04.30.09
Posted in Evolution at 7:14 pm by nemo
Melanie Philipps nixes the idea that Intelligent Design can be equated with creationism, and the post has ricocheted across the Debate divide. The equation is no doubt unfair, but in the final analysis the suspicious extreme conservativism and undoubted Christian comittment of ID-ists limits its consideration. How ironic!
To me the problem is that ID advocay has ended up discrediting design thinking which, though not my perspective, has a weighty history. Whatever its status, it is NOT true that Darwin’s theory of natural selection has refuted design arguments. This claim, which has now snowballed into an monolithic paradigm dogma, and a new metaphysics, threatening to impose itself on everyone by a bunch of Dawkins fanatics, is bogus. That doesn’t mean design arguments are correct. In fact, such arguments are distant cousins of theistic proofs of the the existence of god, which have suffered a sad fate from figures such as Kant. Speaking of Kant, we should consider design arguments (and thence even natural selection arguments) as impinging beyond the limits of observation, leaving the scientific hopes of their current proponents stranded in metaphysical overreach.
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Posted in New Age at 6:19 pm by nemo
I promised another post on J.G.Bennett, in the previous post, Matter, life consciousness, but maybe that was enough. Dealing with Bennett is impossible at this point, as he carries too much baggage to be believable in the current culture.
But modern civilization is lacking a decent brand of ‘spiritual psychology’, which should rebranded ‘evolutionary psychology’, and flounders between Christian theology, where such a psychology is non-existent and the realm of scientism, where such a thing is also absent, and where an alarming set of delusions has taken root, with the fanatic imprimatur of science.
Bennett made a valiant attempt to correct that, but the result in his book The Dramatic Universe attempts too much, and ends up in a speculative mishmash. That’s a pity, because if you read his book almost archaeologically, throwing out all the junk, you find a core of ancient Samkhya, and a few basic structures that might be extracted and put on a reasonable basis, as an insight into spiritual pschology issues. That core revolves around the ancient Samkhya, whose understanding has been lost, but which suddenly springs to life again in Bennett.
Unfortunately you can’t discuss such things either with scientific audiences, or, sadly, even New Age audiences. There is a yahoo group devoted to Bennett: the mental mush that is visible there is a severe warning against bringing such an author into public discussion, like sellling alcohol to Indians.
But there is no reason why anyone who can read betweent the lines, discipline himself with Kantian critiques, might not pursue Bennett’s tome The Dramatic Universe to get a glimpse of how a real spiritual psychology might be constructed (but such a thing is still absent in that book!) for modern society.
Short of that, a study of Kant, maybe a reading of Schopenhauer, might help (Bennett quietly uses a Schopenhauer idea of ‘will’ to interpret Samkhya, a brilliant insight) might at least give a warning that the current psychologies in fashion are not adequate in any way.
In any case, human psychology is very complicated and could never have evolved by a Darwinian mechanism, as Wallace finally realized, tossing in the towel on ‘Darwinism’ (Wallaceism) and moving on to something else.
The entire Darwin succession ought to do likewise. There is no way trying to impose Darwin on world civilization can succeed, so why inflict this failed obsession?
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Posted in General at 2:33 pm by nemo
James posted a link to a book called Biocentrism, here’s some info: Amazon data on Biocentrism
This book looks like it would be worth pursuing, thanks to James for the information.
However,…
Just to think with care here: people have been promising ever since the Romantic movement to rewrite science around consciousness and/or life, but not a single effort has succeeded. Why?
This was an issue for me early on in studying the eonic effect. People like Spengler et al. see civilizations as living entities, etc….
I ended up always staying away from such claims.
The eonic model is therefore based on the idea of a ‘system’, and this is a neutral term used to describe the intelligible characteristics, causal or not, of a ‘something’ that might be
1. a machine 2. a biological entity, alive 3. a conscious entity, etc,…
Actually, despite tantalizing evidence of all kinds, it is not possible to close on a conclusion here, and the best approach is the Kantian transcendental idealism approach which stages a causal baseline against a noumenal envelope that is beyond observation.
