Oh! I wonder if we have been talking at cross-purposes this whole time. Because, yes -- I would have to say that (donning my scientific/atheistic hat) I believe in the Scientific Method and not particularly in the Forces of Nature. When I've said "science" in this whole discussion, I actually mean the Scientific Method; I agree with Hawking. I don't really have faith in gravity or quantum mechanics in that sense, and now I see why this seems so weird to you. Because it seems weird to me too.
Because theories of science are always subject to change. Having faith in Newtonian mechanics would be silly, even though for hundreds of years they were the accepted Way the World Works, because we now know that they're only an approximation, that at relativistic speeds or at the quantum mechanical level Newtonian mechanics fails. But of course science is always like that. Tomorrow we might find that our understanding of particle physics is totally wrong. (Probably not today -- my grad school advisor was a little sad that they found the Higgs and validated what we know, because it would have been much more interesting, he said, if they hadn't!) As a scientist, I don't believe in having faith in a scientific theory; that nullifies the whole point of it being a theory.
But I wouldn't say that I have faith in rules that aren't understood. What I have faith in is that induction will always work, that logic will always work. That mathematics continues to be consistent. That mathematics continues to be a useful model to describe the world. That making predictions and experimentally validating them remains a valid way to understand what's going on. That the universe really does work according to laws that are discoverable and that are mathematically beautiful. That we will continue to understand more and more about the world works -- if gravity stopped working tomorrow, we'll eventually be able to understand why, and how that plays into a universe in which gravity did work up until now. This is what I mean when I use the vocabulary of faith to describe how I feel about science -- not the results of science, but the process of science. And I do have a relationship with it; these assumptions are fundamental to the way I interact with the world.
(And it's not so different from a religious faith in some ways; faith in God doesn't mean one has faith the sun will come up either, because God could of course decide, for whatever reason, that the sun wouldn't come up today. But either way, we might as well plan our lives under the assumption that the sun will come up tomorrow.)
There are of course various philosophical reasons why one might not buy in to such a faith (in process-of-science), or individual tenets of that faith. But something deep in me really does believe, in some fundamental unshaken way, in all those tenets. ...This is becoming a very interesting and somewhat disturbing discussion for me, thank you for bringing it up. I had never articulated it in exactly this way before. I also wonder if this is part of what disturbed you about "Complexity," this worldview coming through, because now I'm certainly a little disturbed. Perhaps if I'd just written straight lighthearted crack, without trying to transpose the serious bits, there would not be this issue at all!
(I don't know why I keep thinking about Ted Chiang, but I think his story Division by Zero is relevant.)
As for your other point, hmm. I also don't think I agree that Moses and Aron can't function without the other personally in Schoenberg (although I agree with you in general; I do think that's the case in "Waters," and the case I was trying to make because I do believe that with that structure of family undercut, they're both lost) because Moses seems to me to be very sure of himself suddenly in Act III, in a way he's not in Act II, and also because for the first time, as far as I know, we see Moses address the people (or, well, an alle) instead of Aaron, at the very end, without Aaron as intermediary. (At least, that is what my libretto says; my memory of Straub-Huilet is that they don't really stage it quite like that.)
I wonder if Schoenberg would have said (about Act III as it currently stands) that casting Aaron out was what let Moses finally communicate with the people. Though again I'd like to think that he would have changed it around :) because -- although I think it is supported by the text of Act III -- I don't agree with that at all!
Because yes -- like you're saying, so Schoenberg!Moses wins the argument, well, yay for him -- but when one actually considers it as a real person, it's still a tragedy, because what has he lost: Miriam's dead, Aaron's cast out/dead, he's so obnoxious that I can't imagine that Zipporah likes him at all at this point -- and without family, without that to balance him, what is left for him?
