Been busy! I finished reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. I am thinking about doing an audio recording of The Gay Science which will take a long time. Need to read more. To do: go to library.
AC1
I saw Steve Jones (the geneticist) talking about the future of the human species. It was a very slick presentation. It seemed to be an expanded discussion of an article he published in the telegraph. He claimed that human evolution has come to a halt. The reasons for this are perhaps not interesting in this blog’s context. I was immediately skeptical of his conclusion but he did add two important conditions: he was only referring to the western world and the halt in evolution was temporary.
Any claims of constancy or certain knowledge in the apparent world should be examined closely since they can only come from two lines of reasoning:
1) A priori - there is no reason why constancy (or even inconstancy) should be expected, so no certain claim can be made.
2) A posteriori - basing a theory on past observations can never provide certainty since the next observation might disprove a theory.
The purists would try to apply this reasoning to my argument. An uncertainty might be the possibility of other sources of knowledge apart from a priori and a posteriori. What we can say is any claim about the apparent world without an element of doubt is, at best, misleading*. Since the apparent world is different at different times, we can speculate that change is possible. It seems the universe has changed greatly through out its existence, and it is therefore conceivable that constancy is illusionary. We could say some things are constant and some things are transitory. There is also a possibility that an seeming constant in the world is in fact going through a slow transition - too slow for us to perceive. As Heraclitus said, “All things are flowing.” Also Nietzsche, “Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie.” (A luck “guess” by Heraclitus - that everything is made of one primordial element (fire) is not so far from the modern concept of mass/energy equivalence.)
A few blogs have attempted to rebut Steve Jones on practical grounds which might be interesting for some.
Anti Citizen One
* probably
I was reading the Gene Expression blog and it claims that generation of scientific knowledge is generated through the scientific community acting as the overall arbiter and gatekeeper. Without this collaboration, science would not function. Individual scientists are not fully rational and presumably the rationality of the scientific process arises through ‘”wisdom of the crowds” at its apotheosis’.
Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It relies on the cumulative and self-correcting rationality of the scientific community.
[...]science is such a superior method of extracting information about the world around us[...]
[...]the power of science arises from the intersection of the communal wisdom of tens of thousands of individuals over decades with the nature of the subject at hand. Gene Expression blog
The author implies that no individual scientist is capable of really doing science in isolation.
Granted, there are individual geniuses of great brilliance such as the great Isaac Newton, but the outcomes of his dabbling in alchemy and scriptural hermeneutics should go to illustrate that cognition applied to a fool’s errand only results in glorious foolery.
I picture this as an infinite amount of research monkeys almost randomly striking keys on type writers and the gate keeper of science, the community, allows anything that happens to be scientific. As Newton said, possibly with sarcasm, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”.
Peer review and the scientific community is not what distinguishes science from other areas of knowledge. After all history community decides what is good history knowledge, theology community decides what is good theological knowledge and the law community decides what is good law knowledge. Since they have similar process for publication and dissemination of knowledge, why are they not also “a superior method of extracting information about the world”?
What distinguishes science from other fields of knowledge is empiricism. Production of scientific knowledge occurs when we use our personal experience about the world to form predictive theories and we attempt to verify them. When Galileo looked through a telescope and saw dots circling Jupiter and him realizing they were moons was a scientific achievement. Since there was no community, it is clearly false to say the community is necessary to progress science.
Referring to the scientific community as this monolithic truth machine is not helpful considering that good science is decided by a very small subsection of the community who have the relevant background knowledge to review cutting edge research. In some fields, everyone knows the other researchers by name. I will admit that science has progressed more quickly because collaboration and teamwork is more efficient than solo working. But teamwork it is not necessary for science to occur.
Anti Citizen One
At the risk of repetition, there is a good piece on correlation on the BBC.
And a piece on offense overriding expression of ideas is also interesting.
I just finished The Gay Science. Really good and really quotable (unfortunately for you dear reader!). “April weather” is present in it.
Anti Citizen One
It has been about 10 months since I posted on my religion in the TV series Babylon 5 thread. I have been busy. (”Everything out there has only one purpose. To distract ourselves from what is truly important.” G’Kar) I have had a chance to rewatch the series again since I last thought about blogging on it.
