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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA
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Oct 27, 2011 - 09:49pm PT
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I just wondering what experience really is . . . people spring back to measuring rather than even moving one inch into 1st person subjective experience.
IT isn't anything. IT's everything. As you say, one can look directly at it.
Personally, I think it's the most f*cking amazing thing there is. I don't think there is anything else.
I reach out around me with everything available, and IT is everywhere and now. IT is like looking into a searchlight. IT is the weirdest thing, IT is the most amazing thing. Direct experience, full-on subjectivity, is ALL there is. Everything else is like little toys and distractions: concepts, theories, frameworks, constructs, measurements, ideas, yada yada yada. IT's like living in an n-dimensional movie. Thing is, IT is not a movie. I can't describe IT, IT goes with me everywhere I go, IT is completely mysterious. I can perceptually diminish it though--by thinking about it, by analyzing it, by talking about it.
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wack-N-dangle
Gym climber
the ground up
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Oct 27, 2011 - 10:25pm PT
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ohm...
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allapah
climber
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Oct 27, 2011 - 10:57pm PT
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can't help posting, this is something i've given thought, this is the best thread ever, but why must it all be so off-topic? climbers, with their habit of skimming the event horizons of death attractors, have data which is valuable in the sacred quest to verify the existence of mind-
Gregory Bateson's Criteria for Mental Process
1. A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components
2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference
3. Mental process requires collateral energy
4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e., coded versions of events which preceded them)
6. The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the the phenomena
Throw in Bohm's implicate order, Jung's Creatura (matter) vs. Pleroma (relations), the assumption that a Mind does need to have consciousness in its components but creates consciousness through relation of those components, use big words like "stochastic" and "nonentropy" and "realized ultimate reality piton," and: we have our hypothetical model of Mind—
now, to prove the hypothesis, employ legions of self-centered alpinists with lightweight clipboards to go gather data (in other words, they must go climb dangerous hills, in every kind of weather) which will verify the alignment of events in such a configuration so as to prove this universe we are in is permeated at every quantum pixel by Mind- though we be locked in 1st person subjective experience, the key is to triangulate what is outside the 1PSE (in the way you can calculate that a distant sun has a twin by analyzing its orbit and frequencies from afar)-- these climbers must employ their artificial prediction-intuition systems (spirituality) and thus seek resonance in their neural networks through the electromagnetic feed—
ok, electromagnetism, admittedly, there's a missing link right about here (but why must Fructose be so closed?)… are we not simply waiting for the "string theory" bit to get cranked out by the next Einstein? this may all start to come clear when that piece arrives... probably, the next Einstein is wasting his or her time right now doing offwidths in the desert...
examples of data: rate your level of certainty about the climb on 1 - 10 before the climb, compare to outcome— or, watch the face for ten years and then calculate the statistical improbability of that avalanche that annihalated last night's bivvy?
the damn problem is, Mind is a weak force-- Mind manifests more readily in non-entropy than in entropy- from our point of view, it only occasionally happens outside of our selves— nice climbers die, the as#@&%es live on-- I had a bad feeling, I didn't die… it's all BS... lots of Mind going on in the nonentropy of our brains, our pattern-replication machines....
The Eiger is a lower logical type than the book Eiger: Wall of Death, which is a lower logical type than the thoughts of Eiger: Wall of Death in the meat brain of climber scuttling up what is left of the second icefield... the more replications of Hal and Petunia's Prow climb that exist, the greater the nonentropy, and the level of mental process immanent in the system begins to creep upward through the very minerals of the quartz monzonite...
hard climbers never want to talk about any of this, because it can be some very bad space babble to have in your head while soloing...
look, i'm sorry, i was trying for 'thursday night posting while drunk' thread, but i keep landing here....
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wack-N-dangle
Gym climber
the ground up
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Oct 27, 2011 - 11:18pm PT
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^^^Kundalini?
Lost here... Asking for a more experienced perspective...
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allapah
climber
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Oct 27, 2011 - 11:23pm PT
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definitely kundalini is involved as well, the chakras being the nodal point (and therefore, the control dial) of the energy body which is the "organ" which is receiving information from outside the 1PSE, which is telling you to go back down the mountain, now, no summit today, ghosts, sahib...