And yes, that's right about Miriam -- she loves Moses and Aaron, and what she wants more than anything else is for them to stop fighting and realize that they love each other -- of course she'd be even happier if they agreed with her philosophy, everyone likes to be agreed with, but whatever. (Interestingly, I had almost exactly this conversation with my beta -- "What does Miriam really want here?" and that was my answer.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-01-04 05:40 am (UTC)Because theories of science are always subject to change. Having faith in Newtonian mechanics would be silly, even though for hundreds of years they were the accepted Way the World Works, because we now know that they're only an approximation, that at relativistic speeds or at the quantum mechanical level Newtonian mechanics fails. But of course science is always like that. Tomorrow we might find that our understanding of particle physics is totally wrong. (Probably not today -- my grad school advisor was a little sad that they found the Higgs and validated what we know, because it would have been much more interesting, he said, if they hadn't!) As a scientist, I don't believe in having faith in a scientific theory; that nullifies the whole point of it being a theory.
But I wouldn't say that I have faith in rules that aren't understood. What I have faith in is that induction will always work, that logic will always work. That mathematics continues to be consistent. That mathematics continues to be a useful model to describe the world. That making predictions and experimentally validating them remains a valid way to understand what's going on. That the universe really does work according to laws that are discoverable and that are mathematically beautiful. That we will continue to understand more and more about the world works -- if gravity stopped working tomorrow, we'll eventually be able to understand why, and how that plays into a universe in which gravity did work up until now. This is what I mean when I use the vocabulary of faith to describe how I feel about science -- not the results of science, but the process of science. And I do have a relationship with it; these assumptions are fundamental to the way I interact with the world.
(And it's not so different from a religious faith in some ways; faith in God doesn't mean one has faith the sun will come up either, because God could of course decide, for whatever reason, that the sun wouldn't come up today. But either way, we might as well plan our lives under the assumption that the sun will come up tomorrow.)
There are of course various philosophical reasons why one might not buy in to such a faith (in process-of-science), or individual tenets of that faith. But something deep in me really does believe, in some fundamental unshaken way, in all those tenets. ...This is becoming a very interesting and somewhat disturbing discussion for me, thank you for bringing it up. I had never articulated it in exactly this way before. I also wonder if this is part of what disturbed you about "Complexity," this worldview coming through, because now I'm certainly a little disturbed. Perhaps if I'd just written straight lighthearted crack, without trying to transpose the serious bits, there would not be this issue at all!
(I don't know why I keep thinking about Ted Chiang, but I think his story Division by Zero is relevant.)
As for your other point, hmm. I also don't think I agree that Moses and Aron can't function without the other personally in Schoenberg (although I agree with you in general; I do think that's the case in "Waters," and the case I was trying to make because I do believe that with that structure of family undercut, they're both lost) because Moses seems to me to be very sure of himself suddenly in Act III, in a way he's not in Act II, and also because for the first time, as far as I know, we see Moses address the people (or, well, an alle) instead of Aaron, at the very end, without Aaron as intermediary. (At least, that is what my libretto says; my memory of Straub-Huilet is that they don't really stage it quite like that.)
I wonder if Schoenberg would have said (about Act III as it currently stands) that casting Aaron out was what let Moses finally communicate with the people. Though again I'd like to think that he would have changed it around :) because -- although I think it is supported by the text of Act III -- I don't agree with that at all!
Because yes -- like you're saying, so Schoenberg!Moses wins the argument, well, yay for him -- but when one actually considers it as a real person, it's still a tragedy, because what has he lost: Miriam's dead, Aaron's cast out/dead, he's so obnoxious that I can't imagine that Zipporah likes him at all at this point -- and without family, without that to balance him, what is left for him?
And yes, that's right about Miriam -- she loves Moses and Aaron, and what she wants more than anything else is for them to stop fighting and realize that they love each other -- of course she'd be even happier if they agreed with her philosophy, everyone likes to be agreed with, but whatever. (Interestingly, I had almost exactly this conversation with my beta -- "What does Miriam really want here?" and that was my answer.)