71–80 of 515 posts
Third year math phys and its accompanying book (McQuarrie). It blew my mind when I learned McQuarrie is a chemist.
Engineering's role in society:
Schumacher's "Small is beautiful" and "Guide for the perplexed" was the straw finally broke me free of the technocrat worldview. (Although Illich's argument that a car's average speed is 3mph made me question my love for cars)
I had a very poor model of what people meant when they spoke of divinity, god, and religion until reading the Tao Te Ching. Whenever I heard god, I just thought of sky daddy. The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.
What is it about that book that made it click? There's an awful lot of people who believe in sky daddy. What did they miss?
If you Are extremely analytical, maybe when someone says “God”, do a text replace with “the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe”. If what the other person is saying still makes sense, then they aren’t a sky daddy believer.
The universe doesn’t want or command, but it certainly does require and allow.
You share an incredibly tight light cone with all things on earth, living and non-living, so you can assume that your causal relationships with everything and everyone around you are highly intertwined.
In its first chapter there's the best and only compelling argument I've ever read in favour of spirituality and why people believe in God. Even an ultra-atheist like me finally got why people have faith. There are obvious blind spots in science and logic that can't be explained away with more theorems.
If logic is pointed thought, it's good to recognize there's some things that can only be seen by unfocusing your mind. Some shadows only appear in your peripheral vision.
I say this as a native English speaker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSuXS_zqRec
However, what generally happens is something 'clicks' and you get it for a while, then you realize you only had a low-level understanding, so then you get into higher-level abstractions, and it 'clicks' again, and so on.
Teaching the history and story of the scientists who made different genetic discoveries, and along the timeline they made those discoveries, made everything make sense.
Brent Yorgey's Introduction to Haskell: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis1940/spring13/ Rudin's "Principles of Mathematical Analysis" is a brilliantly lucid introduction to the topic that takes a completely unconventional approach.