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wack-N-dangle
Gym climber
the ground up
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Oct 27, 2011 - 11:39pm PT
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just a clarification before I sign off. no disrespect was intended. also, I think Dr. F had some good points quite a ways back.
an individual's examination of "mind" (sans ego), still seem to be relevant pursuit after all these years. it is remarkable to me that science is proving it (fMRI studies). maybe ironically, it was only the scientists who needed the proof. however, it does take time to put in the work to see it the old way.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2011 - 12:34am PT
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In 1698, Gottfried Leibniz wrote:
It must be confessed that experience and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds - that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have experience, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain an experience.
---
The obsessive discussions about figures and motions, as they relate to experience, are in fact like wandering through Leibniz’s machine, describing various physical functions, and for the total absence of said experience, declaring, in so many words, that experience simply does not exist since it is so clearly not here. Ergo, all there is objective functioning, therefore the functioning IS experience.
This is the point where people like Dennett, once regarded in the 90s, totally lose their way, basically saying that since experience will eventually be fully explained by natural phenomena, anyone entering Leibniz’s machine was in fact looking at experience all along, they just didn’t know it.
It is one thing to say crazy things with no empirical evidence whatsoever, and quite another thing to insist that we believe them. And Dennett and others are, IMO, insisting just that.
The so-called “hard problem” of consciousness rests on the vagueness of physical meaning per subjective experience. Physical descriptions can describe functional processing like memory, perception, sight, hearing, and so forth, but to say that experience follows from atomic activity is such a conflicted notion that one wonders if the question is even valid.
The line of questioning is based entirely on things with very tangible physical meaning. A “rock” is in the atoms because the aggregate of matter that constitutes ever higher conglomerates, all the way up to something the size of Half Dome, never, at any stage, jumps to something nor yet “produces” something totally, and entirely different, qualitatively, than a mineral.
With “mind,” when experience jumps out of the meant brain, we have something that has only the vaguest similarities to matter, if any, and even material fundamentalists must pause when trying to consider the experience of chugging up the Monster Off Width crack to be the very same thing, qualitatively, as a gas can or a particle accelerator. It trule is apples and oranges, but more so.
But there is another “hard question” that is never mentioned or debated but which is really the flip side of the non-reductive argument (Chalmers "Hard Question"), and that is the plain fact that if we screw around with the meat brain, experience is immediately altered, and once the meat brain dies, experience seemingly dies as well.
These two “hard questions” seem to imply mutually exclusive truths, or perhaps they cancel each other out, but in fact the implications are apparently true in both cases. Materialists say that the non-reductive Hard Question is only so for the lack of more comprehensive measurements, and once those are in, the question shall be solved. But of course those measurements will be describing Leibniz’s machine, not experience.
But I believe there is a way out of this seemingly rhetorical circle, but I doubt very much that it will be a bottom-up casual model. What is the "third way" of looking at this, beyond 1st and 3rd person POVs?
Tiz a puzzlement . . .
JL
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Oct 28, 2011 - 01:11am PT
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with respect
it's not a hard question at all
just backwards
a thought...
(by whatever flavor name meets your fancy)
...thinks up a physical universe
thought then gets lost playing around in this physical universe
and forgets how it came about
creating this local phenomena of endlessly speculating about it
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Oct 28, 2011 - 02:21am PT
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Largo,
1. Do you consider evolution to be a fact?
2. Do you consider "God" or "The Main Server Of Life" as a 1st person subjective experience to be "fact" or "truth"?
3a. Do you consider the hypothesis "1st person subjective experience is of a non-physical non-biological origin" to be a high probability hypothesis?
3b. Or: Do you consider the hypothesis "1st person subjective experience is of a non-physical non-biological origin" to be a high probability hypothesis?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Oct 28, 2011 - 05:33am PT
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If we knew what provoked the invention of language around 60,000 years ago ,whether it was a biological meat brain change or a subjective change in awareness motivation and perspective, we might have hope of knowing what kind of breakthrough we need to get through the mind brain dichotomy.
