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Our thesis here is that there is a basic error in the deepest assumptions of Plato's idealism that pervades much of western philosophy.
The pragmatists offer the best way out. They place ideas properly in the space of cognition, in the space of what humans can be analytically aware of. Or maybe in a larger space of what any aware being could know, and to consider whether omniscient awareness is even meaningful.
Religion and philosophy can speculate with equal authority on the nature of the expanded spaces thus created and debate them to the end of time. What the mathematicians and physicists have invented to describe the universe is far more awesome than anything in the religious books. The faith that the scientist has that these relations hold for all time and space has to be stronger any religious faith. I'm not just talking about the measurements that cannot be made because of fundamental limitations, but also about the potentially knowable measurements not made because we just don't know how (yet). There is some fascinating work about a 'fourth phase of water', where experiments can be done that suggest there is a lot of hidden information in water and the ways it relates to other molecules in solution. Stuff that cells need to know in order to function.
(we may need a foundation here to be detailed in one of the chapters about artificial wisdom. The foundation is about our concepts for knowing: information, knowing, wisdom and such.)
The pragmatists offer the best way out. They place ideas properly in the space of cognition, in the space of what humans can be analytically aware of. Or maybe in a larger space of what any aware being could know, and to consider whether omniscient awareness is even meaningful.
Religion and philosophy can speculate with equal authority on the nature of the expanded spaces thus created and debate them to the end of time. What the mathematicians and physicists have invented to describe the universe is far more awesome than anything in the religious books. The faith that the scientist has that these relations hold for all time and space has to be stronger any religious faith. I'm not just talking about the measurements that cannot be made because of fundamental limitations, but also about the potentially knowable measurements not made because we just don't know how (yet). There is some fascinating work about a 'fourth phase of water', where experiments can be done that suggest there is a lot of hidden information in water and the ways it relates to other molecules in solution. Stuff that cells need to know in order to function.
(we may need a foundation here to be detailed in one of the chapters about artificial wisdom. The foundation is about our concepts for knowing: information, knowing, wisdom and such.)