Josh,
I'm not quite sure what your angle is here, but I don't seem to be
communicating, (please correct me). If BTW you and/or others aren't
interested in this whole cultural history area, please ignore.
I'm saying the last 400 years have been framed by Descartes' and science's
mind VERSUS body dichotomy. That in turn has been expressed in a whole
variety of subsidiary dichotomoies and cultural battles:
HUMAN SYSTEM:
mind vs body
Self vs body
reason vs emotion
rationality vs imagination
intelligence vs creativity
(convergent vs divergent
intelligence intelligence)
logic vs analogy
SIGN SYSTEMS/ MEDIA
literacy vs artistic education
(symbolic vs image
media media )
What
Josh: 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
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