Many thinkers believe it will involve an understanding of energy. One of the big impediments to this understanding however, is lack of a neutral vocabulary for even discussing such things. For example, if I mention auras that is deemed too woo woo. If I call it electro magnetism, then the engineers jump on me for not sticking to the textbook definition. In fact, I assume it is something much more subtle than that which has not yet been measured.
You don't have to look at tantra or meditation, to ponder such things. Trying to understand acupuncture is another such phenomena. After doubting it because it can't be explained according to the meat body, most doctors now recognize that for certain things like pain management it can be more effective than the chemicals we currently use. They can't explain how it works but deny that the eastern practitioners who claim it works on the human energy field rather than blood, nerves, or tissue connections can be right.
Keep remembering that scientific revolutions are always held back not by what we don't know but what we are sure we already understand.
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go-B
climber
Sozo
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Oct 28, 2011 - 08:59am PT
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The ability to reason, duh!
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Oct 28, 2011 - 11:49am PT
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My shrink told me I am likely addicted to this site so the prescription was to stop for three months. So I'm going to exercise discipline and follow through.
Just want to pipe in long enough to say (a) I enjoyed it and (b) Marlow: those are damn good questions for Largo. :)
Carry on!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 28, 2011 - 11:55am PT
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about "people springing back to measurements"
Bob Parks, writing about Steve Jobs on Oct. 23, 2011 in his blog What's New by Bob Parks wrote:
'...the first law of science: "Every observable effect has a physical cause." Perhaps the most profound insight of all time, causality is a total rejection of the supernatural.'
Of course, this is the point that Largo has been lambasting us about for a while, the idea of causality, which he rejects as being an unprovable assertion. Taking Largo's philosophical point that there is no reason for this to be true, it is amply tested empirically, and the very means of knowing whether or not it is a least an excellent approximation to reality are contained in that very same empirical method.
Not to distract the arguments so far, this gets back to Largo's frustration with "knowing what the real explanation is!" In a scientific approach where we refine an approximation of reality, we collect the observations and formulate a physical model or a theory of the phenomena, which has the feature that the observables are evident, and maybe even the finer points of the model have some inner logic.
We would then take that model and predict the outcome of experiment and observation. Those results would then refine our model.
Eventually, the model provides a set of attributes which may have a deeper connection with the phenomena, including the explanation of how the parts fit together to generate the observed behavior. In this case, we would expect the physiological and anatomic understanding of the brain to connect with the behavior aspects of a model of mind and consciousness.
The resulting "theory" would then have the features of being predictive based on a smaller set of fundamental elements.
This methodology has worked over and over in the past 400+ years to unlock a number of rather subtle features of the world. So far, we have not had to resort to "supernatural" explanations... and there is no reason to suspect that this phenomena, mind/consciousness, will not be explainable to good approximation by the same.
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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Oct 28, 2011 - 11:59am PT
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your zealous search
might be impeding the actual discovery
of that which you are seeking.
what the f*#k do i know?
what the f*#k do you know?
anyways my opinion is that the emotional realm
is much funner to bludgeon than the metal domain.
fact may sit down,
while fantasy stands up to dance.
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go-B
climber
Sozo
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Oct 28, 2011 - 12:06pm PT
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Cheerio old chap!
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2011 - 12:16pm PT
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1. Do you consider evolution to be a fact?
AS I HAVE SAID MANY TIMES, CLASSICAL EVOLUTION IS UNDENIABLE PER THE MATERIAL ASPECTS OF REALITY. WHAT ELSE WOULD WE DO WITH THE FOSSIL RECORD? THE GUY I USUALLY RIDE WITH IS ONE OF THE FIRST GUYS TO GET HIS PhD IN EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND WE HAVE HAD CURIOUS CONVERSATIONS OVER THE YEARS.
