tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post7500231114406150864..comments2024-02-13T12:50:30.457-05:00Comments on Rants Within the Undead God: The Incoherence of NaturalismBenjamin Cainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-85597239771875732112015-09-10T18:14:03.055-04:002015-09-10T18:14:03.055-04:00When is mainstream science going to admit, that so...When is mainstream science going to admit, that some races have higher average IQ's than others? Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-4668846269502454892015-09-08T22:11:24.341-04:002015-09-08T22:11:24.341-04:00Subject: From Grand Illusions to Grand Solutions: ...Subject: From Grand Illusions to Grand Solutions: hold theoretical physics to a higher standard<br /><br />Hi,<br /><br />There's a rising up within science right now asking deep ethical questions like "How do we keep ourselves in check from over-reaching, that is, stating and publishing as fact what we do not in fact know or trust?" A nobel pursuit, except that many theoretical physicists are responding by stupefying us with still more over-reaching nonsense about reality that they peddle as fact. Act now to let academic scientists and philosophers of science know we want them to hold theoretical physics to a higher standard.<br /><br />That's why I created a petition to Ralph J. Cicerone, President, National Academy of Sciences and Michael P. Federici, President, The Academy of Philosophy and Letters.<br /><br />Will you sign this petition? Click here:<br /><br />http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/from-grand-illusions?source=c.em&r_by=14227609<br /><br />Thanks!MK McGeehttp://cosmicomorphic.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-70515387514452684522015-08-30T07:02:01.691-04:002015-08-30T07:02:01.691-04:00lol. I can relate, and concede the pitfalls of op...lol. I can relate, and concede the pitfalls of optimism! I just experienced over the last few days in my depths an expectation that I will die in obscurity. As I allowed it to surface, I felt the toll of this, especially the effect on my ability to experience my outward vision inwardly, as fully available to me right now with complete clarity, and able to reflect to outward experience in a way that is comfortable within my own life. I saw myself alive but buried face-down in vision. I felt what it is like to operate within a sort of "obscurity-of-vision" curse. <br /><br />On a different note, this ironic question of science and verifiability is taking such a weird twist of late, because many scientists are working to co-opt the "open book" approach for themselves! Ee-gad! I spent a few days commenting on this recent article that is in the same vein. I felt good about the numerous comments I had to share (as MK McGee). <br /><br />http://nautil.us/blog/is-it-time-to-embrace-unverified-theories<br />___________________<br />Here's the text of a few:<br />It is a fallacy to conclude that theoretical physics is or has ever been the kind of Science that can rightly be associated with experimental validation. I thought you were going to take your comment in the interesting direction of noting that science on the horizon of the unseeable is in fact a hybrid between science and the imagination! Within the biggest scientific paradigm of reproducibility, science and the imagination actually work well together, but validation is not necessarily of anything real. If you apply validation rules in ways that are self-referentially, or internally consistent (like the rules of D&D!) then nothing "real" is actually validated. It's disconcerting but fascinating, I think.<br />________________<br /><br />The use of consciousness as a central construct in reality collapses reality itself into the Essential Knowledge Trap, separating the universe from the knowing of itself! Doesn't make sense, though it's a tempting solution when we feel that there's nothing else coherent to go on than making the universe a big self.<br />________________<br /><br />As I'm sure you are aware, most people are not comfortable with a vision of *answers to life's questions* happening in a way that is non-dogmatic or, more subtly, not externally guiding or guided in any way. Has to do with a desire to maintain a sense of influence in the world by having a system of blame (perhaps even of ourselves) when something goes wrong -- or take credit when it goes right!<br /><br />What is most ambiguous (in a lovely way) to me is your conclusion to "let the world impose its logic on us." That could be "us," as in individuals, or "Us," as in the collection of adults with roughly the same perceptual and self-integration capacities.<br /><br />Asking individuals to be aware by getting out of their own way in getting answers is great, healing, correct. Yet it is also well worth holding on to the vision that collectively-held answers can be and have been useful. For those who do not find great comfort in things beyond the power of their own knowing, existential dissonance (doubts and nihilism in an interconnected world) will continue to plague their reality models, that is until the universe's logic is brought into focus in a way that humanity can know.