Barry Long—Purveyor of Fine Bullshit
See if you can distill a coherent point out of this passage:
It (the Big Bang theory) would be really effective, and an astonishing scientific advance, if the theorising observer realised that as intelligence he is reducing all that he is seeing and imagining, including himself, to within a split second of the non-existent now-point in his own brain, the point of reality and the emergent point of the whole universe as far as man and sense can perceive it. Then the theory would be absolutely correct.
The scientist would not be concerned with a fabricated beginning billions of years ago but with himself, intelligence, being only a split second away from the pre-existent state, his own and everything's source - the motionless pure intellect or consciousness. Universe and man as intelligence would then unite in one sublime realised truth and the way would be open for scientific entry into the new epoch of time and knowledge beyond light-speed, sense and past.
Barry Long: The Origins of Man And the Universe, 2nd ed., Chapter 14
Um. Someone is full of shit.
No, actually, I like a few of the perspectives he seems to hold. I'm only going by his Wikipedia article. Although he seems like he would be something as an asshole as a friend or husband.
Advocating a simple life of few activities (his education is only in Indian mysticism) implies advocating uselessness to the society-at-large. I like to pretend I want to contribute as little to the world as possible in my career, but, really, that seems immoral. People have to be interdependent, and, with the world population as large as it is, that necessitates complex lives and specialization of careers. If a person spends their life as a philosophical ascetic, and telling everyone else that, in order to be happy, they need to do the same thing, then they're materially hurting the well-being of many other people through inaction.
True, it can be argued that they are providing some sort of spiritual support for those people, but to this I can argue:
- Being a material and a physical aid to other people are not mutually exclusive occupations.
- Bullshit. I personally need no other peoples' opinions or advice for "spiritual" guidance or happiness. I manufacture that that shit in my own mind, and I'm not planning on exporting. By being only a provider of spiritual goods (a phrase as laughable as "financial products"), Long is contradicting his own recommendation of "abandonment of religious tradition in favour of direct experience", and suggesting the defensibility of leisure class of priests.
Ok, I'm out of steam now. Damn philosophers.
Tom's Picasa Web Albums
