EW>Personally, I don't like the idea of the scientific method being thought of as part of European mythology. What is European about it? I'm not sure. Shamanism begins with observe everything, miss nothing. Make a story about it. See if you can talk to it in that story. If not then observe longer. Be careful not to kill it because in the mind of the Creator "it" is as important and valuable as you are. (notice I can call another life form "it" but if I call you "it" then it's an insult) The part of the Scientific Method that is European is the part about it not talking back to you. You have to poke it, make sure it's dead, and then make stories about it. Check it out with observation of another just like it or make up stuff about it using the rules of logic. Humm! Is that why we are taught to call the European "Little brother"? Humm! :>)) REH
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Darryl or Natalia Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2010 10:02 PM To: [email protected]; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Comments Whether or not you have any use for metaphysics, at the very least, questioning our most ingrained beliefs about ourselves and our world would do us all some good. In a world pervaded by pain and suffering, with adversity in the external, and in our own minds one of conflict between choice and what's in our own best interests. That those best interests are also best for the rest of the world is seldom understood. Healing our relationships with others is paramount; relinquishing attack of others in favour of respect for persons and dignity, to transcend the characteristic emptiness that ego-centered pursuits entail. I don't fully understand positivism. I would think that if only the senses are relied upon for an understanding of the universe, even throwing in OL (objectivity and locality), one might be creating a block to the possibility of that which has no material substance, but nonetheless has effect. Science's need to describe may not result in an explanation of that which can only be experienced, but I'm confident that physicists will be changing both our minds about a lot of things. Natalia Ed wrote: EW> I said that I'd send along more comments on the paper that you and EW> Mike Hollinshead put together for the commissioin investigating EW> the residential school system. [1] You say: Economic progress EW> (embodying linear time) and the scientific method are the modern EW> European's mythology. They tell him everything which is important EW> to know about the cosmos and his place within it. That is a EW> mythology. Unfortunately, modern Europeans do not believe they EW> have myths and a mythology. Those are things the ancient Greeks EW> and Aboriginals have They are utterly convinced they do not have EW> one. That creates a huge problem for the future. How do you get EW> people to change something they do not believe exists? EW> EW> Personally, I don't like the idea of the scientific method being EW> thought of as part of European mythology. I'd argue that it EW> belongs to everybody, that everybody can contribute to it, and EW> that it deals with reality and is not therefore myth. One thing that we'uns erudite debaters forget (or overlook in a spasm of Political Correctness) is this: A large fraction of the public is stupid. An even greater fraction is ignorant. Many of the latter category are non-stupid and some have the credentials of extensive education. The ignorant are not, typically, ignorant of everything because, if not bone stupid, they learn to survive where they find themselves and often excel at a trade, craft or profession. But a majority of the population is ignorant of science. [2] They are ignorant of the scientific method and of the basics of the hard sciences. An example occurs in the Wired magazine article, "Welcome to Armageddon, USA", about Picher, Oklahoma that Ray recently circulated: Outside Garner's little colony, others have found their own ways to survive. Fred Von Moss, a 64-year- old former school custodial supervisor who still remembers the boomtown days, has rigged a makeshift security system--a motion-sensitive light, two dogs, and a shotgun full of birdshot. Around 1988, he and his wife, Marsha, bought a ranch house here just before they got married, and they won't leave. She keeps a small garden with tomatoes and zucchini and okra, and he picks wild asparagus from around the edges of the chat piles, hunts quail and duck, and fishes for bass in nearby rivers. Both say they figure that cooking or freezing will eliminate any toxins. It's elementary science fact that freezing & cooking don't detoxify heavy metals. This sort of ignorance is depressingly widespread, not just the manifestation of neurological damage occurring in Picher. So science and the scientific method are not, themselves, myth. What does qualify as myth is what is written, said and done "under color of science". Science has been a pop subject for over a century. Electrification entered electricity into the lists as The Secret Power of the Universe. Invisible X-rays led to all kinds of mysto-scientific rays and you can still find Q-ray bracelets in (putatively) respectable pharmacies. After Einstein's publication on relativity, the word was, so to speak, on every tongue. After the Manhattan Project, there were Atomic Cafes and Atomic $WHATEVERS. Better living through chemistry. Electronic brains to whom [sic] were addressed the question, "Is there a God?. [3] DNA and the secret of life. Finally, we have quantum everything. Put the quoted phrase "quantum x" into google, substituting any one of your ten favorite nouns for 'x' and you get a hit on most of them. [4] As a component of popular culture, science is a large myth construct. Because there are practitioners whose credentials involve years of study and multiple advanced degrees, you might even call it -- the popular embodiment science -- a religion, a religion made manifest in its miracles, for prosthetic ceramic hips and cell phones work miraculously. Some people, those who are put off by ex cathedra pronouncements that can't be explained or defended in a few words or pages of commonplace words, consequently dismiss science as *just* another religion or myth system. Perhaps the epitome of the latter hostile (scornful?) reaction is the PoMo movement that wants to boil the entire universe of discourse (and tangible reality along with it) to a universal semantic quibble. Everything is metaphor, including this one. [5] People generally hate uncertainty and ambiguity. They like to know they're doing the best they can. Schumacher wrote that "When people ask for education,....what they really are looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them." Most