12.26.06
Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion, The Axial Age at 5:53 pm by nemo
Cargo Cults and religion.
If you sometimes wonder how God came into being, it’s really quite simple. When a primitive culture encounters a more advanced culture (and not necessarily of a different species), engendering godlike status is a natural, if illogical reaction.
Monotheism, sourcing in the Old Testament period resembles a cargo cult phenomenon, but, alas, we see the evidence is part of the Axial Age, so who were the advanced beings?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke.
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Posted in Evolution, Philosophy at 7:30 pm by nemo
Reference: UD.
The problem here is that Darwin didn’t show anything of the kind. And such is the botched science education now dominant that even writers of textbooks are confused and incapable of seeing the howlers in their pronouncements.
Actually, Marx’s theories are not so well founded, but one thing he did do was to expose the game of ideology behind theories, Darwinism being a prime case (as Marx originally pointed out, a fact suppressed by the current left). As to Freud: his thinking on the unconscious is a degenerate version of Schopenhauer (via Nietzsche?). Schopenhauer clearly put materialistic/spiritual dualities in a better perspective than metaphysical theologians. Read the rest of this entry »
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12.20.06
Posted in History, The Axial Age at 4:42 pm by nemo
Times on Armstrong.
Having endured Armstrong’s disastrous treatment of the Axial Age, it is with caution that one approachs here biography of Muhammad. Then again, I welcome an attempt at defense, even as I welcome the recent attempted exposes or revisionist bios (some of them from current rightist Islamophobes). Personally I find the figure of Muhammed compelling, but that doesn’t mean I have to place him on a special pedestal before examination. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in History, Philosophy, The Eonic Effect, you've got mail at 4:20 pm by nemo
Another post at kant@yahoogroups.com, this time concerning Kant, Hegel, the categories and the attempt to ‘historize’ Kant.
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Posted in Evolution, History, Philosophy, The Eonic Effect, you've got mail at 4:16 pm by nemo
A post at kant@yahoogroups.com dealing with the issue of Allen Wood’s discussion of natural teleology and unsocial sociability. Read the rest of this entry »
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12.18.06
Posted in Evolution at 11:13 pm by nemo
From India Times
Charles Darwin’s theory that humans have descended from the apes has long been assailed by Christian ‘creationists’. Now, Darwin’s theories are under attack by Islamic fundamen-talists in Turkey as well.
In contrast, no one has made much of a fuss about Darwin in India. This is not surprising as most subscribers to the Indic tradition (which includes many who are not of the Hindu persuasion) believe in reincarnation.
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Posted in Evolution at 6:35 pm by nemo
Is God Still Necessary?.
There seems to be an implication that God was once necessary.
In any case, one can ask if Darwinism is still necessary. All the elements are there for a more intelligent approach to evolution.
Meanwhile, a culture dominated by reductionist Darwinism seems doomed to the resurgence of religion, necessary in some sense, then.
From: Douglas Rushkoff
To: Andy Bachman
Subject: Groping towards sentience
Dear Andy,
Earlier this year, I posted a blog entry about God that led to a heated discussion in the comments area. “Maybe I’m just getting old, but I no longer see the real value in being tolerant of other people’s beliefs,†I wrote. And then:
Like any other public health crisis, religion must now be treated as a sickness. It is an epidemic, paralyzing our nation’s ability to behave in a rational way, and—given our weapons capabilities—posing an increasingly grave threat to the rest of the world
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Posted in Evolution at 6:08 pm by nemo
THE CAVE PAINTERS
Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists
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12.17.06
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution, Philosophy, The Eonic Effect, you've got mail at 10:24 pm by nemo
email on Kant’s unsocial sociability at Kant@yahoogroups.com:
In a message dated 12/17/2006 7:24:05 PM Central Standard Time, x@X replies:
Unsocial sociability amounts to Kant’s appropriation of the rationalization
of “commercial society” advanced by Hume and Smith, whereby, paradoxically,
the conflict of individualist self-interest results in material,
social-psychological, and institutional benefits. The crucial fact here is
that it does not involve any kind of judgment. The invisible hand does not
involve conscious agency
My reply:
I think I have indicated the way in which Kant’s theory of history is ambivalent, as seen in his essay on history where he seemingly intuits unsocial sociability as some directional factor and yet also seems to express doubt about this in the form of a question to be projected into the future. And I think that taking unsocial sociability in a teleological sense as ‘natural teleology’ simply precipitates the confusions of ideology that drove Marx to his critique and his own confusions.
