My feeling was that the author can not be objective. He seems to 'hate' mysticism. I can understand not liking something organized and institutionalized but solitary mysticism allows us to bandage our understanding and proceed with incomplete knowledge (filling the cracks in God). It is only when our mysticism is in direct conflict with empirical data that I see any problem. Like any bureaucracy, institutionalized mysticism can end up being simply wrong in the face of the facts. We needn't look any further than the High Church's opinions on celestial mechanics for an example. Prior to the evidence provided by Galileo, the mystical meaning of having Earth at the center of God's creation was part of an overall edifice that promoted the coherence of the Church as the human embodiment of Gods will. Namely, the earth was the center of the universe and Rome was the center of God's will.
Because of the institutional momentum, even when the mystic model is wrong, it is not changed. This produces a ridiculous output when viewed in the new framework.
Personal mysticism, IMO, is essential for forming a coherent understanding of the whole. Unless you could possess all knowledge, one has to have a proxy to fill the gap in order to produce an output of some meaninful kind. In neural networks, unused inputs are tied to a logical '1'. The influence of the '1' is to provide a reference point. Since it doesn't change over time, it has little, if any effect, in calculations produced after initial 'training'. In human reality, there is no '1' to tie our logic to. Mysticism, IMO, fulfills this roll. This proxy is not sacrosanct and should be periodically 'process checked' to make sure that the assumptions are still valid against the new data. It should also be periodically changed to see if better forcasts come about. |
