Young Master Smeet
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That's right, findings are produced by society, by an ongoing debate: there is no final finding, just a succession of opinions.There, so, I note Lbird's response to a direct question is a lot of questions. I believe I've answered the pertinent ones.So, I'll ask again. How does Lbird see the voting happening? Will everyone gather the data together? Will everyone analyse the data? Will everyone get a turn on the electron microscope?I'd counterpose genuine free association and democracy in action to Lbird's one sided closure of debate, which is simply undemocratic.
I have repeatedly laid out how I would expect democratic science in socialism to work: open access to information and libraries and scholarly communications, datasets shared as widely as possible, free association in learning societies, democratic allocation of resources to funding and democratic votes based on the information provided by scientific research. I'd throw in, importantly, a general (rule of thumb) reduction in the working week to about two days out of seven, which will free up more time for study and discussion. So science would become an ongoing debate for all members of the community who wish to join in, and freedom to pursue topics and research lines would be protected if not encouraged. Freed from position and possession, vested interests (liek professorial salaries would be ended, so the only object of science would be to be right.I'd imagine that juries may well sit in and discuss and come up with findings on particualr research areas, and peer review would also be employed to ensure rigour.There, that is science by the whole community, a genuine democracy of science, without having a vote on the findings. Your turn.
LBird wrote:It's simply because you think that physicists have a neutral method which gives them a truth not available to the common mass.This is something that no-one ont his thread has said, and I'm sure no one believes. The method of science is open to everyone, and can be made accessible to everyone. The technical language of science, and the detail of practice is no more than the technical notation used by musicians will the audience vote on the music?).You brush off any attempt to ask what about sorting and analysing large blocs of data, doing the routine work of science, operating the technical machinery, conducting the experiments. If we all have to do it, there'll be a hell of a lot of repetition.How do you see this voting happening? Or are you no better than the underpant gnomes:Stage 1: Vote on science.Stage 3: Communism!
Why would he weap? What a transformation: the block, the chisel, the muscles, the brain all turned into a statue.There's a fabulous line in Herzog's film about Antarctica: the universe sees itself through our eyes. We are part of the unfurling of the universe, and the only bit that sees and creates its potential (through our labour).
I'm not sure we're differing as much as you think. If I take a block of marble, a hammer chisel and some imagination, I am merely transforming the marble into a statue, nothing is created, but transformed into a work of art. The act of labour is an act of transformation. Criticism is transformation. With poetry, you study a text, and produce a different text, that is the criticism, it is a continuation of the poetic relationship.
Well, there's three points (maybe more) to any debate:To hone/refine and test the quality and expression of your own ideasTo seek to influence third parties/onlookers.To experiment and explore and maybe discover new argues or points of view that you may not have come across before or thought of for yourself.There's been many the time I've had what I thought was an unshackable argument, only to find it either being easily sidestepped or knocked out of hte park. I wasn't, obviously, wrong, but I still learned that I needed to put it differently and expect different responses.
It's simply a corrolary: information comes in, is transformed, comes out again and is shared with other meatbots. At the minimum the senses shape (or constrain) the information in and out. I'll admit to being a bit rushed and unclear around the word 'created', I'll re-iterate that information can only be a transformation of real events (or at least of their sensory manifestations, and thus ideas can only be transformations of previous information). Obviously, that means lots of new and interesting combinations of ideas (especially through the working of memory). In a way, ideas emerge from our 6th sense: the structure and mechanisms of our brains.
Yes, new information (and data) is created within the mind, but the only ways that can be got out is via the five and passed on to another meatbot in the same way. No information is ever created, it is merely transformed. The meatbots are the gatekeepers of discourse.
Lbird,there are only six ways information gets into the meatbot. Five are the senses, the 6th is DNA, that is the networks of information I mentioned, expressely, that is social. Remember, I don't exist, I'm just an emergent nodal point, one algorithm running in parrallel process with many others. This meatbot is an indivisible component of a greater network.