My point is that, first, books attempting to revolutionize physics with a life or consciousness approach made fundamental, simply show dialectical reversal between non-fundamentals. Second, they impinge instantly on the metaphysical, the limits of observation.
Third, unlike the approach with the idea of a neutral system, and this relates to or restates the first point, if we make physics fundamental, then life and consciousness become mysterious. But if we make life fundamental, then matter will become mysterious, ditto for consciousness.
In the idea of a ‘system’ as I use it, neither of these three are fundamental. But then the result perhaps is that all three are mysterious.
I recommend nonetheless a close look at the eonic effect as an account of ‘history and evolution’: it is the closest you can come to seeing something that looks ‘alive’ or ‘conscious’ on a global scale. And yet you cannot easily reach the final conclusive demonstration.
Next, these authors assume that life and consciousness are both of a piece, and not opposed to each other. But they may be two separate things themselves.
Finally, and I will throw this to the next post, the philosopher J.G. Bennett, discussed several times here, produced a ‘system’ that can partilly alleviate all these difficulties, by looking, not at matter, life, and consciousness, but at will, being, and function, in an approach that resembles that of Schopenhauer, whose philosophy is about the ‘will’ as a cosmic/individual process, etc… Is Schopenhauer’s will alive, or conscious?
In Bennett’s system, which attempts to explicate the ancient Samkhya, the categories of matter, life, ???consciousness (the third category!), are independently acting poles in a triad that constitute the hyponomic, autonomic, and hypernomic realms. These three all have independent generative status, in the sense that a ‘triad’ is a unity of its three elements.
(It remains true that we can, however, ascend the scale of complexity from matter to the highest category)
They correspond somewhat indirectly to function, being, will.
Note that in this scheme matter disappears, and we have function, ‘matter’ being a degree of ‘being’ lower than the ‘being of life’.
Etc,… that approach of Bennett’s is a useful way, whether you believe him or not, in seeing the limitations of those trying to break out of the straightjacket of scientism.
Nonetheless this book looks interesting, and worth reading
I should note in passing, in conclusion, that we can’t for good Kantian reasons, even complete the triad indicated, which seems to go
matter, life, ???consciousness (garbled human thinking). The third category isn’t even known to us, and isn’t like our standard consciousness, although that we must guess is a manifestation of that mysterious higher third of the triad.
The problem can be seen when you start to contrast consciousness and self-consciousness, in the classical yogic way.
Bennett, annoyingly, switches this usage, and calls ‘self-consciousness’ consciousness, and ‘consciousness’ (animal, or even plant) sensitivity. The latter is what man shares with the animal realm. Man’s ‘consciousness’ in Bennett’s sense is a higher grade beyond ‘sensitivity’ but the lowest grade in a progression of cosmic energies, of which ‘consciousness’ is the ground state.
Bennett’s tendency to go off the deep end, and race around on roller skates with half-digested bits of classical Samkhya makes his approach somewhat untrustworthy, but his indication of a larger framework shows where we tend to thrash around in the realm of scientism, clutching at straws, ‘life’, ‘consciousness’, trying to make them fundamental.
In any case, meditation was once described as a form of sitting/waiting, while you reach understanding of all these terms.
That’s the problem: man’s thinking is always scrambled on these issues, going nowhere. Semantic descrambling is very close to final enlilghtenment.
Bennett conveys a message from antiquity, to wit, that scientism flattens out the whole into a dualism, and makes it seem like ‘life’ and ‘consciousness’ are the same, somehow opposed to matter. It is not that simple.
Finally, armed with Bennett’s approach, a strange thing happens (he takes second hand the system that Gurdjieff claimed was very ancient): entities combining degrees of will, being, and function might be alive by definition in a fashion that we cannot understand. Thus the scheme makes a solar entity ‘alive’, in some sense, but only by definition of the terms.
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Posted in Booknotes at 2:03 pm by nemo
Comment on Idealism vs materialism
James said,
April 29, 2009 at 11:50 pm ·
New book that proposes a biocentric theory of the universe (Lanza is not an ID theorist):
http://www.amazon.com/Biocentrism-Consciousness-Understanding-Nature-Universe/dp/1933771690/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240888757&sr=1-1
Looks interesting, and I will attempt to read the book. However, I will comment in next post on some problems with this kind of thinking (but haven’t read the book)
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Posted in Evolution at 1:36 pm by nemo
Richard Sternberg on junk dna
We often hear from Darwinians that the biological world is replete with examples of shoddy engineering, or, as they prefer to put it, bad design.