The Shadows are an alien civilization which also very mysterious, manipulative and powerful. Over millions of years they have come to oppose the Vorlon empire. Their philosophy and understanding are all driven by a simple question: “What do you want?” In this system, the identity of an individual is only defined in terms of actions and goals. Any identity, underlying motive or free will is not considered. This is similar to consequentialism where the ends justify the means. Since most of our immediate desires are worldly, it might also be a realist or materialistic philosophy in its routine application.
Machiavelli is a good example of this style of thought. In his most famous work, The Prince, he describes how one acquires and maintains power. He does not attempt to describe an “ideal” prince (that is to say “who he is”) but simply what actions must be performed in order to achieve a goal. This pragmatic view is political realism.
Not all desires are about the pursuit of power. For example we could ask of Socrates, “what does he want”? Could we say “rationality at any price”? (quote from Nietzsche). We could also say Plato: knowledge, Aristotle: wisdom, etc. (Incidentally Lennier indirectly asked for this of the Shadows.) If we pursue any goal too single mindedly, we risk losing our perspective.
I have previously mentioned the questions “who are you?”, “why are you here?” and “what do you want?” There are several secondary metaphysical questions that are mentioned by one or other of the characters but are not so critical to the story’s main conflict. These questions serve as another thematic backdrop to the TV series but are not addressed at such a literal level.
Who do you serve? (TV Movie “In The Beginning”)
How will this end? (Series 2 Ep 9)
Who do you trust? (Series 3 Ep 16)
Have you anything worth living for? (Series 4 Ep 2)
Where are you going? (Series 5 Ep 22)
This is perhaps a reference to the Socratic method, in which a thinker explores a philosophical position by using questions to stimulate thinking. In the next part I will attempt to describe and analyze the various answers to these questions.
Anti Citizen One
I was reading an interesting article in Prospect magazine by Adam Phillips on the issue of teaching happiness in schools (subscription only). When I talk to people, I am normally met with the assumption that the pursuit of happiness is beyond doubt. Epicurus appears to have been more pursuasive than his reputation. An amusing quote that was cited by the article:
A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy. Marshall Sahlins
One good point was made that to instruct happiness is difficult since it varies between people and may be counter to the other objectives of education.
“Be happy” might be a paradoxical injunction like “Be spontaneous”; if you do it you are not doing it, and if you are not doing it you are doing it.
Anti Citizen One
Interesting news from the New Scientist which tells of a demonstration of unconscious learning and therefore knowledge that cannot be linguistically expressed.
Also of interest is a piece in Scientific American on the honesty of people being compromised after being told there is no such thing as free will. But strictly speaking this doesn’t mean free will is true - it is just certain ideas might cause good or bad behavior.
The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often![...] Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses. Scientific American
As FN said:
[...] delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation [...] Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. The Gay Science, 107.
Guess what book I am reading?
Anti Citizen One
Several very interesting news items:
“A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.” Interesting state and religion issue. SFGATE
UK Government proposes wide reaching surveillance powers to investigate … well anything. I expect we will soon be given a helpful reminder by an anonymous camera operator when I forget to turn the oven off. I am now thinking the balance of power to the government from the individual is getting extreme. Individual rights are fraying at the edges and are almost torn apart. PCPRO
China: where an application to hold a protest is met with arrest for “disturbing social order”. BBC
Interesting piece on atheism in the US - The Guardian
And a subscription only news item, the New Scientist had a issue exploring the boundaries of reason. I have not finished reading all of it yet!
AC1
Well this website has survived for a whole year! That is longer than I expected. I almost gave up last autumn over the whole dialectics quagmire. I am glad I didn’t. I still have not finished that Babylon 5 series… Any comments El Sordo?
To give you an idea of our readership, in the last 3 days we have had about 47 human readers (discounting the authors!) from Ukraine, Poland, Turkey, Sweden, United States, UK, China, Latvia, Germany, Russia, Jamaica, Japan, Slovakia, Colombia, Vietnam and Finland. That is pretty diverse!
To invert Spider-Mans motto: “With great power comes no responsibility!”
har har har AC1 
Again on my recent theme of cause and effect:
Grand Theft Auto 4 queue man stabbed in head
A hooded male stabbed another man in the head and neck yesterday as they both queued to buy copies of Grand Theft Auto IV from a Croydon Gamestation store. The Register
Considering the people had not had an opportunity to play the game, we can hardly blame the game’s content for this incident. And I was not serious in suggesting that queueing causes violence. In this case, violent people chose to stand in line to buy a computer game.
Banning the game is like bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
AC1
Recent Comments