[FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

Sat Mar 14 12:26:51 EDT 2020

Dave and Glen, 

It's great to see your two frames coming into adjustment.  At the risk of taking the discussion back to absurdity, let me try to express, in laughably simple terms, what I hear you guys agreeing to. 

I have been taught a way of thinking about science that is western.  Like all ways of thinking it both sights me and blinds me.  Nobody knows everything; everybody knows what they know.  Nobody should presume to judge what they don't know.  I don't know Eastern ways of thinking.  I have no basis on which to claim privilege for my western ways of thinking about science.  

Now, as a person who has always delighted in attending discussions among people who do not agree, and always fascinated by the possibility of convergence of opinion, what do I do when Dave (or Kim, or others) highlight the fact that there are whole ways of thinking that I just do not know anything about?  

One way would be to shrug.  AW heck, you go your way, I will go mine. I can't do that.   Shrugging is just not in my natire.  I need to try to integrate discordant ideas held by people I respect.  Now, it is possible that need is, in itself, Western.  And what an eastern philosophy would tell me is to put aside that need.   Often developmental psychologists among my acquaintances have asserted that my quest for agreement is a kind of invasion of their mental territory, that each person is entitled to his own individual and pristine experience.

Let's say you come to me and tell me that you hold in your hand an instrument of great wisdom, a revolver.  And if I will only put it to my head, and pull the trigger, I will have knowledge and understanding beyond anything I can now imagine.  I would be reluctant to follow that advice.  Is that western? 

Let's say, I say to you that "to speak of that of which we cannot speak"  is non-sense.  To say, as an occasional member of the home congregation occasionally says, "What if there is a world out there which is totally beyond all forms of human understanding" is non-sense.  As Wittgenstein says, the beetle divides out.  Is an Eastern philosopher going to reply, "Ah Nick, such a paradox is not non-sense but the beginning of wisdom."  

Or perhaps, the eastern philosopher would say, No, No, Nick, you have it all wrong.  If you seek that sense of convergence, go for it directly.  Don't argue with dave and Glen, hug them, drink with them, play Russian roulette.  What you seek cannot be found with words!

If what we have encountered here is the limits of discourse, why are we talking? 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Saturday, March 14, 2020 8:28 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

FWIW, I agree completely with your gist, if not with your pique. The lost opportunity is implicit in the ebb and flow of collective enterprises. Similar opportunity costs color the efforts of any large scale enterprise. I can't blame science or scientists for their lost opportunities because triage is necessary [†]. But there is plenty of kinship for you out there. I saw this the other day:

  Your Mind is an Excellent Servant, but a Terrible Master - David Foster Wallace
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsAd4HGJS4o

I'm tempted to dive into particulars on your examples (Vedic, Buddhist, Hermetics). But my contributions would be laughable. I'll learn from any contributions I hope others make. I've spent far too little of my life in those domains.

[†] Both for the individual trying to decide what to spend their life researching and the whole (as Wolpert points out <https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/pub-archive/1476h/1476%20(Wolpert).pdf>). Most of the prejudice I encounter doesn't seem mean-spirited, though. Even virulent scientismists seem to be victims of their own, personally felt, opportunity costs.

On 3/14/20 3:21 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> Glen, I really appreciate your response and insights. 
> 
> You are certainly correct that much, or most, of my pique is simply impatience. But, I am here now, with these questions, and with a limited window within which to be patient. Should my great grandchildren have my interests, Science might serve them well, but is is frustrating right now.
> 
> Science is far more reflective that I generally give it credit for. Your examples, save one, illustrate that. The one that I object to is "assessing scientific literacy" which, based on limited exposure, seems to be more of "checking to see if you are bright enough to agree with us" than evaluating what it would mean to be scientifically literate.
> 
> A closely related, I think, topic is the push by computer science to have "computational thinking" embedded in elementary and secondary education as "essential." Computational thinking is exactly the wrong kind of thinking as most of the critical things we need to think about are not algorithmic in nature. The scientific and computational part of the climate crisis is the easy part. figuring out the complex social-cultural-economic-politcal answers to the problem is the hard part and I doubt it is reducible to scientific thinking and absolutely positive it is not amenable to computational thinking.
> 
> Maybe when Hari Seldon has his psychohistory all worked out it will be 
> different.  :)
> 
> It may very well be possible to develop a science of philosophy, but it will require relinquishing what, again to me, appears to be a double standard. Scientists are willing to wax philosophical about quantum interpretations but would, 99 times out of a hundred, reject out of hand any discussion of the cosmological philosophy in the  Vaisesika Sutras — despite the fact that that Schrodinger says the idea for superposition came from the Upanishads.
> 
> George Everest (the mountain is named after him) introduced Vedic teachings on math and logic to George Boole, Augustus de Morgan, and Charles Babbage; shaping the evolution of Vector Analysis, Boolean Logic, and a whole lot of math behind computer science.
> 
> One could make a very strong argument that most of the Science that 
> emerged in England in the 1800-2000, including Newton, was derived 
> from Vedic and some Buddhist philosophies. But try to get a Ph.D. in 
> any science today with a dissertation proposal that incorporated 
> Akasa. [The Vedas posited five elements as the constituents of the 
> universe — Aristotle's four, earth, air, fire, water, plus Akasa, 
> which is consciousness.]
> 
> Swami Vivekananda once explained Vedic philosophical ideas about the relationship between energy and matter to Nicholas Tesla. Tesla tried for years to find the equation that Einstein came up with much later. Try to get a research grant for something like that.
> 
> A practical question: how would one go about developing a "science" of the philosophy of Hermetic Alchemy and its  2500 years of philosophical investigation. Information, perhaps deep insights, that was tossed out the window simply because some pseudo-alchemists tried to con people into thinking that lead could be turned into gold.
> 
> Of course the proposal for developing such a science would have to be at least eligible for grants and gaining tenure, or it is not, in a practicial (take note Nick) sense.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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