I have said this many times, and my views are in print and on the web, so I feel sad to watch the point ignored, in the endless continuity in this subtle error.
It seems close to a philosophical tragedy, yet one I think I have resolved in my eonic model where the real sense of I call ‘Kant’s Challenge’ gives a better meaning to his essay by looking at teleology in its real meaning, without mystifications about the ‘invisible hand’. But, of course, all this is hopeless in a ‘commercial society’which is forceably deluded about the ‘teleology of markets’ for as long as such a society exists. It is a tremendously sad question, all this philosophical effort falling into ruin because of a confusion in Kant’s thinking condemning him to the ideologies of conservative liberals, when in fact his clear deeper intuition sees beyond that.
The eonic model ( http://history-and-evolution.com/model.htm and also the material on Kant’s Challenge) proposes a beautifully enigmatic clue to the riddle of teleology (or the antinomy of teleological judgment) as a function of Big History showing directionality in a series of alternations, precisely as intuited in the first paragraph of Kant’s essay.
In any case, the ‘invisible hand’ is an economic concept used by Adam Smith to express the properties of markets. It is not generalizable to universal history for reasons that should be clear and clearer still from my analysis, and Kant’s reasoning here may or may not have shown Smithian influence, but the fact of the matter remains that his unsocial sociability is ambiguous and not directly equivalent to Smith’s thinking (or, for that matter, Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, another such confusion).
Kant created a whole methodology for dealing with teleology and then applied it to the wrong concept. That’s the point that can’t seem to be resolved. Yet I think I have resolved it, and that in a fashion that corresponds to the facts of history and to the resolution of a beautiful enigma that could make Kant’s work relevant to a crisis of civilization. But he will be taken away into the hands of the economic ideologues, as everyone pursues the vain phantoms of postmodern postKantianism in the wreckage of a civilization fixated on the magic of markets and deriving all its theories therefrom.
I am a Kant peon, I know. No response can be expected.
Best of luck. Maybe better luck in another civilization.
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12.12.06
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution at 4:31 pm by nemo
Panda’s Thumb is debating evolution and conservatism with Arnhart at Darwinian Conservatism.
There is a simple answer to Arnhart, and not only to him: Evolution is not economics. The figures of Adam Smith, Burke, Hayek give us no special insight into evolution, cultural or otherwise. Adam Smith was an economist, Burke a conservative propagandist given a free gift in the abuses of the French Revolution, and Hayek’s ideas on spontaneous order simply don’t add up to sound theory.
The confusion over Adam Smith’s economic thinking, as it seeps into Darwinism, has gone on so long everyone has forgotten the connection, exclaiming the resemblance as an insight.
A sorry state of affairs.
In Darwinian Conservatism, I identify the core ideas of conservatism as manifested in the political thought of five conservative thinkers–Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, and James Q. Wilson. While libertarians look to Smith, and traditionalists look to Burke, Burke’s praise for Smith’s two books–The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations–shows their fundamental agreement. Although Hayek and Kirk often criticized one another, their points of agreement were deeper than they were willing to admit. After all, both praised Burke and stressed the importance of cultural tradition in sustaining social order. Wilson might be seen as a traditionalist conservative insofar as he emphasizes the importance of moral character for social order. But he might also be seen as a libertarian conservative insofar as he shows how moral character is best nurtured through the spontaneous order of civil society. Moreover, Wilson indicates how the very possibility of moral order rests on the natural propensity of the human animal for developing a moral sense–a natural propensity that manifests human biological nature as shaped by Darwinian evolution.
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12.10.06
Posted in Booknotes at 6:06 pm by nemo
Secularism, science and the Right: New book by Ananda Meera whose ‘Breaking the Spell of Dharma’ is the source for Dennett’s title, ‘Breaking the Spell’.
The religious right in India is easy to denounce, but as with Dawkins and Dennett, Meera picks on one manifestation to reject a whole tradition
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12.09.06
Posted in Evolution at 9:43 pm by nemo
Priest of the Cosmos.
So Lemaître maintained that God preserved those truths in Scripture related to salvation. But Scripture had nothing to say on specific scientific questions, and might even be full of scientific errors.
The problem here is that Scripture had a look to say about everything, and wasn’t taken symbolically, or compartmentalized.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution at 9:09 pm by nemo
A Marxist critique of the La Jolla conference
By Deirdre Griswold Read the rest of this entry »
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