GENERAL COMMENTS ON THIS THREAD:
First of all, it is almost impossible for one, a modern of the
post-Renaissance expansion, to try to divine what primitives and ancients
actually thought unless there is enough surviving original material in which
to immerse oneself.
This being said, it extremely easy to use flawed hindsight to impute to
ancient science, belief systems that they never held - or even to validate
such beliefs by correlation with modern beliefs.
Secondly, fairly lengthy reading of the older Hindu literature shows that
there was an empirical approach... though it was based on introspective
analysis of the "world within". The ancient Hindus compared many such
observations, and there was actually a fair amount of dissent. All output of
such observation can't be summarily dismissed as groupthink.
This tradition was expanded into two schemata: a minute dissection of the
atoms of consciousness; and an application to cosmology & cosmogony.
The basic premise was that, paraphrasing Bertrand Russell ( speaking in
respect of his own physical epistemological perspective ), ultimate
empiricism lay within the realm of the state of consciousness; and
everything else - including the macroscopic physical world and the process
and contents of consciousness themselves - were solely inferences.
This was the hindu basis for unifying the physical & mental Universe... from
moving from a primitive human picture of Case Based Reasoning to a Theory of
Everything.
By working at the physical Universe "inside out" as it were, by assuming a
single Universal Entity and viewing all physics as interaction of the entity
with itself, the ancient hindus came upon a picture that bears some vague
similarity to a massively entangled universe that we ourselves are currently
uncovering, even though we have trodden quite a different path.
I think the papers under discussion are not meant to be definitive evidence
of any high level theoretical physics of an Aryan past... but a clue that
may or may not lead to paydirt as our own physics progresses to something
more than the travesty that it currently is.
Isaac Newton please forgive me.
CYMM
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:36 MDT