Is this reference to the blind alley of the shopping list, or is it that part set in Rue Reclus?

Most of the time, what I get paid for as a geologist, is not to find a Truth, but just to document what is there. And what might be there. The beginning of science is observation, then synthesis, then thesis. I get paid for observation, my clients usually don’t care about synthesis, and thesis is reserved for publications.

I was privileged to have as teachers many of the old guard geologists, the ones who went through the Plate Tectonic Revolution. For the most part, the Geosynclinal model worked for them, based upon the evidence at hand. All of them, while being a bit embarrassed at holding to such a theory, eagerly embraced Plate Tectonics as a better theory, once the evidence was provided, thanks toMarie Tharp, who was just doing her job, and, not, in my opinion, trying to find a Universal Truth.

Often, Truth is found by not looking for it. But you have to be looking.

Does that make any sense?

Engineers and doctors have been doing useful work, treating diseases and injuries as well as building and fixing things, for centuries, long before any scientific knowledge or even consensus existed about the systems they worked on.

Scientists periodically throw out all their old ideas and explanations and replace them with new ones that work better. The fact the old ones sometimes gave excellent results too is conveniently overlooked. Physics has been completely overhauled in the lifetime of those alive today(Classical vs Modern). So has geology, biology, and astronomy (plate tectonics, DNA, the Big Bang), all within MY lifetime.

The smart man bets on scientific method, but the Morgellon affair teaches us a lot is left to be learned, not just pure facts, but in methodology and philosophy, too.

If physics and chemistry aren’t settled yet, then its not likely the social and behavioral sciences are all wrapped up either. Think Rupert Sheldrake, Halton Arp, Julian Jaynes. There is a lot of unfinished business, and you never know you’ve been lost up a blind alley until after you’ve found your way out.

Have you read Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum?

Journalism, too, encourages just this kind of certainty. Facts, assessed and checked. Liars exposed, truth-tellers elevated. Good guys and bad guys. The satisfaction of firm conclusions, of nuance erased, of reality tamed. In my younger years, I was driven to the ends of my own sanity by the desire for this form of truth — an unthreatening, finished article that is cauterized and stitched and does not bleed. Does she love me? Is she faithful? Will she love me next week? Next year? Did she love him more? Does she desire him more? Will we stay in love for ever?

https://medium.com/matter/the-itch-nobody-can-scratch-4d980e3ac519

I’m thinking about buying the book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1468308181/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1468308181&linkCode=as2&tag=m0eb2-20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvGJvzwKqg0

I’ve been thinking about this conversation for several days now; but truth be told, we’ve all thought about it before, one way or another, stretching back through our family trees. It’s what we get for having evolved that colossal pile of gray matter stuck in our skulls.

But that part of the brain that is uniquely human is stuck on top of other bits that came form our family tree, but back to apes, and the primates, mammals, amphibians, fish… It’s cobbled together with all these bits of the flotsam of billions of years of change. It’s amazing it works as well as it does. With all those synapses and neurons and strange chemicals running around it is nearly chaos up there. At the edge of chaos is a fractal landscape of shifting patterns. And that’s where our thoughts reside.

Rational it is not. But we can aspire. Observant, creative, intuitive, capable of extremes and subtlety, yes. Yet prone to selective observation, creatively confusing intuition for reality, from the many little lies we tell ourselves over and over to the big lies that wind up hurting others. We tend to be the absolute heroes of our own internal dialog, even when engaged in victimhood. We don’t like to hear our ideas are wrong, we’ve stubborn patterns of thought, it’s not easy to kick them out of their groves and into others. I like to see my thoughts as strange attractors, bound to return to similar results unless the basic formulas are changed. Our thoughts ride a sort of space time fabric, pulled into the gravity wells of the thoughts we’ve thought before.

Through experience, the more we realize how big this landscape of experience is and we try to find comfort in it’s infinity. Also, the gravity wells are deeper, the strange attractors more statistically defined, the grooves deeper – like a well-played vinyl record.

And that’s just the contents of one skull. Start arranging more skulls as partners-families-tribes-clans-villages-cities-states-nations and it’s the same thing: fractal weirdness at the edge of chaos: patterns within patterns;seemingly inescapable, but certainly evolving through time.

Perhaps that’s a bit too much philosophy from a simple geologist who grew up riding in the back of a crowded station wagon. Over the years, due to the slings and arrows of my life, the various things I’ve learned and experienced, I don’t really search for Meaning all that much anymore. At least not with a capital “M”. I like to learn but know I’ll never know all that much, in the big scheme, anyway, but I’ll suck up much as I can while I’m here. If that perspective is out the back of a station wagon, so be it.

But most of all, it is the conversations we have with each other in that station wagon that make it all decidedly not futile. Some are looking forward, some backwards, some sideways.

The article is not the point of this post, it is the commentary itself. In fact, posting the article would probably just obscure the points I and my correspondent are trying to make. That’s why I left it out.

“The rabbis study the text, and comment on it. And other rabbis comment on the commentaries.”

I watched some “yellow science” on TV this weekend: the Search for Noah’s Ark. Total nonsense, of course, but otherwise intelligent, articulate and I believe decent men are throwing themselves into these pointless endeavors, desperate to find some
meaning in their lives by looking for bits of fossilized timber on remote Turkish mountainsides. We may see it as a wild goose chase, (perhaps a snipe hunt is a better metaphor), but we can offer them no answers they can accept.

It isn’t just the world of supermarket checkout line anomalism and Sunday supplement cryptozoology I’m talking about. How we view history is used as evidence of how we should organize our communities, our lives, even our work. We search for meaning where there is none. You know no amount of geology, astronomy and biology is going to resolve the debates on Creationism, either.

I sometimes wonder if our fascination with science isn’t as ultimately futile as my friend’s stoned Pontiac passengers, facing backwards as they ride to some unknowable future.

Exploring the puzzle is a ‘koan’,where the experience of seeking the truth is more important then the truth itself.

At best we have models that fit the data of the past to anticipate the observations of the future.