2. Do you consider "God" or "The Main Server Of Life" as a 1st person subjective experience to be "fact" or "truth"?
ODD QUESTION. IME, "GOD," OR THE ALL IS UNGRASPABLE AS A "FACT." A FACT IS SOME "THING" WE CAN QUANTIFY. CERTAIN ELEMENTS OF 1ST PERSON SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE SEEM UNGRASPABLE FROM WITHIN SAID EXPERIENCE - LIKE TRYING TO SEE YOUR OWN FACE, OR ASKING A FISH ABOUT WATER - BUT JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE UNGRASPABLE DOES NOT MAKE THEM THE SAME THING.
I THINK YOU ARE HUNG UP ON THE IDEA THAT SOME AGENCY HAS TO PRODUCE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IN THE SAME CAUSAL WAY A TRUMPET PRODUCES TAPS. SO IF IT'S NOT THE MEAT BRAIN ENTIRELY, THEN YOU LOOK FOR SOME WU WU AGENCY WHICH YOU CALL "GOD." I DOUBT THIS IS THE CASE IN ACTUAL FACT. And I doubt your bottom up causal model is the one, indisputable fact here. A key part, certainly, but not the entire story.
3a. Do you consider the hypothesis "1st person subjective experience is of a non-physical non-biological origin" to be a high probability hypothesis?
AGAIN, YOU'RE LOOKING AT THIS IN A CLASSICAL, MECHANISTIC, CAUSAL WAY, WHERE THE MEANT BRAIN WAS THE "ORIGIN" OR "CAUSE" OF 1ST PERSON SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE. AS MENTIONED ABOVE, THE 2ND "HARD QUESTION" CONCERNS THE INDISPUTABLE FACT THAT IF WE SCREW WITH THE MEAT BRAIN - DRUG IT, POUR BEER INTO IT, STRESS IT, STICK IT WITH PINS - 1ST PERSON SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IS IMMEDIATELY ALTERED. SO IT CERTAINLY WOULD APPEAR, FROM THAT ANGLE, THAT AT THE VERY LEAST, EXPERIENCE AND MATTER ARE INEXTRICABLY LINKED.
THE OTHER "HARD PROBLEM," MADE FAMOUS BY CHALMERS AND OTHERS IS THAT 1ST PERSON SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IS ITSELF NOT A PHYSICAL THING IN THE NORMAL SENSE OF THE WORD. FOR EXAMPLE, WE CANNOT WEIGH THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING YOU READING THIS AT THIS TIME. THE PROBLEM WE RUN INTO IS WHEN PEOPLE CANNOT HOLD THEIR EXPERIENCE WITHOUT DEFAULTING OF OF 1ST PERSON AND BACK TO 3RD PERSON EVALUATIONS ABOUT WHAT THEY BELIEVE ARE CAUSES - BACK TO LIEBINZ'S MACHINE. AND OF COURSE ONCE THEY GO INTO RECKONING HOW THE MACHINE WORKS, EXPERIENCE IS LEFT BEHIND.
3b. Or: Do you consider the hypothesis "1st person subjective experience is of a non-physical non-biological origin" to be a high probability hypothesis?
THOSE ARE TWO QUESTIONS. I CONSIDER 1ST PERSON SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE TO BE INEXTRICABLY TIED TO MATTER. BUT I SUSPECT THAT THE IDEA OF "ORIGINS," MEANING LOWER LEVEL ATOMIC ACTIVITY ENTIRELY AND WHOLLY "CAUSED" EXPERIENCE IS ITSELF WITHOUT MUCH EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE SAVE FOR THE ISSUES RAISED BY THE 2ND HARD QUESTION.
IN ANY BELIEF SYSTEM THERE IS THE TENDENCY TO GO THE FUNDAMENTALIST ROUTE AND GO "ALL-IN," CLAIMING THAT ALL AND EVERYTHING CAN BE KNOW OR EXPLAINED BY THIS OR THAT BELIEF. THE NEXT STEP IN THIS VERY HUMAN TENDENCY IS TO CITE ALL THE REASONS AND PROOFS WHY WE SHOULD BELIEVE AS SUCH. HISTORY IS LITTERED WITH FAILED GODS IN THIS RESPECT, AND I FEAR WHEN EVOLUTION IS TROTTED OUT AS THE ONE AND ONLY EXPLANATION FOR ALL AND EVERYTHING, WE ARE ONCE MORE BETTING THE FARM ON A PRAYER.