<br />_________________<br /><br />Blessings!Michelle Kathryn McGeehttp://cosmicomorphic.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-45242382773245337792015-08-29T20:34:08.480-04:002015-08-29T20:34:08.480-04:00Hi, Michelle. Looks like you're more on Matthe...Hi, Michelle. Looks like you're more on Matthew's optimistic side of pantheism or naturalistic religion. I'll have to look more into that take on matters, since I'm sort of hung up on existentialist and cosmicist doom and gloom. Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-50263188885398421142015-08-29T20:31:06.474-04:002015-08-29T20:31:06.474-04:00Regarding the connection between intuitive experie...Regarding the connection between intuitive experience and technical scientific concepts, the key battleground now would be string theory. As I point out in the above article, its proponents effectively rewrite what it means to do science, downgrading the need for experience (for observation) and focusing on mathematical inferences. As long as the math bears fruit, though, such as technological applications, the new science will likely get a pass since the abstract conceptions will be indirectly grounded in the experience of the success of those applications.Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-535234652464525082015-08-29T20:25:31.657-04:002015-08-29T20:25:31.657-04:00Hi, Matthew. I suppose you're right that my po...Hi, Matthew. I suppose you're right that my point about pessimism is a non sequitur, which is to say I set up a bit of a false dichotomy. The more precise distinction is between triumphal and cosmicist philosophical interpretations of science. <br /><br />I see from your blog that you're also interested in pantheism. I'll have to read some of your articles on this, but I wonder whether you think organic life is crucial to the universe's spiritual side. I call the cosmic body undead because I see no compelling evidence to speak of any Mind of the universe, which makes the existential point that the vivification is up to us: our solemn, crypto-satanic responsibility as sentient creatures is to bring meaning and purpose to the robotic and indifferent wilderness (thus to undo the monstrous creator god; hence, the existential mission is essentially "satanic"). We do this by technologically transforming the natural into the artificial, and so spirit isn't a ghost in the machine, but the program of intelligently designed functions that replace undead processes.<br /><br />I'm also interested in a naturalistic religion, in what you call a cosmotheandric worldview. I include some links below to articles where I talk more about this. Indeed, it looks to me like a dialogue might be fruitful between us about the optimistic versus pessimistic kinds of pantheism and naturalistic religions. If you're interested in putting one together by an email exchange, perhaps for posting on our blogs, let me know by sending me a message through the Contact the Ranter section of my blog just below my blogger profile (in the non-mobile version of my blog).<br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2012/01/inkling-of-unembarrassing-postmodern.html<br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2014/11/the-satanic-grandeur-of-modernity.html<br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2014/03/artificiality-miracle-hiding-in-plain.html<br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/04/technoscience-existentialism-and-fact.html<br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2014/10/qualia-artificiality-and-fractals.html<br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/09/mythopoesis-and-consolation-of.htmlBenjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-51945873918210544162015-08-29T19:58:28.896-04:002015-08-29T19:58:28.896-04:00Thanks, Raul. I may be heading to Guatemala in Oct...Thanks, Raul. I may be heading to Guatemala in October for a week on business. That may be as close as I get to Paraguay for a while. ;)Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-46714548876772290782015-08-29T15:02:40.057-04:002015-08-29T15:02:40.057-04:00I agree completely that, from the perspective of t...I agree completely that, from the perspective of the person doing the conceiving, this limitation seems to apply (never arrive at the immanence...). But what the sciences are *trying* (in the benign ideal sense) to do is provide and then act on a collective perspective. <br /><br />There is a way to bring the collective shift that is metaphysically profound. Comes down to conceiving of a modally primitive complementarity born of the two most basic cosmological properties. <br /><br />cosmicomorphic.com or healinggeneration.com<br /><br />Thanks for the deep-diving post Benjamin. Michelle Kathryn McGeehttp://cosmicomorphic.