Been away, just to take a step back a little. To take a philosophical saw: lets look at a mug (I'll make a fair bet there's one within your view right now). You can see the rim, its depths, it's handle (mathematicians can give us a formula for the manifold of a mug, guess what they had on their desk when they should have been working). However, that mug you can see before your very eyes is a distortion. You are only seeing the light beams being caught by your eyes, the straight line from where you are to where the mug is. The process of making a hologram involves placing a cone of photographic paper over an object, so that light from all directions, in a complete sphere is captures on the film. If we could see an object in complete 360's around it, horiozontally and vertically, we in fact wouldn't see it, we'd just see a sphere of light.In many ways, it is a plaussible claim to make that knowledge is distortion, without reduction, contraction, abstraction, we only have the thing itself. I remember someone on another forum whose footer quote was: 'I have a fully functional model of the universe, unfortunately, it's life size'. In computing an important distinction is between data (lots of numbers) and information (useful data, formatted, etc.)This holds a great emancipatopry potential, if we are each of us. As we grow into our senses and our networks of information, we each become a focus for shaping our own world. If we are presumed to be wrapped up in ideology, we'd need priets to see us clear, but if we can each make up our own minds, as social beings making history in conditions not of our own choosing, then the possibility of acting democratically to change the world comes into view.
Just another quick point. We also need to address value. So, peopel accept there is high cultyure and low culture: Is the Mona Lisa better or equal with beavis and Butthead? Both are cultural products, and some might be equally awed by either. An absolute relativist would say they are equal and we cannot assign a higher artistic/cultural value to one than the other. But if we say one is 'better' than the other, and we start to compile an ordinal value to the products of culture, we create a 'cannon' that can exclude or include different groups (and possibly different cultures). One way out is humanism, and appeal to a common humanity and (yes, again) aesthetic reaction, how does it make us feel, are all humans awed by Shakespeare (even in translation)?Below is a well known (and possibly controversial passage from Marx on this theme:
Charlie M wrote:Let us take e.g. the relation of Greek art and then of Shakespeare to the present time. It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But, in any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology.From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm
Culture is what we do, including creating ourselves, and creating difference. That is our creative nature. It's nonsense to talk of distorted knowledge if its the only knowledge we have. Differentiating between culture and ideology is making a useful distinction because it is the differentiation between the effect of power and the effect of our own self activity. Saying we all are always within ideology is merely as banal as saying humans have consciousness.Anyway, we have to include the theory of alienation here as well. If our products become alien to us us, and relations between people become relations between things, we are estranged from our nature and from our culture. The end of commodity relations thus becomes the flowering of culture, as we focus on growing humans not things.
I don't think it is 'conservatism' so much as the big artillary of the bourgeoisie being directed at them. We'll put up prices. We'll make you poor. We'll make you unemployed. This is an object demonstration of how property society makes democracy impossible. If we were coming at them armed with a clear rebuttal: we're going to expropropriate you, then I think we'd be better protected.
Right, got space to do this now. So, Raymond Williams, credited with being the founder of cultural materialism (his book was 'Culture and materialism', which was a blast against mechanical materialism and the official Marxism of the 1950's). He describes culture4 as a 'whole way of life' including 'structures of feeling'. He later amended that to 'whole ways of life'. Now, I'd be a lot happier (per he science debate) if people used 'culture' where 'ideology' is often used. To say that knowledge is cultural, and that we have inevitable cultural biases, to my mind, avoids the perjorative sense of ideology, and in fact emphasisies the entirely antural state of culture (culture, as Williams points out, is a term derived from 'Agriculture', growing things). I think it perfectly fair and right to talk about a socialist culture (indeed, it becomes useful, because that becomes the doorway to a study and understanding of that culture).In socialism, it may well be there will be different cultures across the planet. Take one example, there may not be full agreement on what constitutes democratic behaviour. In the Nineteenth century, in the United States, it was common for large gangs to gather around voting stations (there weren't official ballot papers, so rival groups would print their own, and distribute them at the station). Judges ruled it was only intimidation if a man of average physical courage would be detered. So, theat is, only intimidation if more than half the voters would be put off. Yet, in a very physical culture, that was deemed fair and democratic. This isn't relativism, per se, but a recognition that in different conditions, people may apprehend and feel differently about different ways of doing things.
