Slothrop

Tight but Polite
kind of an aside, but re: mr spock, there's a big difference between being logical and being rational. virtually everything in life is ill-defined (except for things like chess games and computer programming), so there's an infinite number of propositions you can make about the world, & obviously it would be impossible to logically deal with all of them. being rational probably has a lot to do with realizing which of these propositions are actually relevant, and maybe being able to intuitively reconcile them.
I think that's pretty relevant to the point, actually. I don't think that having a fundamentally empiricist / rationalist outlook is neccessarily means that you're an emotionally dead materialist with no sense of fun and no sense of wonder, but Zhao's position seemed to be using the two interchangeably.
if you buy that, it stands to reason that having superstition/narrative/religion/whatever is very rational (and possibly necessary?) as you point out.
I wouldn't say superstition/narrative/religion so much as empathy/intuition.
 

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
We can access reality through testing hypotheses. And testing. And retesting. And peer reviewing our results. And retesting.

That seems like an anti-realist statement. Hypothesis and tests are built on top of elaborate scientific theories.

Kant's no realist, anyway.

Yes.

NO, ALL COGNITIVE AND NEUROSCIENCE DOES NOT POINT TO ANYTHING BEING SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED.

Sure it does. Anyway, maybe you want to reflect on how a typical contemporary scientific experiment like the LHC in Geneva is conducted without several millenia of preparation in terms of developing Mathematics, physical theories and so forth.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
That seems like an anti-realist statement. Hypothesis and tests are built on top of elaborate scientific theories.



Yes.



Sure it does. Anyway, maybe you want to reflect on how a typical contemporary scientific experiment like the LHC in Geneva is conducted without several millenia of preparation in terms of developing Mathematics, physical theories and so forth.

No, scientific theories are built on hypotheses, which are tested, or test-able (aka "falsifiability"). If you don't have a set of hypotheses that are falsifiable, you won't be able to build a coherent scientific theory.

The fact that the LHC comes into being within in the space-time continuum has nothing to do with whether "neuroscience" "tells" us that "everything" is "socially" "constructed". It doesn't--not even close--although I wish I had a dime for every time I heard a philosophy or humanities buff pull that hot one out of thin air with a straight face.

There are branches of neuroscience and cognitive science that deal with social factors, social relationships, and the ways in which these relate to cognition/thinking/neurological processes. But these branches are in no way the "primary" ones. The deep biological bedrock of neurology is still molecular and cellular, the knowledge basis is being built up as we speak, and there's huge amounts of evidence pointing to the fact that the "mind" is at least as determined by genetics (if not much more so) than it is by environmental factors.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Anyway, maybe you want to reflect on how a typical contemporary scientific experiment like the LHC in Geneva is conducted without several millenia of preparation in terms of developing Mathematics, physical theories and so forth.

Anyway, maybe you want to reflect on a few semesters of neurophysiology, neurochemistry, genetics, and the epidemiology of neurological disorders.
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
I'm sure it'll be bangin'. You got any links that refute Kant etc? I kant (lol) get past idealism.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
But the question was whether they were setting out to understand the world with an irrational or a rational attitude, not a scientific versus and unscientific one.....

This is all great stuff. I'm afraid my reply might only be tangentially relevant, however - what I'm really waiting for is a response from the Z-man. I think your (nomad's) point, here and elsewhere, about rational thought processes being employed by pre-technological peoples no less often then by people in developed societies made me think about how often people in a technological culture use intuition - which is to say, all the time. Driving a car (surely an archetypal "soulless Westerner"-type activity?) is a wholly intuitive process; cooking; dancing; playing football, baseball, whatever your sport of choice may be; fishing; fruit machines; computer games; musical instruments; DJing (ha!); Guitar Hero...

And going back to pre-tech civilisations, they have immense stores of knowledge gathered using much the same rational process as Western scientists; observation, trial and error.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Hmmm... don't agree with how you're using "intuition" here, really. Surely it's something more than just activities carrying on outside our deliberate conscious control? Isn't the idea of some kind of understanding/reaching at knowledge implied by intuition? One might say that you drive "automatically" but one wouldn't say one drives "intuitively" would you? Unless you were talking about some kind of direction location without maps type skillz.-
 
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nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Believe it or not, the way our brains function hasn't changed all that drastically in terms of basic cognitive capacity in the past several thousand years.

