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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (13399)	10/24/1997 1:55:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

>>When one's continued motivation falls outside reason, is that not a definition of insanity?<< 1) Not if there's a reason for it! :-) 2) Defining insanity is probably one of the scariest craziest things we can do. That's the final bastion of a totalitarian ideology. All that doesn't fit is either evil or insane. I don't like that; it can be horribly misused. Don't get me wrong. I subscribe to the scientific method, so long as it is restricted to the phenomenal or concrete world. Edison, Rockefeller, Attila: all these folks kept their attention to practical matters. Sure they've shaped each of our lives; sure I like central heating and cheap wheat. I'm working from the idea that Kick Rock = Toe Booboo is universally accepted. But there are daily human forces which I don't think can be reduced to an algebra. Ethics is one. We've got an awful lot of very different ethical and political views, and so far, we're all of us right. . I can imagine that the rigorous method of science might reach one day through biology and neuroscience on into psychology and give us a blueprint for Homo Sap, Mark 1 Mod 0. But I predict hat htis is a far way off. In the mean time I still need to have a reasonable system of ethics to govern my behavior and teach my unborn daughter. I cannot use pure reason founded on scientific fact to do this in any satisfactory manner. I need to introduce extraneous principles. These are necessarily articles of faith. So I submit that I can operate in a reasonable but not 100% Rational manner, and still lay claim to sanity. A is A, no problem. But there's a disconnect, seemingly a controversial disconnect between A and A-OK.

To: Father Terrence who wrote (13399)	10/24/1997 4:12:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

OK, I'll play. >>"A is A" is one of the few statements based on observation, not faith. I'd be obliged if you could show me an experiment, or a citation in the peer-reviewed literature of the natural sciences (like Nature, or the Physical Review Letters, etc.), which addresses the nature of A. I'm skeptical, because like that annoying professor in those icky new Dianetics commercials, I'll pound the lectern and intone "A-is-an-abstraction!" "Water is dihydrogen oxide" or "Sirius has a very dense companion" are the sortsa things we can bandy about at the meeting of the Royal Society of Observers and Achievers. But my lasting complaint with a tight little logical loop like "A is A" is that we'd have an awful hard time reducing A to practice. Units? Dimensions?? I posit that "A is A" requires one act of faith: the acceptance of logic. That is a learned behavior! Now granted, logic, when carefully deloused of impolite premises, is pretty universally accepted. But it strikes me, even as you strenuously deny it, that the proclamation of "A is A" is saying a bit more. I see it as a contraction for the much bolder claim "The real and the phenomenal are the same. And a step further: "Man has it in [him] to be sovereign Master of all Reality." Brave bold words, but maybe a tad immodest. Pure observation is a hollow shell, Substance without Form. It requires the faculty of abstract thought to simplify and organize it into a hypothesis, then a theory, then a doctrine compact enough to teach at college. The wise, scientific thing to do is to always subordinate the abstraction to the observation. But this gets dicey since the two get woven into a pretty tight mat. We need abstractions to talk sensibly about what we're learning. But those same abstractions pose a potential trap, requiring constant care by all scientists and technologians. Where trouble invariably occurs is when someone tries to shoehorn a new, incongruous observation into a convenient abstract system. Lysenko did it, Freud probably did it, every priest does it for pay on a daily basis. George is onto something with his vignette about the rollerskate girl. What if our young cortices are just barely beginning to be able to taste the Aness? Imagine fer a seckint that autism is an almost-progressive mutation wherein the Doors of Perception are jammed wide open, to the point where our lizard switchboard is too damn busy soaking in Pure Sweet Comprehension for such inconveniences as walking&talking? Pure speculation, but prettyspeculation. So - that native shaman might not be shutting out reality - just accessing a different, captivating but so far useless facet of reality. Maybe. Proving or disproving that will have to wait. In the mean time, show me what (practically, tangibly) you mean by A.