JL
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Oct 28, 2011 - 01:10pm PT
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thank you Ed and Largo for these remarkably clear explanations of viewpoints
Ed - '...the first law of science: "Every observable effect has a physical cause."
Largo - IT CERTAINLY WOULD APPEAR, ..., THAT AT THE VERY LEAST, EXPERIENCE AND MATTER ARE INEXTRICABLY LINKED.
i don't see a discrepancy between these viewpoints
Ed explains how all observable phenomena can be traced back to physical root causes
(basically the failure modes and effects analysis that i have been doing at NASA, DOE, EPA, Ford, etc without any need to resort to something you might term 'supernatural' other than having a pretty good nose for sniffing out chains of effects across complex interactive subsystems)
and Largo explains how mental phenomena are linked to the physical
and i point out that how we understand the basic nature of the physical is especially relevant here
Perhaps the most profound insight of all time, causality is a total rejection of the supernatural
from my viewpoint this does not necessarily follow the initial statement and is in fact quibbling over the definition of terms
(i suspect that any good physicist will agree that we still have much to learn)
remember the old story of the five blind men standing about describing an elephant?
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Oct 28, 2011 - 01:35pm PT
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Hmmm. Still at it?
Subjective experience permeates our senses constantly. These are things that are difficult or perhaps even meaningless to quantify.
Objective experiences are easy to quantify.
Engineering is a highly quantitative use of science.
Theory is far more difficult to quantify, because it is, in essence, dealing with data that has not been measured, or an attempt to explain data that has been quantified but differs from theory.
In that sense I can see where you are going with "qualia." I see it as loosely meaning subjective data. You may hate the taste of vanilla while it is the favorite flavor of the rest of the world. How do you quantify every tiny sensory input or subjective thought that passes through our brains? Our MINDS?
There is a great back and forth between petroleum engineers and geologists. The engineers say that geologists are engineers who couldn't handle the math. Geologists generally think of engineers as woefully lacking in imagination.
Besides, without the geologists putting the gold star on the map (Please drill here!), they wouldn't have any work to do.
Subsurface geology is very intense mentally. It is kind of like turning a Rubik's cube around in your head all of the time, but the cube is always different.
Not only is subsurface geology highly imaginative, companies used to send geologists to funky courses where you did things like draw a nickle backwards with your left hand every day. That was kind of a fad.
It deals with a limited dataset. Theories of what lies in that data are numerous and consistent, however only one is true. You find that one out when you drill the well. Hopefully.
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA
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Oct 28, 2011 - 01:45pm PT
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Wack-n-dangle: I liked your comment. Clever.
HFCS: I'm sure people will miss you.
SOME OF THE PROBLEMS WITH THE THREAD OF CONVERSATION
1. People argue about science from a practitioner's point of view. They use science but they haven't studied it as a field in itself. They aren't aware of all the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science.
There is just simply too much to write here. If really interested, Wikipedia's presentation on philosophy-of-science issues provides a good primer.
As for the particular conversations that Largo seems to be leading, I'd suggest reading up on "incommensurability." Again, Wikipedia has a nice explanation. Both Feyerabend's and Kuhn's ideas were hot intellectual topics when I was in grad school a couple decades ago, especially at late night parties. Kuhn is easier for non-math types, but both are clear about how non-science influences create science and isolating results. Must reading.
2. People are putting square pegs in round holes because they aren't clear about what falls in the domain of science and what falls into other domains (history, culture, the arts, etc.).
"Religion or religious beliefs are not science" . . . DUH. Return to item 1 and read-up on incommensurability. It is possible to argue relevantly and rigorously about science and religion, but neither falls into the same domain, and neither ought to be analyzed or discovered with the same approaches.
Until science, ethics, and the arts (the True, the Good, and the Beautiful) get reconnected, we are going to have this big problem talking to each other about them in the same breath or using one to criticize the other. The three got separated with the French Enlightenment, and our world has been chaotic ever since. (But that's been the price of killing-off God--see Nietzsche.)
