h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>> Yes - it's reductionist. But it's the only game in town. <<

Reductionism plus materialism
Sounds like painting oneself into a corner,
or the incredible shrinking man/mind.

Or maybe a polar bear on a melting ice flow...

What was that Beatle's song about 'making his whirled a little bit smaller'?
Oh wait, music and poetry aren't material either are they.
Therefore any comparison I make could not exist.

God! Hard to argue with a insensate micro-chip.
Even Mister Spock had a human side.

peace
~jwf~

>> ...by what mechanism to these immaterial things(?) communicate with the material brain/body? <<

You again! How many times I gotta tell ya.
Music is the bridge between the 'material' (body/world) and the spiritual (soul).
What other possible use or purpose could it have.
I say 'use' or 'purpose' in the spirit of your rationality
because merely having a 'reason' for it does not guarantee
any measurable 'utility'. I mean, what is the 'use' of dancing!

~jwf~

I'm with yer jwf.. Just off to put Mozart's Requiem on ...not sure about its particular dancing stimulating effects though , but yes it does hit me straight and hard through the thanks to my native Anglo Saxon genes

so, ~jwf~, this soul/spirit thing makes a series of compression waves in the air of a certain harmonic and rhythmic nature which causes the eardrum to vibrate, etc. sending nerve impulses to the brain.

This is how the soul/spirit communicates with the mind/brain?


what is the mechanism by which the soul/spirit interacts with the air?


I don't think you're actually considering my question, which really is a serious one.

>>
Which means you pay lipservice to other cultural realities. That's a form of imperialism IMO.

No, I'm not having that. To call this sort of thing 'Imperialism' trivialises the *real* imperialism - the kind dome with guns, bayonets and smallpox-infected blankets.

Also - as a political strategy - it's the sloppy, lily-livered, white liberal thinking that says that all we have to do to improve the lot of colonised peoples is to 'respect their culture'. I'm not sure what exactly the hell that means - but it sounds a hell of a lot easier than allowing them the means to improve their material conditions.

That's you told.


btw...do you really expect me to believe the guff about affecting change in the wider, material universe by working with its Chi? Very few Chinese, even, believe that. It's as daft as a belief in prayer.

On the subject of respecting cultures:


I think respecting other cultures is extremely important. But respecting other cultures does not mean that I abandon morality.

For example, I have great respect for both ancient Maya and modern Maya culture. That respect, however, does not mean that I'm going to go out and stick a sting-ray spine through my willy in order to hear the voices of my ancestors, and, if the modern Maya still had that cultural practice, I would suggest that it probably would be better not to do it and, if they insisted on it, I would recommend a certain degree of hygiene and perhaps a course of antibiotics.

How far does our cultural respect have to go? Do we have to respect female genital mutilation? Where do we draw the line?

>> I would recommend a certain degree of hygiene and perhaps a course of antibiotics.

When Wilfred Thesiger lived amongst the Marsh Arabs, he intervened in an unhygienic circumcision. As a result he gained a reputation as the Go To Guy for circumcisions. If you didn't want your boy's Johnson to go green - Wilf was yer man.

how imperialistic of him!

Actually kea is arguing for us to try a different way of thinking. It's all too easy to jump on that and dismiss it in a clever way.

My reading of this thread is that she is just putting forward a POV based partly on her particular interaction with people who don't post on h2g2. If they did, this discussion might be much more interesting than just being about the usual suspects doing their usual thing.

last night I was reading (savouring) Lisa Randall's Warped Passages and she was talking about 'renormalization' in the context of theory in particle physics. In a nutshell, at different energy levels, you stop for a moment to determine what the important bits are at that scale and just average out the bits that are at a smaller (or larger) scale. The fact that one concentrates on what is useful at a particular scale does not in any way invalidate the other scales. But, at the same time, the modeling that is done at the smallest scale, with greater precision, is strictly speaking more accurate.

to use an example used around here before, Newton is useful for a certain scale, but Einstein is more precise, more accurate, more 'true', but not necessarily more useful when getting a rough idea of when the next eclipse will occur.

