On 1/27/2014 2:32 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 10:09 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 1/27/2014 12:12 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
So sure yeah, there's no limit to what you can do when you eliminate and
don't care
about x. Louis C.K. had a good one: "Wow, I can't believe we built the
pyramids -
yeah, we just threw human death and suffering at them until they were built.
There's no end to what we can achieve when we don't give a sh•t how to get
there..." Science that advances by eliminativism comes with a price and some
side-effects.
Just because there's a price doesn't mean you shouldn't pay it. We
eliminated the
Egyptian gods, the divine Pharoh and their theology, so we don't get
pyramids
anymore - and I'd call it progress.
Well Louis' bit finishes in the contemporary world with: "Wow, look at all this amazing
customized digital technology we have", waving around an iphone, "that's because where
they build these things, people are so miserable they have to deploy nets outside the
factories to keep them from jumping off the effin roofs...
There's a lot of young men and women concentrated in a small area. Given the numbers I
don't think the suicide rate is higher than elsewhere. Universities in the U.S. also have
high suicide rate.
/"At Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., there have been six confirmed suicides this
academic year, including two on successive days last month. Last week, Cornell installed
chain-link fencing along many of the bridges that cross the gorges on campus, serving both
as deterrent and a physical reminder.//
//
//According to a 2009 article in Professional Psychology, 6 percent of participating
undergraduates and 4 percent of graduate students in four-year colleges said they had
“seriously considered attempting suicide” in the past year—and nearly half of each group
did not tell anyone.//"/
so that we can leave a grumpy comment on Youtube, while we're taking a sh•t".
Sure, it's comedy.
But it's not trivial in proclaiming "civilization" has not made the progress promised by
"Science, liberalized from theology". I guess people think less about such problems as
good and evil, fundamental science, philosophy, theology etc. and we may be materially
richer for it, and technologically stronger, but perhaps ethically poorer and more naive
about the limits our ignorance imposes, without which we will tend to use technology for
savage and low stuff, simply because we lose the capacity to envision more appropriate
beliefs in such complex contexts.
Eliminate/negate belief, and pair just half of science (the how-techne bit,
fundamentally laying aside "what" with belief implication) with what's left, our default
opportunism, and Louis' joke is no surprise. It's also no surprise why many argue this
way: it's simpler and clearer.
Doesn't make it valid. I think we may be half blind in this sense. Children with access
to the weapons shed. The ignoramus Greeks were onto this. PGC
The Greeks also kept slaves, considered women inferior, and gave us the Spartans and
Alexander the Great as well as Plato.
Brent
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