - reaction plays out a programmed plot of blind self-interest. Perhaps you have faith that balancing of powers of a 'free market' will result in the best world for all concerned??? It is not free, the winners make the rules for a corporate hegemony. 'People', good or bad, become the stuff to use for whatever purpose suits the current imaginations of those in 'power'.

Q2: A_Stone enjoined:

Science is a method, a kind of tool in a sense. The wisdom must come from us.

I do often wonder about what we can't measure, whether there is 'something' that is simply too nebulous and subtle to grasp with our big sicencey man-hands (albeit that have measured the voltage of a single electron), or whether such things are mere side-products of our consciousness (presuming that the latter quality is what brains have developed and not some kind of non-local cosmic entity in which we partake).

I suppose I can be a little chauvinistic and say there is science and the rest is just the human imagination and 'spiritual' mumbo-jumbo, but it behoves us all to keep a more open mind than that, however. We don't know everything, and it may be that I've just watched one Twilight Zone story too many, but there may be things in that 'evertything' that will surprise us.

A2: To A_Stone

Yes, a tool. Wisdom would be the intelligence as to whether or when and in what way to use it. Wisdom is not something that science can act or be brought to bear upon because it is a higher or more fundamentally inclusive intelligence.

The tool of science - operating at its most basic level, divides in order to rule. yet Actuality is an Indivisibility or true Individuality that the imagination can 'divide' out from so as to make rules. That is to say Consciousness is a self-programming expression of a more fundamental intent.

Now you may not follow me - or want to! - but in my way, I am in a similar business to the bio-geneticist - excepting I am observing within consciousness - not merely manipulating a structure of accumulated conceptual data - but the movement of consciousness itself. Whereas science - so far - imagines that it separates from what it observes (and exempts its personal consciousness from its findings), I feel consciousness is naturally revealed to a more fundamental awareness - IF it yields into a truly integrated purpose. This last sentence can include scientific purpose - if that is where the passion of your motivational interest inspires you. Rather than try to fix a 'broken world - that reflects a 'broken' self-sense, rewaken back into what actually and wholly works - is working now and always works. But we (humanly) tend to be addicted to our egocentricity - regardless that it 'breaks' our innate capacities and qualities of connectedness and communication. Where folly leads to a fall, humility, reconnects at ground zero. But perhaps not to repeat the same program in yet another disguise this time?

(I also added)

I cant verify this quote myself - but it is possible to explore it further:

"Science has developed electron microscopes that get resolutions measured in millions of diameters, yet they cannot research life processes, because an electron microscope kills what it looks at":http://www.ahealedplanet.net/m...

Q3a:

fabcat responded

 

No. You probably confuse business with science. Science is a method - the most successful and 'true' philosophy in history. Amongst other things it provides things that immoral and amoral people exploit. They have always exploited people - slavery, murder and cannabalism go as far back as the archeological record does - and they continue to do so. They do this DESPITE science, for behavioural psychology, amongst other disciplines, shows better ways to behave. It is the politics of the stupid against which you rail, not science.

And do you really think religion is wise? 

A3: What is the business of science? It exists within Human Consciousness and is a specific focus. The philosophy of science is conjecture or imagination - that is... thinking.

Moral integrity of a system is different from moral codes of attempt to manipulate or control a mind externally.
Science is one aspect of a movement of consciousness toward uncovering truth. Like everything in a polarised world-consciousness it has both wheat and tares - that is the search for truth and the manipulation of what it takes as it 'divine or given' inheritance to exploit along the lines of its own private agenda.
I would see science draw back from arrogance and re-Member itself to a wholeness of being. To annul the imaginary divorce with the heart and express a unified intelligence.
I do not seek to undermine the gains of either religion or science. While a polarised session fails to communicate, the 'government is shut down' (to use a current metaphor). Any kind of war between aspects of One Thing is to use your term 'stupid'. I don'tfeel to use such terms for living beings - but only to the thought processes that repeat errors without gaining insight to correct them.

Q3b:

fabcat responded:

'Wisdom' is a post-hoc self-referential approval of something of which one approves. It is not in itself a real thing and nor is it 'bigger' or 'greater' than science. That is like saying that hunger is 'greater' than farming.

A3b:

Fools may pretend to be wise.