The term ‘shoddy engineering’ is itself significant. Evidence of imperfection is not evidence, as such, against a designer, since we see imperfect designs (‘shoddy’) from designers all the time.
I am not a designist, but merely note this fact.
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Posted in atheism at 1:32 pm by nemo
40 Million Nonbelievers in America? The Secret Is Almost Out
by Ronald Aronson – religion dispatches
Thanks to Ron for the link.
Reosted from
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/religionandtheology/1381/
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Posted in atheism at 1:29 pm by nemo
Summertime camps boom: The ‘Godless alternative’ for non-believers
by Jerome Taylor – The Independent – UK
Reposted from Dawkins site
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/summertime-camps-boom-the-godless-alternative-for-nonbelievers-1675815.html
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 1:26 pm by nemo
Q & A: Francis Collins
The former director of the Human Genome Project hopes to show compatibility between Christianity and science.
By Daniel Burke, Religion News Service | posted 4/30/2009 10:25AM
A year after stepping down as director of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins is embarking on a new venture, one that may be even harder than deciphering DNA.
Collin’s new BioLogos Foundation, which launched on April 28, aims to be a bridge in the debate over science and religion and provide some answers to life’s most difficult questions.
Through an interactive Web site, gatherings with pastors and scientists, and possibly developing science curricula for Christian schools, Collins aims to tell others about the deep compatibility he sees between Christianity and science. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity
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Posted in Evolution at 1:24 pm by nemo
Visualizing the virus
How can one bug combine genetic material from pigs, birds and humans to become so dangerous? Think of flu viruses as promiscuous, species-jumping, disguise-wearing contestants in a reality-TV show titled “Evolution Gone Wild.” Virus-fighters are scrambling to keep pace, using analytical techniques that work more quickly than ever.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:05 pm by nemo
Evidence Of The ‘Lost World’: Did Dinosaurs Survive The End Cretaceous Extinctions?
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2009) — The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago, has no less appeal now than it did when it was written a century ago. Various Hollywood versions have tried to recreate the lost world of dinosaurs, but today the fiction seems just a little closer to reality.
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Posted in In the News at 1:02 pm by nemo
Swine Flu Outbreak Illuminated By Avian Flu Research
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2009) — A new study by University of Maryland researchers suggests that the potential for an avian influenza virus to cause a human flu pandemic is greater than previously thought. Results also illustrate how the current swine flu outbreak likely came about.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:00 pm by nemo
Can Living And Non-living Follow Same Rules? Unifying The Animate And Inanimate Designs Of Nature
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2009) — Living beings and inanimate phenomena may have more in common than previously thought.
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Posted in environment at 12:57 pm by nemo
Published on Thursday, April 30, 2009 by Environment News Service
Air Pollution Endangers Lives of Six in 10 Americans
WASHINGTON, DC – Six out of every 10 Americans – 186.1 million people – live in areas where air pollution endangers lives, according to the 10th annual American Lung Association State of the Air report released yesterday.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:53 pm by nemo
Published on Thursday, April 30, 2009 by Salon.com
Top Senate Democrat: Bankers ‘Own’ the US Congress
by Glenn Greenwald
Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis “own” the U.S. Congress — according to one of that institution’s most powerful members — demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.
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Posted in global warming at 12:51 pm by nemo
Published on Thursday, April 30, 2009 by The Independent/UK
Climate Chaos Predicted by CO2 Study
World will have exceeded 2050 safe carbon emissions limit by 2020, scientists say
by Steve Connor
The world will overshoot its long-term target on greenhouse gas emissions within two decades. A study has found that the average global temperature will rise above the threshold that could cause dangerous climate change during that time.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:49 pm by nemo
Agriculture and the Environment, It’s Our Choice
by Jim Goodman
Farmers claim to be stewards of the environment, some would say it’s best friend; others, its worst enemy. The truth is we can be both.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:36 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://thetyee.ca/Views/2009/04/22/AfghanPolitics/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=270409
The Tyee.ca April 22, 2009
Afghan Politics: Let’s Be Real
How US promoted corruption while locking out true democracy.
