magdes15

Great Dark Age of humanity when the knowledge of
what is - the magnificence experienced by Buzz
Aldrin, the thought or mind spoken of by Parmenides,
Plato, Plotinus, the Vedas, Christ - was systematically
eradicated and replaced by the illusory knowledge of
what is not - the desolation.
* * *
When the Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa visited
Nepal in 1975, he talked to some school children
about his flight to the Moon. One of the kids asked,
"Who did you see there?" Roosa answered, "No one.
There is nothing there."
Later he learned that one of the teachers took the
child aside to clarify what Roosa had said. The teacher
told the child the astronaut didn't know what he was
talking about. For as all Nepalese know, the Moon is
where the souls of the dead go. It could not be true
that "nothing is there" because Heaven is there.
Stuart Roosa and his wife felt bad about this after it
happened. They wished they had been briefed more
thoroughly beforehand about the culture they were
visiting. This means, presumably, that Roosa felt he
could, given adequate information, have framed an
answer to the child's question that created the illusion
that Roosa did indeed believe he had seen, on the
Moon, something. Even though he thought he saw
nothing.
In the age of science, the belief that Heaven is in the
Moon seems quaint. From another perspective, the
belief that you can solve all your problems if you can
just acquire enough facts, also seems sort of quaint.
Speaking and thinking are the same as what is. This
does not mean, however, that we invent our own
reality. Both Parmenides and Neils Bohr roughly agree
on these points. Parmenides declares categorically that
what is, is, and that what is not, is not. This is not a
matter decided by thought, but shaped by thought.
Bohr says quantum physics indicates that an observer's
mind plays a role, complementarily, in the results of an
experiment. But this does not mean the mind
re-formulates the structure of molecules.
There are illusions and there are truths about reality.
The natural world is (apparently) an illusion of some
kind. It is an image, science explains, formed by
subatomic particles. In Plato's terms, this description
is nearly as far away from reality as it's possible to be,
and not be in the (non-)realm of what is not. Closer to
the truth will be a correct opinion of the nature of the
object. This includes the object's image as a starting
point (which is probably what Parmenides the
naturalist meant), but also the actual object of
knowledge, which is the essential being of the thing.
Probably, in the same way that we can't know exactly
what or where an electron is, we can't objectively
know essential being. We are faced with our own
theories and descriptions. To speak is to think.

Science is an intellectual edifice made of words. It is a
vast, incomprehensibly detailed description of physical
objects and events together with theories about the
objects and events. If you tried to grasp all of science
whole, in your mind, you would come up against a
swamp of inconsistencies, logical contradictions,
unexplainable peculiarities like lunar transient events
and appearing and disappearing subatomic particles.
You would find almost nothing about your actual
inner experiences of beauty, conscience, courage,
temperance, evil and so on; most scientific discussions
of them would divert from the actual experiences and
refer to them as chemical activities or as symbols
without concrete reality.
It all sounds very desolate. It gives you a desolate
feeling, as though you had looked directly at the
surface of the Moon and seen nothing. No one is
there.