Phoenix
by Dale J. Sprague
White Papers
Science
Intoxicated by so many dark adventures, so many bright probabilities..the power of reason, the edge of oblivion when simple emotion becomes light, can cause its bearer to be compulsive, addictive..addiction to ensight.
What matter is, is like the matter of what one, self aware as I, wants to know for a special need alive and well, at a particular place, among specific things, at a certain time in respect to day and night, by a sea under a sun, and the position that the Earth is around it. Science is relentless, selfless, and unforgiving. Between cause and effect, not one signature of rhetoric is allowed. But reality in the sense of capital R, reminds us that while the self'perceiving eye does its best to detach itself from itself, to perceive at all, it must remain attached in order to perceive..no matter how fine that tether may be. Inevitably, an evolving science makes that tether, finer and finer..but no finer than what is needed to objectively predict with certain confidence level, or margin of error, plus or minus this or that. And should someone's thumb print be discovered between cause and effect, causing a cause to have its own irreproducible character, it is immediately identified, and if measurable, incorporated into science as a data point..or otherwise promptly deported to some other order of knowledge..truncated, as it were, and ignored, or absorbed into some measure of analysis of error. Science relentlessly, stalks subjective personality.
Science has imbedded software..to work a'constantly, keeping the air as clear as possible between cause and effect. And it can be argued that a scientific pov is as aesthetic as any other. But what aesthetics indeed! for which an aspiring scientist must pay. To know, one cannot be spontaneously, of the world they know. The researcher is cloistered by a passion for ensight, a passion to predict. And the price to know is paid with the removal one has gained..from feeling the life. A searcher readily exchanges feeling for knowledge..umbro'd ego for the high of light.
Yet ultimately, if the most knowledgeable, the one most removed, the most isolated, was to be discovered, I would expect to find only some cyborg, set on automatic, a'doing its programmed chores, adjusting half'lifes of elements and particles..but if gone a'wry, humankind shall arrive just in time to switch the computer to manual, repair it, and promptly turn it back to auto, and return to some new cutting edge.
Though science is for the humble, it is not for the meek or weak. With the gain of knowledge and respective acquisition of power..and perhaps a little vanity, if there is such a thing, one correspondingly loses the ability to generate and assimilate more knowledge, having become high on vainglorious power, and lower on the humility required to acquire more knowledge.
As unforgiving as science may be, as ruthless as it may be stalking personality, and as painfully exact it strives to be, its selfless almost irritating nature does deliver. One of the merits of its colorless mind is that..its mind does not know failure! A venture never fails! Science has no personal values. Whether thesis or antithesis, whether accepted or rejected hypothesis, science always moves..with the wind, or tacking it.