Do We Need the Dialectic?
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Young Master Smeet wrote:LBird,actually, I'm not joking, I'm in with the Singularitarians on the immnent emergence of human constructed super human intelligence (when I say "I" I obviously mean the linguistically constructed retroactive justification for the actions of the meat-bot hitting the the keyboard right now).
Good one, comrade! You nearly had me there!We all know, of course, that 'super human intelligence' will only emerge with Communism.I have faith in us 'meat-bots'!
Young Master Smeet wrote:when I say "I" I obviously mean the linguistically constructed retroactive justification for the actions of the meat-bot hitting the the keyboard right now.It looks as if we're all Zen Buddhists now! Here's how the sceptic and researcher Susan Blackmore who says she's a bit of buddhist puts the same idea in her The Meme Machine (incidentally, not a very good book as she tries to develop another of Dawkins's silly ideas):
Quote:Everyday experience, ordinary speech and 'common sense' are all in favour of the 'real self', while logic and evidence (and more disciplined experience), are on the side of the 'illusory self'. I prefer logic and evidence and therefore prefer to accept some version of the idea that the continuous, persistent and autonomous self is an illusion. I am just a story about me who is writing a book. When the word 'I' appears in this book, it is a convention that both you and I understand, but it does not refer to a persistent, conscious, inner being behind the words.She's sort of right about this of course and this has implications for the idea of "free will". We've debated this issue of 'free will v determinism' here before since we really do seem to be the Socialist Philosophers of Great Britain.
LBird wrote:This was merely meant as a joke, comrade, to echo ALB's use of 'Zen Buddhism', and hopefully to stimulate some discussion about whether we Communists should focus upon 'individuals' (as the ruling class insist that we do) or alternatively focus upon the relationships between 'individuals'.This is all in the context of our discussion about Critical Realism and 'structure/emergence', which as a model stresses 'relationships', as opposed to the so-called 'dialectical laws' (boo! hiss!) of Engels and Lenin.As a model post of objectivity, I'll leave you to judge where my beliefs lie.========================================================================Mcolome1 wrote: Well, In this forum I do not know who is a member of the WSM, or who is not a member, probably we should do like in the WSM forum where we indicate our political affiliation at the bottom of our names. ( If we use our names, I do not use my names frequently because there are too many fanatics right wingers in others forums where I participated, and they like to kiss the ass to their own rulers, and there are too many renegades who are dangerous too ) Since I take socialist theory in a very serious manner when I see something wrong I try to clarify it, and always indicate what is the stand of the WSM in regard to certain issues, that is reason why I have spent a lot of times reading our website, and our history, and I always try to comport myself according to the principles of the WSM, and when I make a mistake I do recognize my errors I have seen during the years that I have been with the WSM, members supporting capitalist candidates to the the presidency, peoples trying to comeback to the age of the cave, and supporting communes, religious peoples, and peoples supporting state capitalists nation, and I have seen racists peoples too ( I do not know how they have passed the interview and how they have answered the membership questionnaire )Mcolome1(WSM member )
Mcolome1 wrote:I have seen during the years that I have been with the WSM, members supporting capitalist candidates to the the presidency, peoples trying to comeback to the age of the cave, and supporting communes, religious peoples, and peoples supporting state capitalists nation, and I have seen racists peoples too ( I do not know how they have passed the interview and how they have answered the membership questionnaire )Mcolome1(WSM member )If you mean by "members" members of the WSM this is a very serious allegation you are making here. Indeed if I had come across such behaviour it would immediately mean a charge of action detrimental. However, I have never come across the behaviour which you describe.I think in the circumstances some evidence of what you claim would be appropriate.
Brian wrote:Mcolome1 wrote:I have seen during the years that I have been with the WSM, members supporting capitalist candidates to the the presidency, peoples trying to comeback to the age of the cave, and supporting communes, religious peoples, and peoples supporting state capitalists nation, and I have seen racists peoples too ( I do not know how they have passed the interview and how they have answered the membership questionnaire )Mcolome1(WSM member )If you mean by "members" members of the WSM this is a very serious allegation you are making here. Indeed if I had come across such behaviour it would immediately mean a charge of action detrimental. However, I have never come across the behaviour which you describe.I think in the circumstances some evidence of what you claim would be appropriate.
Mcolome1 commentary: I do not think this is the place to do that. The problems were already taken care of
By members I meant the combination of several individuals. Each action was done by one individual. That is not important it belongs to the past
Regarding Susan Blackmore's book, I read that too, probably when it came out or near enough. it suffered from the same problem of false perspective that most of these things have – trying to stand outside of ones own thoughts and look in. From my recollection. She describes the sense of losing one's sense of self. But this is only because the exercise is false. We are everything that we think that we are – or rather, we do not cease to be these things simply because we cannot describe them with our current mental furniture. We are not doomed to vanish in a puff of logic. In this case, recognising that the processes of thought are finite leads to a positive and life-affirming conclusion. Simon W.