By Murray Dobbin
The outpouring of Western anger and shock earlier this month over a new Afghan law that legalizes marital rape and confines women to their homes demonstrates how out of touch Western countries are with the monster they have created in that benighted country.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:34 pm by nemo
RG mail
Obama: Beyond Savior or Trickster
By Norman Solomon
As President Obama enters his fourth month in office, two tendencies among
progressive-minded Americans seem most hazardous to the political health of
the country. The gist of one approach is that Obama can’t do anything
seriously wrong; the other is that he can’t do anything seriously right.
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3842
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:31 pm by nemo
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1889152,00.html
RG mail
Time Magazine Thursday, April 2, 2009
Why Are Army Recruiters Killing Themselves?
By Mark Thompson
When Army Staff Sergeant Amanda Henderson ran into Staff Sergeant Larry Flores in their Texas recruiting station last August, she was shocked by the dark circles under his eyes and his ragged appearance. “Are you O.K.?” she asked the normally squared-away soldier. “Sergeant Henderson, I am just really tired,” he replied. “I had such a bad, long week, it was ridiculous.” The previous Saturday, Flores’ commanders had berated him for poor performance. He had worked every day since from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., trying to persuade the youth of Nacogdoches to wear Army green. “But I’m O.K.,” he told her.
No, he wasn’t.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:24 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/when-it-comes-to-israel-there-can-be-no-academic-freedom-or-dissent-the-case-of-william-i-robinson-and-uc-santa-barbara/
When it comes to Israel, there can be no academic freedom or dissent?
The case of William I. Robinson and UC-Santa Barbara
2009 April 29
by Maximilian Forte
* Another allegation of “anti-Semitism”?
* Another tale of a “racist” professor?
* Another professor who “violates students’ rights”?
* Another university administration “investigates” a professor?
One would have thought that, in a post-Churchill context, university
administrations would have been more circumspect, less willing to rush
in and stifle free speech, as if only certain opinions were authorized
and lawful.
[...]
Continued…
http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/when-it-comes-to-israel-there-can-be-no-academic-freedom-or-dissent-the-case-of-william-i-robinson-and-uc-santa-barbara/
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:22 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/cloud290409.html
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built:
The Cases of Margo Ramlal Nankoe, William Robinson, Nagesh Rao, and
Loretta Capeheart
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:18 pm by nemo
April 30, 2009
tomdispatch.com
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Human Rights in the Dust
Recently, in a Washington Post op-ed, Mark Danner wrote: “However much we would like the [torture] scandal to be confined to the story of what was done in those isolated rooms on the other side of the world where interrogators plied their arts, and in the air-conditioned government offices where officials devised ‘legal’ rationales, the story includes a second narrative that tells of a society that knew about these things and chose to do nothing.” Danner, who did as much as anyone to help uncover what the Bush administration was up to in its secret prisons abroad, should know.
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04.29.09
Posted in atheism at 7:37 pm by nemo
Nietsche among the sans-culottes
One reason I am wary of the New Atheists, despite some sympathies with the study of atheism, is that Nietzsche, most strangely, destroyed the basis for an intelligible atheism by the extremes to which he went.
This tradition will always lurk in the minds, consciously or unconsciously, of those who wish to realize atheism in his wake.
One of the pitfalls of twentieth century thought is the confusing influence of Nietzsche, evident in the references to the ‘last man’ in Fukuyama’s title. With Lange’s History of Materialism and in a play on the noumenal in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche proceeds to a Kantian decadence in an externalization of the will that is a poor continuation of a basic breakthrough. We can see already that Nietzsche’s views on history are wildly off the mark. If there is no direction to history, that is one thing. If we find there is, Nietzsche is plainly wrong, and might simply be a reactionary, the onset of the Rightist Terror, quite terrifying indeed, wherein he is a bit player, rapidly changing gears as his suspicions arise. Nietzsche is the first Darwin casualty, and strangely blind in his failure to see the place of equalization in world history. Nietzsche’s views are, of course, very complex, and it is also true he was a cogent critic of Darwinian natural selection. His challenge to Kantian foundationalism is ambiguous, and he triggers an immense subsequent confusion.
