07.30.06
Posted in Philosophy, The Eonic Effect at 6:19 pm by nemo
To further elaborate on the previous post in reply to Luke Rondinaro’s query on the use of Kant and Schopenhauer:
This refers to the study of the ‘eonic effect’ and ‘eonic model’, not the general history of philosophy, which claims to have passed beyond Kant.
In general Kant seems unpopular these days, as one philosophic fad follows another, each claiming to undermine the foundations of the previous cycle.
Again in relation to the study of the eonic effect, the question arises, from what point of view do we speak of five thousand years of history, and what methodology do we use that can encompass the full diversity?
Note how crippled the current Darwinian phase of knowledge is: it can’t handle something like Buddhism/Hinduism. It can’t handle, in fact, any of the world’s religions. It can’t even handle modern philosophy! It purports to have explained the totality of ethics as an epiphenomenon of natural selection. Free will, evidently, is another adaptive process by natural selection.
Now take all of this and try to evaluate the last five thousand years of history! You will strike out and be left with an account that apparently sees nothing but complete superstition until the time of Newton (although Newton must be factored out, due to his ‘superstitions’) followed by the rise of successive sciences, with Darwin completing the great edifice of historical/evolutionary knowledge…
So Kant was the last great philosopher with a complete set of marbles. He has a scientific, ethical, and aesthetic methodology, and a framework question on history that is useful for organizing a study of historical evolution.
But there is more: as we proceed to consider the ‘eonic periodization’ of world history we find that the ‘non-random pattern’ involved includes the emergence of philosophy in its scope, and that, mirabile dictu, Kant appears at the point of the Great Divide, a spectacular effect deserving of close study.
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07.15.06
Posted in Evolution at 9:22 pm by nemo
It is unfortunate that the famous text from the Wistar Symposium is not in print. It is one of the seminal critiques. All we get now is ID, ID, ID, with the real critics of Darwin being marginalized all over again. Read the rest of this entry »
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07.09.06
Posted in New Age at 8:07 pm by nemo
Thanks for your comment. Before pontificating on esotericism, tell me what is you connection with Gurdjieff? You read Ouspensky, and spend your time wishing you could find a fourth way school, but you never found one. As to my knowledge of Gurdjieff, I wouldn’t care to argue the point. I know more about sufism than most people who call themselves sufis, and as a result I stay completely away from the whole business of pious idiots and out and out sharks. Who needs it anymore? Read the rest of this entry »
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07.06.06
Posted in Evolution, Philosophy at 6:41 pm by nemo
Scream design?. I wonder how the explanatory filter would distinguish Schopenhauer’s ‘metaphysics’ of will from the lurking theological mythologies of the ‘scientific’ ID-ists. The answer is, it couldnt’. At least Schopenhauer was honest about the noumenal/phenomenal aspect of such questions, unlike ID vulgarians.
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07.05.06
Posted in Evolution at 7:38 pm by nemo
Karen Armstrong had a clever and devious strategy, visible in her popularity with an Islamis audience. Here’s a review from a Moslem journal.
This blog has repeatedly exposed the flaws in Armstrong’s ‘analysis’ (if it could be called that).
Let it be noted that Christianity and Islam are NOT part of the Axial phenomenon.
I think a study of the eonic effect will clarify this issue:
Symphony of emergence.
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Posted in Evolution at 7:31 pm by nemo
NCSE plays cheerleader for the ‘straight doctrine’ science blogs.
In fact, the public is completely ill-served by both the ID group and the Darwinian biologists. Darwinists almost seriously analyze criticism, apart from rote dogma repetition a la Talk.origins. It is all a propaganda game.
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Posted in Evolution, New Age, Science & Religion at 6:26 pm by nemo
People have been critiquing the Enlightenment from the moment of its birth. Further, the critique of the Enlightenment was invented by the men of the Enlightenment, witness Kant’s critique of reason. The one-dimensional ‘rationality’ of the positivists is an easy target for those whose anti-Enlightenment agenda is really anti-democratic retrogression. Reading Kant’s What is Enlightenment? we see that the issue is not rationality, which any rational person can critique for its limitations, but autonomy. This demand for autonomy is the threat to the theistic dogmatists, the gurus, and the rest.
Your autonomy is never ‘played out’. It is something you must keep, as the wolves assemble at the fringes.
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Posted in Evolution at 6:18 pm by nemo
Cornelius Hunter at ID the Future seems to be regressing to the ‘critque evolution’ rut, when he should know the issue is natural selection. Design promoters must know how the public and general media often fail to achieve the distinction, and a certain sloppiness here plays to the gallery.
In any case, the metaphysical aspect of ‘evolution’ is fair game, but the same is true of ID.
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07.04.06
Posted in Evolution at 6:53 pm by nemo
Now online a free chapter There Is a Free Lunch After All: William Dembski’s Wrong Answers to Irrelevant Questions from Mark Perakh’s Why Intelligent Design Fails.
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Posted in Evolution at 6:50 pm by nemo
One thing I learned after the first edition of WH&EE was to make the eonic model completely free of numerical claims (the point was mentioned in passing in the preface).
I hold no brief for George Gilder but it seems that some fairless harmless remarks on information theory get the full treatment by quibbles, here.
Actually the debate over the ‘no free lunch’ theorems between Darwinists and Dembski shows how the terrain just gets chewed up like a WWI battlefield. The result? Whole domains of discourse lost to discussion, with pure garbage on both sides.
As to the eonic model, the implications are that numerical parameters will fail for a phenomenon of real complexity such as we see in the eonic effect. For example, the ‘dynamic’ is dependent on subtle valuations, e.g. ‘aesthetic judgments’, and these don’t follow a sliderule scale.
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Posted in Evolution at 6:36 pm by nemo
Non-religiously motivated dissent from Darwinism. The ID movement acts as if they own Darwin criticism, but in fact everything that is sound they borrowed, and everything they contributed has totally confused the issue. Flush with rightwing cash, a marketable anti-Darwin product reduced to a streamlined hype, they have made the business of critiquing Darwin all the more difficult.
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07.03.06
Posted in Evolution, General at 6:37 pm by nemo
The sad truth is that a free probability textbook won’t help much (even as I eagerly download the file). It is my observation that the Darwin debate has destructively mangled ‘right math intuition’ in everyone it has touched. The damage can be seen in the way Fred Hoyle’s no doubt flawed but basically cogent probability arguments. The inability, abetted by real sophistry peddlers like Richard Dawkins, of trained scientists to see the issues with clarity is striking (I admit that creationist/ID promoters don’t help much).
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Posted in Evolution at 6:25 pm by nemo
A call to explain evoluton’s weaknesses shows how the ‘critics’ in the Creationist/ID camp exploit the ambiguity between ‘evolution’ and ‘natural selection’. The whole search for the ‘weaknesses’ gets the issue garbled.
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Posted in General at 5:21 pm by nemo
The Political Brain.
A recent brain-imaging study shows that our political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias
All of this is, of course, ‘hard science’, but we will never see these techniques applied to scientists, or, oh yes, Darwinists.
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