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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| David wrote: | | Fatboy wrote: | | David wrote: | Fatboy, I'm the product of ten years of far-right Christian fundamentalist home-schooling. 
But thanks, I guess. |
Extremism either way is no good. |
I most certainly concur! |
Everything in moderation, just don't over do it.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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jack_spain 
Joined: 03 May 2008
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| ^ When it comes to the question of God, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and that even more fanatical Sam Harris (with his atheist fatwahs - yes he does say some people should be killed for their religious ideas) really ARE extremists. |
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David 
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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| jack_spain wrote: | | David wrote: |
We're just animals at the end of the day. Animals fight, kill, hunt and, sometimes, toy with their prey. Why would you expect anything different from humans? |
Ah David, David, David. That's the rub. If people are taught they are mere animals ruled by their selfish genes, and there are no objective moral standards to live by (whether you call them God's or the laws of the universe, etc), then is it any wonder civilisation is destroyed.
Atheist ideologists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (who in death now knows better) have never been able to explain away the fact that the emergence of religious values was the causal factor in the emergence of what we call civilisation. Not only did we evolve a human society, but our consciousness evolved to discover transcendent values. Rather than mimicking the stupid and simplistic positivists like Feuerbach, or even Freud, by saying that God is a projection of ourselves, perhaps our consciousness evolved to discover something real about the cosmos: That there really are transcendent values to which we can aspire.
But the moment you deny these our civilisation is on the sure path to utter destruction. Killing off the religious instinct will destroy what makes us humans unique in the animal world.
Two books that you MUST read as soon as possible:
1. Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution (Harvard University Press, 2011) - Bellah is the world's pre-eminent sociologist of religion.
2. Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion - Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry (Coronet, 2012) - Sheldrake is a Cambridge University research scientist and leading thinker in the Noetic Sciences. He is diametrically opposed to the simplistic mechanistic view of universe that should have gone out with the 18th century rationalists.
No, believe me, we get the world we make, and teaching kids they are the result of a cosmic accident (really a ridiculous proposition when you think of it) will inevitably lead to them acting like random selfish adults.
If you want an older philosophical approach to this metaphysic read A.N. Whitehead's ideas about Process Philosophy. |
Well, I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree on almost every single point, although I will keep an eye out for those authors.
The uniqueness of the human race is its superior intelligence and reasoning ability and everything that has followed. We still, however, eat, sleep, mate, nurture, fight and form groups like all other animals do. I firmly believe that all human behaviour and feeling has an origin in animal behaviour. We haven't evolved all that much, really.
Whether or not there is some cosmic order is, at the end of the day, a matter for philosophical and religious debate. I don't entirely reject the possibility, but I see little evidence of it.
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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You do get into sone weird shit Jack. Noetic science is a contradiction in terms.
"The Institute of Noetic Sciences is the primary outlet for this form of woo. It was co-founded by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell and former Exxon executive and crank billionaire Paul N. Temple, who is also associated with the fundamentalist Christian organization The Family. According to the Institute:
"Noetic sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowingincluding intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the "inner cosmos" of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) and how it relates to the "outer cosmos" of the physical world."[1]
All of which sounds more like other ways of knowing than science.
Unsurprisingly, noetic science has come under criticism from skeptics and actual scientists, and the organization Quackwatch has placed the Institute of Noetic Science on the "untrustworthy" list.[2]
Where do the vapour trails start?
I never figured you for this. I am truly surprised.
Each to their own.
I thought the Mormons were into strange shit as well as the Scientologists but Noetic sciences. Goodness gracious me
You really are a troubled soul.
(Sociology of religion was one of my favourite subjects at Uni - 1970's)
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“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
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rocketronnie
Joined: 06 Sep 2006
Location: Reservoir
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Dont worry WPT - he hasn't read it - just found the quote on one of those wacky websites he frequents
Still its good to expose the off wall stuff he tries to dress up in respectability for the gullible to swallow.