Folly has faith in its own preferential thinking and is like a virtual layer running on top of reality - like a story about it that has become self-engrossed and focussed only on that which reinforces whatever story it identifies as itself.

Wisdom is a capacity to pause and question one's own story - including the cultural authorisations of one's story - by actually shutting up!

Wisdom and science cannot conflict because they are different orders of reality. But one can exercise science wisely or foolishly. One can also be blindly subscribed to prevailing ignorances that distort the foundations of a true understanding.

Unless one becomes wise to the way the mind works, one is merely running within a set of identifications that have more to do with mask than real presence.Science unmasked the control mentality of the Dark Ages - but do not for a moment expect that it does not play both sides of every conflict. The attempts to copyright or monopolise living systems and undermine and dominate alternate cultures via genetics and biomedical 'solutions' - as well as other weaponized financial and comms technologies, is well under way.

Science is 'married to' or very heavily distorted by the Corporately owned 'state'. Which is much more sophisticated than anything the Dark Ages could have imagined - for it runs hidden within the idea you are free-thinking- yet extends such thinking with a technological reach that will be able to determine what you are thinking and adjust it - whether you are aware of it or not or like it or not! Fitting you to a 'machine'. Perhaps you already believe you are one! Belief is not the mask of extra differentiation-validation - but the very 'fig-leaf' mentality by which we experience all things in its template.

fabcat rejoined:

I am afraid that this is drivel. Science is a particular approach to reality. It is a method of inquiry that provides true answers, rather than childish ones. It, by definition, studies only questions which may be answered, and that means that they must be falsifiable and amenable to repetition. It does npot address the kinds of questions that occupy some people, such as what it all means, or whether their dog bowl has a spirit, because these questions cannot be answered. It is arguable that these are non-questions, more properly considered from the viewpoint of mental health. Whatever the truth of that, the fact is that science has nothing to say about these artificicial quandries.
The exploitation of knowledge, for example scientific advances, is not in itself science. The problems arise not with the knowledge but with the misuse, which is firmly the responbsibility of the greedy and stupid business community, politicians and so forth. If you want to prevent it, overhaul politics and capitalism.
Sometimes one meets calls for scientists to somehow prevent this idiocy. They try, with various initiatives aimed at education and sometimes calls to reason. But these generally fail. It has for a while - a decade or two - been fashionable to asy that scientists should be 'responsible' for the misuse of knowledge by other people, and so should not learn things in case others behave as unprincipled parasites. The problem with this viewpoint is firstly that whatever 'our' scientists do, you can be sure that elesewhere others will do the research, and secondly that this appeal is basicaly the complaint of the spoilt child that blames someone else because they ate to much chocolate and then were sick - despite the admonitions not to.
Well, tough - there are 7 billion of us, and we share responsibility. If some people in Britain don't like seeing science budgets spent a certain way, then trhey have every right to educate themselves as to the science and to the public problems being addressed, and then enbgage in the political process to influence the funding. They do not do this. They also have a legal (but not moral) right to carp in complete ignorance and frequently drasticly ruin their own well-being and that of others as a consequence (and then blame someone else of course). But this has the consequence that we live in a stupid, chaotic and ignorant society.
Still, that is how it is;.

You can proclaim anything your want! - as you clearly demonstrate.
The one true path eh?
It only studies what can yield answers to its terms?
It approaches 'Reality'? No it deals with the external reflections to a mind of which it is utterly ignorant - because it is turned AWAY from what it sees as childish fears in adolescent presumptions of independence.
The exploitation of religious or spiritual discernment for manipulative or imaginative intent is not really religious either.
I see you DO have an axe to grind. But is it with me?
Science can be talked about in all sorts of ways and perhaps practising scientists who engage a spirit of curiosity with a passion for discovery and a methodology of exactitude - who are not compromised by peer pressures, funding incentives or personal ambitions to become a something in their own right - will be the first to say that science is greatly misrepresented. If they tried to speak out they may find they have no platform from which to speak.
I propose that the society we live in is not what it seems - but is the result of clearly identifiable thinking. As long as one 'wars' within the thinking, one cannot observe the 'battlefield'.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But this is true of an action of one aspect upon another. It is not true when the whole system shifts as one.
For every level of 'reality' there is the level which is aware OF it.
Putting reality OUTSIDE the process of its focussing, the templates of definition and meanings, and the actions of its discovering, is the IDEA that every thing is a thing in and of it self - and that the consciousness that has awareness (by whatever means) of a thing is itself a thing in and of its self, and that this 'self' is independent of its Source Nature, free from its defining relations and able to act out ITS OWN 'reality' via the extension of its own variants of meanings that are archetypal to its founding IDEA.
Now one can see a replication of this in 'discovering the Americas' (sic) - as if native intelligence has no validity. As if European IDEA is the one true Right to dominion.
Science 'discovers' according to scientific validations. It has its own 'ego' as a movement of institution and reputation. It therefore has its own filters and distortions - as well as some reactive tendency to engage in debunking what it feels superior to and self-authorized to
declare to be false - and in terms that reveal the personal agenda behind the act.

