Yabby,

Yes it is all about symbols. How else to transmit message and meaning? And you can reduce it to the cold bare boards of neuroscience as much as you will, but you'd miss the sublime essence of human experience.

Einstein said:
"It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."

Poirot, symbols depend on the eye of the beholder. Now take modern
art. A true story, from when I was living in Europe. Picasso
was an the unveiling of one of his paintings and a woman in the
crowd went up to him and asked him what the painting meant to him.
"One million francs, Madame", he replied.

Squeers,
>>Calling yourself a rationalist doesn't make you one. I'm sure we all think we're rational.<<
How right you are! One cannot define “being rational” - only appropriate it - because the attempted chain of definitions sooner or later becomes circular.

Of course, one can similarly say that “calling yourself a moral person doesn't make you one. I'm sure we all think we're moral!”

Indeed, calling your opponent in a debate irrational (as some atheists do) or immoral (as some theists do) is just name-calling and does not lead to mutual understanding.

Coming to your exposition, I think I can understand it better than your previous essays. Thanks.

You can look at reality studied by social scientists and/or represented in arts (or religion) through a (natural) scientist’s “epistemological prism” useful when investigating physical reality. And you can go about it the other way around, i.e. look at physical reality investigated by (natural) scientists - notably physicists - through a social scientists’s “epistemological prism” useful when looking at reality studied by social scientists and/or represented in arts.

I think e.g. Dawkins and co are “guilty” of the first one-sidedness, you of the second. None of this is wrong, only gives you a distorted image of what you are trying to understand. Your approach offers only a limited extension of what I have known about philosophy of science, however, it offers a good insight into how the world is being seen by those on the other side of the C. P. Snow divide, or the “Science Wars”.

So I shall not comment on what you wrote sentence by sentence. Let me just pick on
>>our whole world and everything we encounter is both real and ideological.<<

As mentiioned, ideology - unless you suitably redefine it - does not enter a serious (as seen by his/her peers) scientist’s investigation. I don’t think the metaphysical/religious concept of “absolute truth” makes sense in a scientific context, however there is something called “pursuit of truth”, which is a very important principle guiding a scientist’s work.

George,
When you cite me thus:
>>Humans have an addiction for models ... Pure fantasy. I just don't believe it. <<
You then seem to infer that I’m making a statement about mathematic models, when the full quote is this:
>Humans have an addiction for models and patterns, to which we are all expected, ultimately, to conform. Pure fantasy. I just don't believe it. Life's a complete adventure for every individual--each one of us is a "host" of random and innate variables, and life's an inspired use of what's at hand.<
The preceding context of this little riff was my thinking on the validity of a universal ethics, whether religious or secular. My point was that both were bankrupt because neither Christian nor constitutional ethics were observed by church or government hierarchy; indeed they’re like snakes coiled round each other. My point was/is that that the individual citizen’s ethics should be drawn not from authority, whether God’s or Man’s, but directly from the example of State polity. The administrators of the State should, ergo, exemplify State ethics. Incumbency would then be tantamount to debasement and ethical responsibility, rather than privilege, advantage, celebrity and hypocrisy, as now. Isn’t this Jesus’ message? Yet we have the wealth and corruption of the Vatican and governments that no ritual washing of feet or hammy debasement at election times can mitigate. But that was another topic.
The point here is that I wasn’t talking about mathematical models, then or now. I’ve frankly admitted in the past that I have no higher maths. I thought answered your question and reiterated my mathematical debasement in this thread when I said: >Russell says that “numbers hold sway above the flux”; I can’t comment.<
Beyond this, you seem to want to extract some kind of confession from me that I’m a disciple of one school or another, that I’m the product of some kind of institutional thinking, when I’ve said before that I left school at 14 and am in all honesty self-taught, through reading, and aspire to be a genuine free-thinker.
Not sure if that’s any help?

Yabby,

From Charles Darwin's autobiography:

"Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds...gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took immense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost almost any taste for music....My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact,, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive....The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

Squeers,

Einstein reckoned that once the mathematicians "invaded" the theory of relativity, he no longer understood it himself. He said also: "To the extent maths refers to reality, we are not certain; to the extent we are certain, maths does not refer to reality."

Poirot, from my list of quotable quotes:

Science is the poetry of the real world. Richard Dawkins.

Then another, seemingly written just for Squeers:

Knowledge is the process of piling up facts, wisdom lies in
their simplification.