On 29 Jun 2014, at 04:26, Kim Jones wrote:
On 29 Jun 2014, at 4:13 am, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
As long as quasi-rationalists like you mock the theological field,
and prevent any seriousness there, it will remain in the province
of the bullshit vendors.
The trouble with "thinkers" like Clark is that they are really liars
to themselves. Clark is a classic example of someone who has great
knowledge of a field but remains a lousy thinker due to his
dishonesty and his selective perception. Because it is actually kind
of impossible to lie to oneself, the only way to work the magic
trick is to utter the lie in public (under the guise of "rational
thinking") in the hope that clever use of selective perception and
bullying tactics, vulgar language, colourful metsphors and analogies
etc. will rally a bunch of sheeple behind him as some form of
support. In other words, he believes that the more he persists by
denying what he has understood all too well but would prefer wasn't
within the scope of the possible (because it doesn't suit his
personal taste) - the more vulgar his use of language, the more
bully-boy his style, the more tortured and affected the use of
analogy (often borrowed from Dawkins who often borrows from Bertrand
Russell) the more he feels he has won some kind of intellectual
point-scoring match.
Clark is the kind of individual that believes progress is always a
kind of battle against an opponent or an opposition. He is great at
physics and related fields and in those posts we stand back in awe
of his command of detail. Knowledge of a particular field or fields,
however - I will never tire of saying - does not make you the
Supreme Commander Of All Thinking. Such individuals have a well-
known behavioural pattern: an intense emotional need to be seen to
be right about everything but probably have never had an original
idea in their life because they never risk anything; they only ever
go to the safe havens. The fact that Clark keeps showing up in
discussions where he is clearly out of his depth merely reinforces
this impression. "These guys over here are talking about something I
understand but hate because it's not something that an
instrumentalist Aristotelian physicalist mainstream scientific
thinker like me should have to put with."
I never miss reading posts by John K Clark. He is the perfect model
of everything that is ineffectual with the thinking system that
humans use. But he does know an awful lot about physics, to be fair.
You might be right. It is difficult to evaluate the degree of "self-
lie" awareness. My feeling is that Clark has "ego"-issue. It might be
the usual "jealousy" or something of that kind. Once he made a post
where he explained that he was open to "arithmeticalism", so he might
not be that much Aristotelian. I think it is more related with ego-
psychological issue than with the matter subject.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