I don't in anyway assume that many of the ideas of what was called 'folk psychology' when I was last in a philosophy of mind class are quite useful for certain purposes and interests. I don't, however, get the impression that very many of those ideas are terribly precise or accurate. I confess that my interest is at a more precise scale and at investigating whether the larger scale models of 'folk-psychology' actually have any foundation in the smaller scales. If that makes me an unfeeling reductionist, so be it.

Frs:
>>My reading of this thread is that she is just putting forward a POV based partly on her particular interaction with people who don't post on h2g2

Point taken. But this is one of the Straw Men I refered to earlier. I'm not defending the pov's of these non-posters - how could I even imagine what they are? What I *am* doing is saying that whatever critiques we put forward, only those firmly rooted in Materialism have any teeth.

>>If that makes me an unfeeling reductionist, so be it.

Oh, I can assure you that reductionists feel.

Frs:
>>Actually kea is arguing for us to try a different way of thinking.

I'll come back to this later - I mean to try another last-ditch attempt at persuading various people of the value of Marxist thought. But for now...various material concerns are pressing.

' I can assure you that reductionists feel.'


Well, I can offer that assurance as well. After all, I, an apparent reductionist, am savoring Lisa Randall's beautiful (materialist/reductionist) book. Beside that, the only (modest) income I have at the moment comes from painting pretty pictures.


I'm reminded by this 'different ways of thinking' of the phrase 'different ways of knowing' by which I've been perplexed in the past. I must be dense, but I have a hard time understanding what people are meaning when they talk like this.

I suppose it all comes down to what's the point of discussion online. For me it can be many things. Sometimes its to 'win' an argument if someone is talking bollox. But from my understanding in this thread, kea is trying to explore new ways of thinking, (which I'm finding really challenging and interesting...), and not quite knowing quite how to put into words what she is meaning.

I just don't want this thread to go down some kind of samo drainhole,

Anyway, hopefully kea is now tucked up in bed and happily snoozing and she will be back with us during our northern hemisphere night.

>> I don't think you're actually considering my question, which really is a serious one. <<

Oh but I am! If I sound too 'happy' in my response it's because of the unsuppressed joy I generally (and genuinely) feel, which you too could find in the music of the spheres if you would just open your mind and say 'Awe!'

It is you sir, who will not take me seriously. And usually you are right to do so . But when I say Music is the proof of the metaphysical I am deadly serious.

And I am making these claims only for Music (and poetry).

I wouldn't try to convince any of you of any real value in the 'other' arts. We all know that 'painting' and 'sculpture' are essentially the same as a chimp's fingerpainting with his own feces, a false correlation between tactile expression and pattern recognition.

At its highest levels (see any posting by Ewdardo) this eye/finger coordination sometimes approaches 'music' because of the harmonic meanings both we as readers, and Ed (subconsciously as a random monkey typist), bring to our subjective interpretations of his postings. Some of which could be made into quite saleable tunes! His variations on certain themes are intricate multi-layered patterns of monkey-do.


~jwf~

Here for example:


"it's the sloppy, lily-livered, white liberal thinking
that says that all we have to do..."

Melodic! Almost fugal in its harmonics.

And the crescendo at the end:
"It's as daft as a belief in prayer."

Resonance and resolution worthy of Beethoven!

The substance of course is still monkey-do because prayer is actually one of the basic/instinctive forms of music, the articulation of feeling in words. Similar to swearing when we stub a toe or hit a thumb with a hammer - vocalisation of an otherwise inexpressible feeling.

Ommmmmmmmmm....

~jwf~

If Music be the food of anything, eat it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mipw18kHqXA


~jwf~

"Posted By: ~ jwf ~ ...I don't wanna grow up "

Oh, I don't think you're in any danger of that!

TRiG.

I understand the phrase "different ways of knowing" to mean "different ways of aquiring information". And fair enough, there are. How reliable are those ways? Some may be more reliable than others. Is there any way to test their reliability?

Oh, but that's reductionist!

Yes, it is. And that's why reductionism is the only game in town.

TRiG.