fabcat also responded to the quote above on electron microscopes:

Complete fallicy, from someone who understood nothing and thinks in childish allegory.
The electron microscope is just one tool. Since electrons collide with air molecules and hence bounce off in all directions, an electron microscope requires a vacuum. It is a tool very useful for looking at, say, a silicon chip or a dead moth's wing.
The processes in a cell are usually halted in a vacuum and hence it is an inappropriate tool for looking at a cell in action, but it can be used for looking at cell components, and has given much knowledge of structure - so even in the terms of the aphorism it is false. We also use other types of microscope, from the optical type with lenses to atomic force microscopes. We use other techniques, such as molecular biology and biochemistry, to study the biochemistry within. Life is a chemical process, so we use the various tools of chemistry and physics to study it. We can now build from scratch (ie from little tubs of chemicals bought on-line) functional cells that work, so we really do understand more than that author thinks.
The quotation makes as much sense as saying that Man has made gorgeous jewelry for religion but spends almost nothing on clean water for the dying children it purports to 'save'. There are detail problems with that - for example, it is not Mankind that makes religious ratifacts, but particular power structures within societies - but the statement is in fact more true than the noinsense about electron microscopes.
We could say that I like strawberries and yet know nothing of the language of the mountains from which the plant originated. That is true, but a falose comparison - just as comparingf electron microscopes with the state of our knoweldge of living things is a false comparison.
Whenever you meet an aphorism of that sort, you can be sure of two things - the originator does not understand what they are talking about and they have an axe to grind.
As for you, you carefully described your lack of scientific background so as to avoid giving undue weight to the aphorism. That is either a reasonable and good thing to do, or a cynical use of a fallacy together with a trick to avoid censure. I suspect (and hope) the first and would strongly encourage you to explore science - it is interesting, beautiful, and not at all 'hard', merely badly taught.

I respond to fabcat:

I didn't say it was verified - I said I hadnt verified it but had read it. I gave the link to the article where I read it. The context of that article leads me to be open to the idea that the means of 'observation' can influence or affect the 'state of the 'observed'.
So I do not feel to dig myself from a situation that you are 'seeing' me in for I feel your mind is 'putting' me there - and it simply is not true.
The essential foundation of taking things apart to understand them can ONLY discover crude mechanism. As instruments extend the senses, subtler aspects of crude mechanism are uncovered - that are in such multiple processes of communication and function as to be quite beyond a linear cause and effect model.
I don't have an axe to grind so much as a desire for a larger cultural conversation. When comment becomes personalized as to invalidate others for having a view - then a 'defence mechanism' has been activated. Once a polarized mutuality of self righteousness is enacted - an apparent barrier is erected and maintained as if it were actually there!

fabcat ends with:

 

I think perhaps you need to return to your therapy. You may find a concrete program of study helpful in distinguishing between reality and fantasy, so that gives two reasons to try it sometime. In the meantime I wish you well, in both senses, and good-bye.

I respond:

 

Thankyou. I accept your well wishing - for there is something to join in. But to close off with personal comments of a patronizing and derisory nature does you no service. Descriptions of reality 'work' or don't work for the purpose intended. Reality ITSELF is not something we can directly perceive because it is also being all that is present as the experience and abilities of our present local experience. One cannot turn around and see what awareness is to see what awareness is of. One can only become aware of its effects or manifestations. The positing of awareness as some freak that matter picks up along its 'evolutionary' path to becoming a scientist amidst a Vastness in which its insignificance is somewhat mitigated by an ongoing experience of becoming something valid (in its own right).