_________________
"Only the weak believe that what they do in battle is who they are as men" - Thomas Marshall - "Ironclad". |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| rocketronnie wrote: | Dont worry WPT - he hasn't read it - just found the quote on one of those wacky websites he frequents
Still its good to expose the off wall stuff he tries to dress up in respectability for the gullible to swallow. |
Note the people who know little about a topic always recommend books, but can never actually explain the argument or the latest thinking or say anything worthwhile on the matter. And the books they recommend always happen to be paperback pop versions of real academic work dressed up by publishers to look all revolutionary and groundbreaking. But at least Spain is more advanced than Bruno and doesn't link to Murdoch tabloids
Spain, here's something you won't read in a book review or a blog post about a book you think might support your view. As with all higher cognition, science is indeed substantially about dynamic framing; if concepts don't yield cognitive coherence (motivation), social coherence (acculturation), and task coherence (application), then they can't even begin to be mapped statistically to the perceivable artifacts of "reality". But it is simply false to claim that motivation, acculturation and application are all there is to science just because they are necessary preconditions of all cognition and action. A whole bunch of computational APIs are thrown in with the deal (what portion of these are online or offline is a parochial distraction) and guess what? Science chooses to utilise several handles that religion refuses to employ where it suits. It's right there that the two part ways and this is clearly a conscious act of will because religion utilises these APIs in every other facet of life without question.
To hold the metaphors of "knowing" and "being right" to the primary school standard of "knowing", or even worse, to reduce all knowledge, statistically significant or not, to the level of the arbitrary is just deceptive garbage. Start with marveling at how as a species we manage to do anything - anything at all - and you soon realise something is being mapped sufficiently to something else to at least give an impression of coherence. Better still, try walking arbitrarily across a freeway tomorrow and see if you manage to make it across
The biology of the mapping system would be nice to know (and advances are clearly being made in neurobiology), but that there's a mapping system no one, religious or otherwise, strict evolutionary adaptationist or otherwise, doubts. Once you have a mapping system you have competing metaphors. Once you have competing metaphors you can fight over motivation, acculturation and application, and then dip into the computational tool kit and statistically test those metaphors against the criteria you've fought for. But don't confuse the former tussle with the latter process as poststructuralists do and drive yourself to the conclusion that rat poison has no stable properties beyond its role as a tool of rodent oppression
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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rocketronnie
Joined: 06 Sep 2006
Location: Reservoir
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Oh come on Pietilidie how much of that do you expect Pain to to understand? I expect you'll have lost him after that opening word, "Spain".
_________________
"Only the weak believe that what they do in battle is who they are as men" - Thomas Marshall - "Ironclad". |
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jack_spain
Joined: 03 May 2008
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| watt price tully wrote: | You do get into sone weird shit Jack. Noetic science is a contradiction in terms.
"The Institute of Noetic Sciences is the primary outlet for this form of woo. It was co-founded by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell and former Exxon executive and crank billionaire Paul N. Temple, who is also associated with the fundamentalist Christian organization The Family. According to the Institute:
"Noetic sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowingincluding intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the "inner cosmos" of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) and how it relates to the "outer cosmos" of the physical world."[1]
All of which sounds more like other ways of knowing than science.
Unsurprisingly, noetic science has come under criticism from skeptics and actual scientists, and the organization Quackwatch has placed the Institute of Noetic Science on the "untrustworthy" list.[2]
Where do the vapour trails start?
I never figured you for this. I am truly surprised.
Each to their own.
I thought the Mormons were into strange shit as well as the Scientologists but Noetic sciences. Goodness gracious me
You really are a troubled soul.
(Sociology of religion was one of my favourite subjects at Uni - 1970's) |
Read Rupert Sheldrake! He was described by New Scientist magazine (no less) as "an excellent scientist: the proper imaginative kind that in an earlier age discovered continents and mirrored the world in sonnets."
Just because you don't want to believe something, doesn't mean it does not exist boyo! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Are you actually going to summarise Sheldrake's claims and arguments for us? Come on, you're such a big fan, give us a run-down. No doubt you'll be aware of the critiques of his work, too.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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rocketronnie
Joined: 06 Sep 2006
Location: Reservoir
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FX: Sounds of crickets chirping........
_________________
"Only the weak believe that what they do in battle is who they are as men" - Thomas Marshall - "Ironclad". |
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