Oh I'm not in the science room. I'm on my back lanai in a screen
room with a fan on me typing on a forum on the Internet.
And yes, I go with that same definition of religious and faith
as that.
The convoluted other meanings I hear tossed around don't make
much sense to me. But I'm big on metaphors, poetic language and
such.
I even took an entire Thesaurus once and cross referenced all of
the words to see what would happen. Ended up in five categories
where each of the words in each of the categories have SOME
connection to each other. Does it mean anything? I have no idea.
So after a year of sitting on the results, I stuck the mess up
there and left it. I find deeper concepts more interesting than
specific word choices and definitions.
I give priority to the etymological basis of words though, as
they shine light on a deeper meaning that can sometimes be
buried within the words and covered by centuries of baggage, so
I'm often to be found in an online etymological dictionary. I
find the movement of concepts across time and human subcultures
fascinating, which sometimes gives me a weird perspective on
things. smile emoticon The meaning with the most meaning to me
is the meaning that is the metaphor that can be actualized in
reality. A good metaphor to describe a concept will free it, and
a poor metaphor (and the poor metaphors are usually the ones
that hang around for too long) will straightjacket the concept.
This is especially a big problem in the sciences.
The metaphor of wavepackets being billiard balls is embedded SO
DEEPLY it affects not only other metaphors and analogies that we
use to describe deeper processes, but it even straightjackets
the choices of inquiry: If we're conceiving wavepackets as
billiard balls, that's how we're going to treat them, no mater
how much mathematics we toss at it.
In our minds, they're conceived as fancy billiard balls.