3. People are just not very tolerant of others' ideas. Professionals in the study and development of science follow different norms of behavior.
I've been an academic in 6 different universities in three different countries, and I have yet to see the fellow academics blatantly diss other colleagues in the arts or the sciences for their views. (Of course there are exceptions.) If anything I've seen personalized attacks much more within disciplines than between disciplines.
Academics must read and understand others' works in their fields in order to review papers, and this tends to give rise to pluralistic tolerance. We express disagreements, but we usually do so with calm reason, evidence, philosophy, and clever witicisms. Although working in a field tends to make one more wedded to its perspectives, reviewing others' studies also attenuates academics to the status of real existence of constructs and theories and measurements. I think academics truly know in their hearts that theories and idea are just constructs, and that their real purpose is to facilitate conversations. It's the conversations that matter, not the real existence of constructs.
Try not making everything so serious and concrete. It's supposed to be an enjoyable activity without harm.
4. The study of any field is immensely problematical. Science is no different.
From the time that science first began to separate itself from general philosophy just before the French Enlightenment, philosophers expressed concern about where science would take us. The first complaints were about nihilism and the lack of grounded values that science would assume. Values come from history, community, and culture, but science claimed it could purportedly ignore those. Nietzsche, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Weber, Hobbes, and Kant all expressed some concerns about science or its application. Science would end up serving the bourgeois and utilitarian commercialism, and it would kill off the ideals of the artist and hero. It would make humanity bland and uninteresting.
From 1900-1910 alone, a number of theoretical discoveries deeply undercut the foundations of science. (Any undergraduate can come up with these concerns today.) Poincare recognized that scientists had their own agenda and that hypotheses were selected before data gathering. So-called facts were matters of judgments, and there was nothing certain about them. Bergson, said that time was nothing if not artificial; time is not successive moments. James said that propositions could be true only if useful. Saussure said that language didn't function as a signifier of reality. Language is only a matter of usage; it doesn't tell the truth about anything but itself. Einstein and other scholars added to the mix. By 1910, there was no fixed time or space, scientific claims became unreliable, truth was relative, and language became divorced from reality. At least to the common man.
Skip over Kuhn, Feyerabend, Boas, Bohr (and Heisenberg), Godel, Wittgenstein, Heidigger, Sarte, and others, and one finds wide disillusionment with science moving into the 80s (almost as strong as the disillusionment with politics after WWII).
Enter post structuralism in the 80s: post structuralists demanded more self-reflection from scholars in their works, and that included science. Bascially, post structuralists said that all references to empirical data are the results of interpretations. In that the claims of science are questionable.
The new fields of criticism of science and scholarship were:
--ethnomethodology (scholarship should assume a native's point of view of reality even on the most trivial of things),
--hermeneutics (understanding and empathy are more important than prediction, use no single sources, texts relate only to other texts--not to reality, scholars should work to expose the unspoken questions that their research hides),
--critical theory (phenomena can only be understood within historical contexts, politics underlie science, the humanities have become objectivized but should not be, what seems self-evident in research needs to be problemized),
--post-structualism or post-modernism (there are no global solutions and no "grand narratives" about anything, the authority of researchers should be problemized, the world is full of ironies and contradictions but research hides those from view, all "closed systems" are false, texts are autonomous and don't refer directly to reality, research should be playful and not so serious, the "humanist subject" is a biased Western creation, research is really literature), and
--work on language, power, and gender (what people say doesn't match with what they think or do, language can't express perceptions and ideas properly, language at best is metaphorical and at worse undecipherable, the power residing in knowledge transforms people into objects--it does not reside in institutions).
The point of all of this is simply to note for those of you who are not aware, science is hardly monolithic or unassailable. At least it can be said that it has attracted many consistent criticisms since its emergence. Why? It, like everything else in the universe, is problematical analytically and conceptually. Pretending that the validity and verification of science are obvious to others is, well, . . . ignorant and indicative of a mild dilettantism.
And, yeah, . . . the same holds true for the studies and practices of religion, culture, history, writing, painting, ethics, and so on. It's the conversations that count, not the existential, ontological status of concepts.
Be well.
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