Re: Mind's Eye Re: Pat

Philip Mirowski is the man on physics envy.  There's a paper here -http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.2688.pdf - though my own views are more biological.  Parasitism is the most common lifestyle on Earth and I'm inclined to think an alien would tend to analyse human society from this perspective.  We resemble parasite-slaver ants as a society.  My eventual guess is that most of our brains are turned off, probably by what passes as education across the very similar-different cultural forms across anthropology.  Seeing ourselves as ants is too tough for most.  The idea of knowing about them would be in order not to emulate them.  The alien might not be able to distinguish us on behaviour.

On Saturday, 11 October 2014 10:38:11 UTC+1, Molly wrote:

Culture undoubtedly shapes perspective demonstrated by the idea that we have a hard time understanding why people behaved the way they did a century ago or less.  Sartre was a product of the war and much of his life work reflected that, like his colleagues Camus and deBeauvior.  Rudolph Steiner too along with Freud and Jung, dodging wars whilst developing their life's work.  In reading them, I can see the effect, but wonder if they did.  The culture of our time dictates what can and cannot be done and we find ourselves moving in ways that our gut tells us are wrong but culture requires of us. No other path seems clear until we ourselves are brave enough to take a step that creates a new path, opening up another view. As a kid I would wander off to the woods near our home, find a clearing and climb a tree, lay down on a comfy branch for hours and watch the world go by.  I think I liked it because it took me outside the constraints of culture and group expectation.  After a couple of hours the animals would begin to wander by and sniff and watch me to see what I was up to, a kind of forest culture.  Where experience has form, there is culture I suppose, and I am not sure that it requires thought other than our own but appreciate the notion.

On Friday, October 10, 2014 8:41:59 PM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

I had Pat on the garden path to the Kaliber Yawn space (getting stuck with the fairies at the bottom of the garden with only non-alcoholic beer) - and liked him because he had a better sense of humour than Zarathustra.  I remember my first lab coat more or less as Facil describes.  There is something of one of Molly's paradoxes with authority in science - the rules are always up for grabs in a perpetual legitimation crisis of a club designed around a 'no rules rule book'.

I rather liked  Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961), a Polish-Jewish microbiologist. Fleck claimed that cognition is a collective activity, since it is only possible on the basis of a certain body of knowledge acquired from other people. When people begin to exchange ideas, a thought collective arises, bonded by a specific mood, and as a result of a series of understandings and misunderstandings a peculiar thought style is developed. When a thought style becomes sufficiently sophisticated, the collective divides itself into an esoteric circle (professionals) and an exoteric circle (laymen). A thought style consists of the active elements, which shape ways in which members of the collective see and think about the world, and of the passive elements, the sum of which is perceived as an "objective reality". What we call "facts", are social constructs: only what is true to culture is true to nature.

This is only the beginning.  We couldn't distinguish the merits of evolution and creationism on this basis, or economics from a real science (economists basically suffer from 'physics envy').  Back in the 80's I came across people with laboratories and lab coats 'experimenting' with electrodes placed on human heads to prove left brain right brain hemispheric differences.  They attracted a lot of funding, yet were so stupid they considered music a stimulus rather than a complex set of stimuli and could rarely describe any actual brain structure to someone like me who actually diced the things from time to time.  Their equivalent today are those who calibrate various brain scanners so badly that they find intelligent activity in dead salmon.  Quantum mechanics arises from black body radiation experiments, but we are not that sure quite what such is.

Early choices of what clubs we join may have to do with competence.  Anyone can bend the knee to the blue and white chequered rabbit, but not many can, say, dissect a rat solar plexus.  I no longer possess a lab coat and am thus not a credible scientist.

 
On Friday, 10 October 2014 20:01:43 UTC+1, facilitator wrote:

Funny you should mention "Diversion".   That is exactly what each is.   I look at them as being almost identical in presentation.  Both rely on a set of "Fixed" beliefs.  And both are dependent on adherents accepting those "Beliefs".  The priest wears robes and tunics and the scientist escapes dissent among ranks by wearing the lab coat.  Each new theorem postulated requires a quantum suspension of belief until proven.  (Or unproven)

On Friday, October 10, 2014 7:52:01 AM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

I'm often struck that science versus religion is a diversion.  There is bad science, there is bad religion.  Some 'religion' (economics) pretends to be science.  Some dreadful power gamers pretend to be religious.  

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