religion offers surcease from hateful ambiguity. So does the religion of science, albeit a "science" no better understood in detail than other myth structures. And you don't have to restrict your diet, go to confession or wear special clothes to believe in science. A problem arises in that science -- real, methodical science -- offers *only* ambiguity. No answer is final. Some "facts" are established beyond doubt -- that iron is needed for healthy human blood, that there are only 92 naturally occurring elemental substances -- but in general, uncertainty is the basic state of science. It's only the pop version, the version explainable to someone who has never learned the basic principles, that offers certainty. Worse than the clathrosynclastic coprocephaly of the PoMos, however, are the putative sciences that aren't sciences at all, the intellectual pursuits suffering from physics envy. B. F. Skinner proclaimed that there was no such thing as an "inner state" of mind; there was only observable behavior. And then he had the hubris to call what he did a science. [6] Economics as it is practiced is (AFAICT) based on numerous assumptions, many of which are false. Such intellectual (or practical) pursuits as economics, political "science" and behavioral psychology are not intrinsically wrongheaded but they project a specious aura of scientific certainty that not only deludes the stupid and the ignorant but, as well, feeds back onto their practitioners a stream of self-confirming certainty. All that is not to say that such non-science pursuits will not evolve (or chance upon) useful strategies or even valid truths. Some time ago, Arthur wrote: AC> I like to define economics as the "allocation of scarce resources AC> among competing uses". Which does not a science make. AC> I think this is still a valid way to see it but when it comes to AC> operationalizing this within any particular system then we quickly AC> see why economics used to be called political economy ...and AC> should still have that name. Perhaps then we will be more AC> realistic as to what it can or cannot do. Yes. Allocation of scarce resources is a matter, variously, of ethics, practicality, power, negotiation, law, subterfuge, kindness and so on. There is no experimentally demonstrable correct answer. An example of (what I take to be) a scientifically defensible proposal by economics is the *concept* (not the embodiment in the Real World) of the market. Like evolution, the market represents a distributed (as opposed to a centralized) system where decisions are made locally or local rules obeyed. In non-exceptional circumstances, there is no single point of (system-wide) failure. Local failures are replaced by the exfoliation of local successes. In addition to the salient example of natural evolution, research, both serious and ludic, with cellular automata, show that such systems can exhibit stability, emergent properties of interest and so on. But a contradiction arises when (as Arthur implies) "when it comes to operationalizing [market principles] within any particular system". We don't want to live in a society (or, for that matter, in a world) where whole populations live with destitution, endemic disease, ubiquitous violence, slavery or continual fear. But that is the natural outcome of "the market" because "the market" is an embodiment of just such a cellular automaton. Unmitigated market economics implies social Darwinism. Sanwichman wrote: 1. A "new economic paradigm" would be like getting a dead man a new pair of shoes. 2. The Hell's Angels need a new code of personal conduct. and in another venue, Besides this charade of calling for a new paradigm gets pretty tired after a while. WHICH new paradigm? Kuhn's "new paradigm" was that of scientific understanding, compelled by new evidence and permitted by the eventual demise of an old guard who refused to accept it. [7] That doesn't work so well in the humanities where ambiguities and conflicts always emerge from the human condition. Circa 1970, Schumacher wrote, The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy and these are not accidental features but the very causes if its expansionist success....If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result us nothing less than the collapse of intelligence. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but the become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence. Make everyone stupid, eh? Sounds like a case of "The Hell's Angels need a new code of personal conduct" to me. Sandwichman wrote, "What is needed is a different metaphysics" and Schumacher wrote, "The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction." I'm weak on metaphysics. I tilt toward the positivist notion that metaphysics -- the nature of things beyond the facts of their physical existence and interaction -- is a pointless pursuit. But I see no conflict between the notion that mind is an emergent property of brain and the long-standing notions of human virtue. You know that you are you. From other capabilities of mind, we all infer a similar personhood in other people. "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." doesn't need metaphysics. But the Hell's Angels who naturally aggregate and gravitate to positions of power in a social structure that intentionally promotes and rewards "a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy" certainly need a new *something* and you can call it metaphysics if you like. I better stop here. - Mike [1] I try to archive everything from FW but I seem to have let this one slip away, so I can't precisely verify what Ed is (indirectly?) quoting here.Theory of the No-Good Shit [2] I'm guessing here, based on my own observation and based on my own experience. I have a degree in chemistry, have worked in biochemistry and, over the last 50 years, have read, albeit somewhat haphazardly, quite a bit of fairly hard-core technical stuff, yet I find myself often unable to evaluate "scientific" claims. [3] Answer, after dimming the lights over three states for a hour: "Now....there....is." [4] Yes, 12,000 hits for "quantum sex". You had to ask.... [5] See: Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Alan D. Sokal, Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). [6] Ergo, Skinner had no ideas. ;-) [7] Circa 1967, I went to a lecture by J. Tuzo Wilson on continental drift. My date was a recent Smith grad in geology. She thought he was a good speaker but simply spurned the evidence he presented and its implications. The old guard isn't always that old, just comfortably free of ambiguity and uncertainty. (She's now an Anglican rector.)
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