"The evidence lies in the idea that the concept of death is a mere figment of our consciousness.Professor Lanza says biocentrism explains that the universe only exists because of an individual’s consciousness of it – essentially life and biology are central to reality, which in turn creates the universe; the universe itself does not create life. The same applies to the concepts of space and time, which Professor Lanza describes as “simply tools of the mind”…..he explains that with this theory in mind, the concept of death as we know it is “cannot exist in any real sense” as there are no true boundaries by which to define it. Essentially, the idea of dying is something we have long been taught to accept, but in reality it just exists in our minds.Professor Lanza says biocentrism is similar to the idea of parallel universes – a concept hypothesised by theoretical physicists. In much the same way as everything that could possibly happen is speculated to be occurring all at once across multiple universes, he says that once we begin to question our preconceived concepts of time and consciousness, the alternatives are huge and could alter the way we think about the world in a way not seen since the 15th century’s “flat earth” debate….He goes on to use the so-called double-slit experiment as proof that the behaviour of a particle can be altered by a person’s perception of it. In the experiment, when scientists watch a particle pass through a multi-holed barrier, the particle acts like a bullet travelling through a single slit. When the article is not watched, however, the particle moves through the holes like a wave.Scientists argue that the double-slit experiment proves that particles can act as two separate entities at the same time, challenging long-established ideas of time and perception…. Lanza says it can be explained far more simply using colours. Essentially, the sky may be perceived as blue, but if the cells in our brain were changed to make the sky look green, was the sky every truly blue or was that just our perception?In terms of how this affects life after death, Professor Lanza explains that, when we die, our life becomes a “perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse”. He added: “Life is an adventure that transcends our ordinary linear way of thinking. When we die, we do so not in the random billiard-ball-matrix but in the inescapable-life-matrix." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-there-an-afterlife-the-science-of-biocentrism-can-prove-there-is-claims-professor-robert-lanza-8942558.html i did say earlier on this thread that apart from dialectics, quantum leaves me flummoxed.
The nonsense spouted by that nutty professor was refuted by Belfort Bax as long ago as 1893 in this essay in The Ethics of Socialism:http://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1893/ethics/14-immortality.htm
I agree with ALB. The modern version is the "Holographic universe" theory. – that the world is like a computer program, Matrix-like. It's Idealism in space. What I'm saying is that the world we are talking about is an internal system. What's in here is not what's out there. Language is simply not *about* what's out there. The only connection with the world beyond the senses is the Darwinian one – hold a stupid thought for long enough and it will kill you, or at least put you at a serious disadvantage compared to someone with ideas that cause them to blunder less. We have nothing meaningful to say about the world beyond the senses. That at does mean, happily enough, that when pop scientists like Dawkins and Cox revel in the beauty of the universe, they are actually revelling in the beauty of us. Simon W.
Morgenstern wrote:What I'm saying is that the world we are talking about is an internal system. What's in here is not what's out there. Language is simply not *about* what's out there. The only connection with the world beyond the senses is the Darwinian one – hold a stupid thought for long enough and it will kill you, or at least put you at a serious disadvantage compared to someone with ideas that cause them to blunder less. We have nothing meaningful to say about the world beyond the senses. That at does mean, happily enough, that when pop scientists like Dawkins and Cox revel in the beauty of the universe, they are actually revelling in the beauty of us. Simon W.I am probably misunderstanding what you are saying. but surely our senses have everything to do with the 'world out there'. We interpret the 'world out there' with our senses. A blind folded person will stumble into things.
Morgenstern wrote:We have nothing meaningful to say about the world beyond the senses.But, at any given point, much of the world is 'beyond our senses'.As Marx argued, 'senses' are much more than the biological receptors of an individual, and 'human senses' are social and develop with society, and so are also historical.Surely the whole point of science is to go 'beyond our senses', in some way?
The normal, 'naive' view of reality is that it is out there and we apprehend it with our minds. In other words, that we have an eagle eye view of the cosmos. Our brains are like a camera obscura that reflects the cosmos through the pinhole of the senses to form an image of it in the brain. I/we (arguably always we
) argue that the mind is it's own system which has only a contingent relationship to the world beyond the senses. Look at it this way. There is a time lag in acquiring sense data, making sense of it, and our being aware of it. By the time we 'see' a thing, consciously, it is long gone. We are just experiencing echoes. This of course a materialist position -that the mind is a material thing, not set over the rest of what would have to be – Creation. Simon W.Morgenstern wrote:The normal, 'naive' view of reality is that it is out there and we apprehend it with our minds.Well, the alternative to this 'normal, naive view' is that the mind creates reality. Surely you're not arguing this?Certainly, the basis of Critical Realism is that there is an objective world, 'out there', which exists prior to, and separately from, our perception of it.We discussed all this on the 'Pannekoek' thread, so I won't reprise that, but human understanding comes from our subjective social interaction with an external objective reality.
Morgenstern wrote:In other words, that we have an eagle eye view of the cosmos. Our brains are like a camera obscura that reflects the cosmos through the pinhole of the senses to form an image of it in the brain.This is the 'naive realist' view of the world, based upon positivist science.This isn't the view of Critical Realism.
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