The Learning Nation

People love to hate on 'the woo' especially the tech bros but for some reason a lot history's greatest physicist consistently converge on things that could be taken directly from Hindu / Vedic philosophy. I think there's a good reason for this: the closer someone is to truth-seeking for themselves the more open they are to grander ideas, the mysterious, the unknown. But this is very rare. The majority of people just 'receive' the truth from accepted authorities and sources and think, yep, that's all there is. The science enthusiast is extremely confident of their materialist perspective because they got it from a textbook and think its the capital-T Truth. The actual scientist that digs in and makes new theories is a lot more likely to admit, you know, we really just made this up, it seems accurate at this level of analysis, but what the true reality is - who knows? maybe there's no bottom to it all and it goes on forever (paraphrasing both Hawking and Feynman). The science enthusiast hates this. They want to be told what is true, what is correct, that "this is reality, full stop" - they want to feel superior to the intuitive spiritual hippie with long hair, because that completely alternative way of living exists as a threat to their worldview and mentality. "How dare they not value the same things as me, what a loser! bah!" At the root of it theres this question of lifestyle and decision-making. If you haven't thought hard for yourself about what is important, how to live your life, sort of reached it from first principles, and instead 'chosen a life' off the shelf of conventional narratives and invested heavily into that, its terrifying to realize, shit, maybe there is such a thing as grander purpose, deeper meaning. Maybe there's more to life than RSU's and brunches and networking events. I think life is really only as big as your willing to dream it to be. The mind of a hardcore skeptic and materialist is closed off to a lot of things that are otherwise quite grand, beautiful, enlightening, etc. To them the material considerations and pragmatism are their whole reality. The mystic acknowledges those things as necessary but not the point of life. The true scientist straddles an interesting divide. They extend the extent of the material by connecting with the mystical through intuition and insight. This was von Neumann's envy of Einstein - that he had such amazing intuition. Einstein was also very spiritual. Von Neumann was not - a lifelong secular agnostic, only in the last months of his life did he call for a priest and express a fear of death. von Neumann vs Einstein is probably as clear a divide as you can get between pure analytical rational genius and pure intuitive genius. Only one of them faces death with fear.