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Posted in The Eonic Effect at 7:31 pm by nemo
Archaic Greece, The Clue
I keep saying it, but the point doesn’t quite register: to understand the history in the Old Testament, the core history from the ca. -900 to the Exile, it can help to study the Axial Age model of the eonic effect, and then the case of Archaic Greece. Construct parallel time-lines and you will notice something quite remarkable: everything is happening in a roughly similar timing. And yet the two cases are entirely different as to content.
In general we see that the era of the Prophets is a symptom of some deep cultural shift going on. In Greece we see something analogous, although entirely different. We can see that our ‘eonic sequence’ operates a level deeper than the difference between the emergence of a religous culture and what we see in Greece.
In any case the Axial interval in the Greek world can be seen in itself without the confusions of theology grafted onto it, and the basic dynamic stands out. We can then return to the Israelite case and see the way that the theology which the ‘output’ of the transformations is confusing us.
But the Israelites were right in one way: they understood that something remarkable was the case about the age through which they were passing.
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Posted in The Eonic Effect at 7:21 pm by nemo
Canaan and ‘Israel/Judah’: The Old Testament Riddle
As with the previous post, the issue of the Israelites comes up, and confuses us.
I would put it flat out: without seeing that history in the light of the eonic effect it will make no sense.
One problem is the primitive character of the theology behind which we see the enigma of a greater historical dynamic. Confusing those two has always spelt doom for theologians and secularists both.
There are two different processes on two different levels, what the eonic model calls micro-action and macro-action.
In terms fo the model the form of the macro-action is only indirectly connected with the micro-action, i.e. the history of the actual Israelites who invented a religion.
I should also point out that the IHVH glyph referencing something that should not be spoken indicates somewhere in the background a far more sophisticated religiousness than what later crystallized as monotheism.
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Posted in General at 7:12 pm by nemo
Comment on Downhill from Nietzsche?
James said,
April 29, 2009 at 3:55 pm ·
“Aquinas would tell you that God is not an entity of any classifiable or verifiable kind and most certainly is not a mega-manufacturer who plotted out the universe on some celestial computer screen. Rather, “God is what sustains all things in being by his love, and … is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.””
It’s all fine and well to point this out, but the problem is that we can trace the intellectual roots of this idea to realize that it results from two incompatible traditions. It is too clumsy and odd to mix up Greek impersonal thought with Yahweh.
The early Christians of the Roman Empire began to have a problem with their own tradition, seeing that the ‘god’ idea had evolved from its Israelite sources.
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Posted in atheism at 3:46 pm by nemo
Those ignorant atheists
In this witty book, Terry Eagleton argues that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and their ilk are shockingly ill-informed about the Christian faith.
I haven’t read Eagleton’s book, which looks interesting, but here is a quote from this review:
A few years ago, I read an article by a Roman Catholic theologian who wryly observed that the quality of Western atheism had gone steadily downhill since Nietzsche. Eagleton heartily concurs.
Downhill since Nietzsche? I have been critical of the New Atheists, but if they are downhill from Nietzsche they would deserve monstrous indeed.
Postmodernists, bemused by Nietzsche, are a curious lot. Has anyone really grappled with what Nietzsche said?
I think the New Atheists have a Nietzschean legacy in their background that is making their whole inititative amibuguous, and easily prone to a Nietzschean demonic breaking out the moment their movement becomes estabished enough to do some real mischief, and after the idealistic founders are long gone.
I think rather that Nietzsche is so extreme that he actually undermined atheism, and the New Atheists seem to wish to break out of that and start on their own way, best of luck if Darwinism and scientism are to be the keynotes.
I think that Nietzsche was downhill from Shopenhauer.
And we should wonder that Kant was an implicit post-theist, post-atheist, and saw the way to go beyond the sterility of both.
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