Marsha: "Hmmm. We must be cautious of a time-scale
chauvinism."
Jorge: I think I am cautious so as to avoid
chauvinism but,
what would you mean by "time-scale chauvinism'?
Interested to know, so as not to fall into it.
Marsha: Daniel Dennett speaks of 'time-scale
chauvinism' in his book
'Kinds of Minds'. "It's the bias in favor of our own
normal pace that makes us misjudge _patterns of
evolutionary change. Change that can take place at
such a slow pace that they are invisible, or
non-existent, at our normal information uptake, so
easy to overlook"
Jorge (current): Thanks, Marsha, for the quote. It
certainly illustrates your point. I tend to think
though that from all the chauvinisms we are so prone
to adopt, the time-scale one is the most difficult to
avoid.
We might be willing to dispose of gender chauvinism,
or race or culture chauvinism, but not of the
time-scale one. This "bias in favor of our own normal
pace", as Dennet puts it, has far more to do with
retaining our identity than the other chauvinisms.
Nothing like viewing time in terms of the evolutionary
time-scale or, even worse, a cosmological time-scale
make us feel insignificant, dwarfed, not only as
individuals but as Humanity at large. To think that
Humanity may be just a fleeting episode in a
evolutionary process or just a speckle of time in
cosmological terms it's the ind of thought pattern
we'd rather avoid. Don't you think so?
Marsha: Also, would you call 'science' a 'thing'?
Seems to me it is a cluster of spovs, or a spov with
component spovs.
Jorge (current): Only as far as ideas are 'things' and
hence, systems of ideas, systems of things. In a
recent exchange with Craig, we got, after some logical
reasoning, to the conclusion that
[spovs = things]
(using 'things' and 'spovs' in their widest senses).
So, if you say "cluster of spovs" it might be the same
as saying "cluster of things".
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