On Friday 11 May 2007 03:06:52 pm Mike Tintner wrote: >... the mind/body era inaugurated by > Descartes (& the first scientific revolution) is coming to an end right > across our culture?
Dualism was intellectually bankrupt by 1950, with the spate of mechanized logic results from Godel, Turing, Church, Kleene, etc, and Shannon's information theory and Weiner & Rosenblueth's "Teleology" paper that was one of the foundations of cybernetics. > The illusion of pure, ethereal, rational mind, which > takes so many forms, is fast fading. The scientific revolution was informed by the notion that the physical world was mechanistic and worked by laws that could be written down and understood. Descartes' dualism was a step TOWARD that from the earlier assumption that both mind and body were moved by mystical "life forces." Dualism said that only the mind was, the body was mechanistic. The intellectual revolution of the 20th century merely dropped the other shoe, saying that both mind and body are mechanistic. The revolution in physical movers was back that-a-way -- somewhere in the Midlands they should be celebrating the 300th anniversary of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution right about now. It's been a while since putting a motor in a car earned it the name "auto-mobile" -- nowadays we take for granted that it can move by itself, and use "auto" to mean things that control themselves as well. The era of mind -- mechanical rather than ethereal -- is just beginning. Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
