I find Frances' presentation of evolution of eternal stuff very sober and logical at present state of our knowledge. I would not use words 'good' or 'evil', they have to much of human moral flavor. I would use 'successfully fit at the moment' as 'good', and unable to survive laws of nature as 'unfit' or what she calls bad or 'evil'. Boris Shoshensky
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Subject: RE: "mad genius" Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2011 20:26:43 -0500 Frances to William and others... This is my quick take on trying to define pragmatist evolution. The two main thorns that remain for me is how to explain that nothing yields something or anything and everything, and if the continuity of any original continuum entails infinity or finitely nothing. Nature infinitely bears or has continua, which eternal stuff tends to evolve. The continuum of time yields the stuff of velocity and energy and luminosity and spatiality and materiality and gravity. The speed of time makes energy and thus light in space that yields matter wanting to stick together. This stuff is definite but different, and thus exists in a heterogeneous condition of plurality. It continues to exist by overlapping with other marginal stuff it is attracted to. All stuff tends to gang together into groups forming whole systems. Each system links with other whole systems before and after it. Stuff gives of itself freely for its own sake, expecting nothing in return. It will thus grow in the direction of least resistance. It tends to exert its energy to struggle in that best way for the better. By the conduct of habit it builds a bent or trait of leaning. The direction is hence good and the end goal it seeks is also good. The means used to go in that way and to get to that end must however also be good. If an exploratory path is wrong or bad or evil, the habitual trait will correct it. The good is what stuff naturally and dispositionally tends to feel is best. The normal is what the type or class or group tends to collectively feel is good. The communal group is able to dispositionally feel what is best for the individual member. The correction however also evolves, and is thus fallible and tentative. The only thing absolutely perfect in evolution is the ideal of continuity and thus the freedom for stuff to feel it must act. The only thing absolutely certain to continue is an existing world of real action. The world as it exists is about as good as it can be for now, because it can be no other way without defying the laws of nature and destroying itself, which the process of correction will not allow. This pragmatist theory of evolution attempts to account for all stuff from microcosms to macrocosms, including all organisms from bacteria to humans and their sciences. The method used to get this account is by the individual observation felt sensed of stuff, and the expression of this finding in a report to other experts so engaged. The conclusion made by pragmatism is that there is an agreed consensus of opinion as to what might be true of evolving stuff. Its application to say art may of course be too broad for any useful address. Furthermore, the current practices of art and tech and science with the sentience and experience and intelligence they yield may be applicable only to humans on earth. There may be an aesthenae and a technae and an epistemae that is broader than art and tech and science somewhere in the vast universe. There may indeed be a limit to human knowledge. Whether the logical inference of human thought is as good as it gets in the whole wide world is still unknown. -----Original Message----- From: William Conger [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, 03 January, 2011 8:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "mad genius" So, the ends justify the means? And, whatever is, is good because that's what is. Tautology 101. The problem with this is that if you always begin with the state of affairs as they are, and claim that is good because that's what is, then you can't make any "corrective" judgments except for the worse. In the realm of the moral, you can't make a moral judgment because you could only make immoral judgments if the state of affairs is good. You didn't explain how it is that the actions of an individual affecting the community and even the state of affairs generally is replaced by the consensus of experts. I am troubled by the beliefs -- and beliefs they are -- that all evolves to a good end and that events are affected by the consensus of experts. I suppose it matters when an event begins and ends to know for sure whether of not it is good. At the height of Hitler's power, millions of people all over the world who believed in his philosophy and militarism, thought things were working out well . Then, when it all crumbled for him and the Reich, millions of people said, "good, things worked out after all." In art we seem to find that the individuals can and do affect the evolution of style (although I am not too sure of that since I also thing art is what is said about it, meaning what the experts agree to say). Just today, trying to thin out my bookcase, I came across Eric Fromm's influential book of the postwar era, The Sane Society. You recall that his thesis was that a whole society could be insane. Hmm... timely. I think I'll keep that book. Clearly, the way things are has no universal claim to the good. But if so, then how can the good be an independent concept if no-one knows what it is, since it has never been defined?
