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Modes of acquiring Perfect Knowledge!
The main purpose of this session is to distinguish the Vedic method of knowledge from other methods. Humanity has different methods of knowledge available to it. I hold that only through Vedic knowledge can we grade the validity of these methods. This session examines four such methods: empiricism, skepticism, rationalism and authoritative testimony. I hold that Western science isn't capable of comparing and contrasting the validity of one method of knowledge against others. Why? Because its own basis is too narrow. That basis was summed up by Albert Einstein in Out of My Late Years (1936):
Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occuring complexes of sense impression ... and we attribute to them a meaning the meaning of bodily objects.
Einstein admitted that this method cannot even prove the existence of the external world. So how can we be sure that the bodily objects scientists study are real things? Aren't such objects just mental interpretations of a jumble of sense data that, with a nonhuman mind, or even with a human mind culturally different than ours, could be interpreted in a very different way? Wouldn't a different interpretation of sense data reveal a very different world? Which interpretation is the right one? And how, by this method Einstein described, can we ever know whether there is a reality outside the range of our sense experiences? These questions are not for science to answer. They are for philosophy. There is a difference between the scientific approach and the philosophical approach. Substance and Shadow takes the latter; it is therefore not remarkable that a scientifically-minded person could have a problem with my book. Of course, science began in philosophy. But it cut its ties to the parent as it accelerated down the narrow path of the study of bodily objects. Professor Lewis Wolpert, erudite biologist at London's University College, writes that most scientists today are ignorant of philosophical issues. Though at the beginning of the twentieth century a professional scientist normally had a background in philosophy,
Today things are quite different, and the stars of modern science are more likely to have been brought up on science fiction ... the physicist who is a quantum mechanic has no more knowledge of philosophy than the average car mechanic.
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By Rasajna Dasa
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The main purpose of this session is to distinguish the Vedic method of knowledge from other methods. Humanity has different methods of knowledge available to it. I hold that only through Vedic knowledge can we grade the validity of these methods. This session examines four such methods: empiricism, skepticism, rationalism and authoritative testimony. I hold that Western science isn't capable of comparing and contrasting the validity of one method of knowledge against others. Why? Because its own basis is too narrow. That basis was summed up by Albert Einstein in Out of My Late Years (1936):
Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occuring complexes of sense impression ... and we attribute to them a meaning the meaning of bodily objects.
Einstein admitted that this method cannot even prove the existence of the external world. So how can we be sure that the bodily objects scientists study are real things? Aren't such objects just mental interpretations of a jumble of sense data that, with a nonhuman mind, or even with a human mind culturally different than ours, could be interpreted in a very different way? Wouldn't a different interpretation of sense data reveal a very different world? Which interpretation is the right one? And how, by this method Einstein described, can we ever know whether there is a reality outside the range of our sense experiences? These questions are not for science to answer. They are for philosophy. There is a difference between the scientific approach and the philosophical approach. Substance and Shadow takes the latter; it is therefore not remarkable that a scientifically-minded person could have a problem with my book. Of course, science began in philosophy. But it cut its ties to the parent as it accelerated down the narrow path of the study of bodily objects. Professor Lewis Wolpert, erudite biologist at London's University College, writes that most scientists today are ignorant of philosophical issues. Though at the beginning of the twentieth century a professional scientist normally had a background in philosophy,
Today things are quite different, and the stars of modern science are more likely to have been brought up on science fiction ... the physicist who is a quantum mechanic has no more knowledge of philosophy than the average car mechanic.