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-49316767125213879422015-08-29T14:38:01.521-04:002015-08-29T14:38:01.521-04:00Just to flesh this out a bit more... The conceptio...Just to flesh this out a bit more... The conception of matter that emerged with the Scientific Revolution and lasted until the 20th ce. was really a covert form of idealism. Latour makes this case quite compellingly. http://footnotes2plato.com/2013/10/11/reflections-on-bruno-latours-an-inquiry-into-modes-of-existence-ch-4-learning-to-make-room/<br />In my above review of his recent book "An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence," I compare Latour's Whiteheadian panexperientialist perspective to Schelling's comments: <br /><br />"The concept of “force” that has proven so irreplaceable to physicists in their study of microscopic particles and far away galaxies is, we should remember, a concept that emerges from and gains its meaning only by continual reference to experience, to our feelings of attraction or repulsion, of being forced, in one way or another, by the insistent presence of an other. As Schelling, speaking to the Newtonian scientist, wrote in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1803),<br /><br />“you can in no way make intelligible what a force might be independent of you. For force as such makes itself known only to your feeling. Yet feeling alone gives you no objective concepts. At the same time you make objective use of those forces. For you explain the movement of celestial bodies–universal gravitation–by forces of attraction and maintain that in this…you have [a physical ground of explanation for] these phenomena” (transl. by Harris and Heath, CUP, 1988, p. 18).<br /><br />In point of fact, experience can grant us no such physical principles, if by “physical” it is meant that which exists “outside” experience, in the so-called “external world” of mute matter in motion. All our scientific knowledge of distant quasars and black holes hits its mark, not because the Mind has correctly represented the formal essences of Nature, but because our organism (equipped with its world-wide network of geometrical notations, telescopes, satellites, computers, and well-trained peers) has succeeding in translating the lines of force at work outside itself into the feelings of life at work within itself. All our knowledge, no matter how abstract, must make its final appeal in the courtroom of experience, since the court of Reason, having disavowed the the facts of feeling involved in all its acts of knowing, has as a result been cut off from its only means of concrete relation to reality. If everything were submerged in abstract “space-time/matter-energy,” science could never follow the threads of experience, could never arrive at the immanence of a truly de-idealized material (106)."Matthew T. Segallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09094870514161016656noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-48789136202469762622015-08-29T02:42:18.917-04:002015-08-29T02:42:18.917-04:00I thoroughly enjoyed that. I follow you on just ab...I thoroughly enjoyed that. I follow you on just about every point until that last paragraph there. <br /><br />"We should reconcile our naïve intuitions with scientific discoveries, but we shouldn’t do so by pretending that modernity isn’t enormously subversive: science devours not only the prescientific delusions but the humanistic ones that are supposed to be able to live alongside it. The humanist’s optimism is at odds with the content of scientific explanations, which is why naturalism is incoherent. Thus, coherent naturalism must be pessimistic."<br /><br />Actually I follow you all the way up until that last sentence! Why rush to say naturalism must be pessimistic when it could very well be that an adequate scientific explanation of nature requires neither simple optimism nor simple pessimism alone. Understanding nature may be as much an aesthetic affair as a cognitive one. Yes, supposedly modern scientific ideas like force and energy are still just as animistic as the old Aristotlean entelechies. But what if nature is itself at least some kind of proto-personal, larval life? What if the best way to know nature is to feel nature? What if another science is possible, one which inherits the method of Goethe rather than that of Descartes and Newton? Has 21st century physics really ruled out the possibility of an organic universe, of a world-soul? Hardly! The mechanistic world-theory has been scientifically refuted. You call the post-quantum conception of physical reality "undead"... maybe this is not all that far off from what I have been calling the world-soul? https://matthewsegall.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/physics-of-the-world-soul-whitehead-and-cosmology.pdfMatthew D. Segallhttp://www.footnotes2plato.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-45164408043416464552015-08-26T09:56:39.892-04:002015-08-26T09:56:39.892-04:00Hello. Im from Paraguay. Your blog is always inter...Hello. Im from Paraguay. Your blog is always interesting and disturbing. RaulAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com