Baboons and other primates have cognitive faculties similar to ours. We're not actually all that impressive in intelligence. We have to jump through all kinds of hoops to correct for our own terrible logical abilities. Thankfully we have computers and other technologies now that help.
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
Kind of off topic but relates to romanticism, seems it's always been around too - I remember reading that cuneform script went through various phases where the way of writing it was shortened (I can't remember exactly what, but I think the vowels were removed or number of strokes were changed) and then it went back the way, there were phases were purism was in fashion and people wrote everything in painstaking format, and the easier one was frowned upon. Makes me laugh how stupid people are, and how similar it is to how we view language today, as if it's this static thing... Hubris has been about for as long as we have.

Does anyone else wonder how they would have fared back in the jungle? I often wonder if I'd be as useless then as I am now, most likely is the answer. Haha.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
Kind of off topic but relates to romanticism, seems it's always been around too - I remember reading that cuneform script went through various phases where the way of writing it was shortened (I can't remember exactly what, but I think the vowels were removed or number of strokes were changed) and then it went back the way, there were phases were purism was in fashion and people wrote everything in painstaking format, and the easier one was frowned upon. Makes me laugh how stupid people are, and how similar it is to how we view language today, as if it's this static thing... Hubris has been about for as long as we have.

Does anyone else wonder how they would have fared back in the jungle? I often wonder if I'd be as useless then as I am now, most likely is the answer. Haha.

the script thing recalls people who are overly precious re txt msg spelling today.

re jungle - i'd be mauled dead in five minutes by a jaguar, no probs ;)
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
the script thing recalls people who are overly precious re txt msg spelling today.

re jungle - i'd be mauled dead in five minutes by a jaguar, no probs ;)
But at least, as you drew your last breath, you could blame it on the jungle boogelies. For the betterment of your eternal soul too. Eh zhao? haha
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
hopefully it'd be a southern Mexican forest jaguar, so i could at least console myself by noshing on some chocolate as i drew my last, afflicted breath.
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
See, I basically think that people have been thinking basically the same sort of shit ever since we could think, talk etc. I think alienation is part of the fabric of human existence, and it's easy to think in modern life that computers, tv, drugs, etc etc do it, when really it's just something that's been following us around ever since we figured out how to escape from brute nature (and I find the word nature problematic too, but you know what I mean). When I read authors of various centuries I find that peoples reactions to things are startlingly similar, there's an overemphasis onhistory and ascribing some 'lost' sense of comfort in your own world to another age.

Human life is, toiling in the field, working in an office, spending days chasing some animal, or whatever. That's what simultaneously seperates us from the animals and makes us feel alien in the world...

Ahh. rambling shite. Got to love it.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Human life is, toiling in the field, working in an office, spending days chasing some animal, or whatever. That's what simultaneously seperates us from the animals and makes us feel alien in the world...

Ahh. rambling shite. Got to love it.


No, you're exactly right. Blood, sweat, tears, and a few moments here and there of leisure time or fun or pleasure or whatever. Take them as they come, basically. Isn't there an entire book of the Old Testament about this?

It's always been this way. Try not to make the world an even shittier place than it already is or needs to be. Try to make things better where you can. Etc.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Does anyone else wonder how they would have fared back in the jungle?

oh, I dunno. it has quite a lot to do with how your raised I think, what skills you learn. like, I remember being shocked at the sight of 4 or 5 year old kids who were already proficient with machetes; it's not as if they're innately better at wielding machetes than children in other locales like, say, the suburban United States, it's just what their parents etc are teaching them & what's likely to be useful.

it's possible to learn skills as an adult as well of course, though it's obv so much more difficult. but, I mean, I know a lot of people who've been learning "jungle skills", so to speak, partially in vague anticipation of industrial collapse (or entropy) and partially out of wanting to to put $-mouth in re: talking up h-gs & original affluence & all that and partially just for fun. even dabbled a bit myself (lemme tell ya, skinning and tanning a hide is a pretty involved process). I mean, it's like anything else - if you want to master it you have to spend the time practicing. and if you'd grown up in that setting you would've spent most of your time mastering those skills as opposed to whatever it is you're doing now.

*so, no, there's nothing magical. no jaguars either, Scott, sorry. maybe deep in the Lacandon, I guess.
 
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