Austin Improv

in fact, i'm going to quote myself. this is part of an entry from my blog written at the end of the spring semester:

this moment is better than anything else - it even beats a great show. this is the end of the semester glow. i feel really good about it because i think i just rocked my population genetics exam (both the in-class and take-home portions). it wasn't just regurgitating information, it was thinking hard and stretching my knowledge and i did it well.

the fact that i get this much pleasure from school and a job well done reminds that this is where i want to be more than anywhere else. i don't get this feeling of accomplishment from anything else that i do, and i doubt i ever will. this is what i need to feel satisfied. this is what my mind and body were built for . . .

deroosisonfire wrote:Maybe scientists do not discount the parts of life that you value most, John, because they think those parts are useless - maybe those areas just do not provide the same kind of satisfaction to a scientist.

Exactly! I didn't mean to suggest that they should feel otherwise. I meant to suggest that different people experience the world differently. So to someone of a primarily emotional or spiritual orientation, an analytical or scientific oreientation feels very cold and bleak, whereas to a scientist, an emotional or spiritual orientation seems very unfocused and vague and sloppy and pointless.

My point is that we want to make sweeping judgments about how the universe is, but really we're all limited to our own subjective experience, and we have no idea how it might be shaping our worldview, BECAUSE WE HAVE NOTHING TO COMPARE IT TO. We each get one life -- even if you're Hindu, you only get one at a time -- and that's our frame of reference.

All I was really saying was that people who orient their lives around spiritual experience aren't necessarily deceiving themselves or anyone else; they're just responding to a different set of stimuli in a different way. I have no objection to someone deciding that a logical, analytical approach to the universe is the most fulfilling to him or her. I DO have a problem with someone unilaterally declaring that to be the only legitimate approach and saying, essentially, that other approaches are wrong because they're not this one.

I also think (or hope) that most scientists don't do that, in the same way I think (or hope) that most religious people are not anti-scientific fundamentalist idiots. Yet.