massrock

Well-known member
Thinking is not some kind of ghost that flies around getting things done in the ether between peoples' heads, even though that's what most people who've not learned anything about neurology or cognitive science believe.
I think that most people think that thinking is something that goes on inside people's heads actually.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Well yeeees, but I don't think that implies "science involves as little thinking as possible".

I put it to you that Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Einstein and Feynman were all at least averagely good at "thinking", for any remotely reasonable definition of the word.

Oh lord how hard is it to get Westerners to stop believing in the powers of their own minds.

You might as well ask them to stop watching TV or playing x-box.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
I think that most people think that thinking is something that goes on inside people's heads actually.

No, they think that their thinking extends far outside of their own heads, and gets all sorts of things done. They think that if they only think harder, all will be revealed. I doubt that.

In a sense, it's correct to believe that our sense-perception organs are not limited to our internal brain structures. But that doesn't mean that "thinking" is the be-all, end-all of human interaction.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
In fact, the entire body thinks. But don't tell people that. The body below the head is bad and dirty. It couldn't possibly be full of the very nerves that send sensory information to the brain in the first place.

There is no "pure" thinking in a human brain, and there's no "pure" thinking outside of it. Abstract systems are worthwhile, imo, only insofar as they make things better according to the people who decide to employ them. Science is by no means straightforwardly a "good thing" any more than anything else is. But I don't want to live in a world where I can't take antibiotics if I get a UTI, so I'm not going to complain too much about it.

Humans need to remember that they actually don't know much of anything.
 

massrock

Well-known member
Except for those people who've learned lots about neurology and cognitive science, because they know lots of things and always see where they have lapsed into dogma.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Except for those people who've learned lots about neurology and cognitive science, because they know lots of things and always see where they have lapsed into dogma.

I don't know if I'm sure about what you mean here, but I've never met any dogmatist neurologists, just people who have studied the brain empirically and are willing to make hypotheses and abandon them very quickly when their work can't stand up to peer review.

Of course, there's the occasional asshole who fakes data, and many companies who bend it, however, so there's no such thing as "pure" science. I have no illusions about science being pure.

Ask for "purity" from the world and you'll be waiting in silence for the rest of eternity.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
A scientific "truth" in Badiou's sense is not a fact, but the "figure" (type of formal process) through which a fact is produced, its evidential basis demonstrated and its consequences derived. For the scientist, certainly, there are truths, and they are not reducible to opinions -although the facts they establish remain in principle contestable.

No, to scientists there are facts, and these are subject to change at a moment's notice.

Scientist do not give a shit about Badiou or philosophically abstract truths, believe it or not. If they do, they care about it on their own time, since this would have nothing to do with science.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Not entirely responding to your point, but it seems worth mentioning that both of those groups were fundamentally pragmatic / empiricist. If you'd put the question to either of them, they'd have responded that a) what they want is for the Nazis to go aways and stop fucking over their nation / race and for things to be run roughly as they were prior to the Nazis taking over or roughly as they are somewhere that the nazis haven't taken over yet and that b) they believe that this situation would be better because they were in that situation five or ten years ago and it was better or because people in that somewhere seem to be doing better.

This seems to me to be practically quite different from the position of the communist revolutionary who says that a) what they want is for capitalism to go away and be replaced by something else (which they may or may not be willing to describe) and that b) they believe this situation will be better because they've proved it (fsvo proved).

Slothrop, these same Badiou readers who will put down anyone for looking for social justice outside of "total transformation" or revolution (e.g. feminists) will in the next breath talk about how the civil rights movement (which was pragmatic and demanded nothing like total transformation, but actually small, incremental, legal-procedural changes and largescale social reform) is a Truth.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Oh lord how hard is it to get Westerners to stop believing in the powers of their own minds.

You might as well ask them to stop watching TV or playing x-box.

OK, you've completely lost me now. Is this part of your ongoing polemical broadside against "common sense"?

If it wasn't Darwin's mind that came up with the theory of speciation by natural selection, which part of him did, exactly? And if it wasn't any part of him, why is he popularly given credit for it?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
In fact, the entire body thinks. But don't tell people that. The body below the head is bad and dirty. It couldn't possibly be full of the very nerves that send sensory information to the brain in the first place.

Stephen Hawking seems to do OK, and his body is rubbish.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
It's not about some special cadre of human beings who place themselves above the moral codes that govern ordinary mortals. It's about the conditions under which ordinary mortals might commit themselves, with courage and anxiety, to an uncertain cause.

Of course, what this "cause" would look like is entirely self-evidently "revolution" on the part of "Leftists".

If your system is so symbolically efficient, why can't you get it off the ground? Liberals get their shit off the ground every day, they commit themselves to, say, getting malaria vaccines to people in Africa who otherwise would have a very high mortality rate and poor standard of living, and accomplish this goal. They kill people to preserve their power.

What's stopping your revolution? Could it be the fact that you know that being in power isn't the world's loftiest goal?
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
OK, you've completely lost me now. Is this part of your ongoing polemical broadside against "common sense"?

If it wasn't Darwin's mind that came up with the theory of speciation by natural selection, which part of him did, exactly? And if it wasn't any part of him, why is he popularly given credit for it?

No, I don't particularly care whether a thought is "common sense" or not. Unless you're trying to explain what's going on in the world, and then I think you need to test against your own biases and such.

Thoughts don't have to come only from the body. The brain is like a CPU for the body, which thinks in a process that is probably complicated and not worth really trying to hash out at this level of discourse.

ALS is a terrible disease, sclerosis of the neurons is long and hard, but Stephen Hawking's body isn't sclerotic because of his body, it's sclerotic because his brain cells (his motor neurons) are atrophying. I'm sure he still gets plenty of sensory information from his body.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
ALS is a terrible disease, sclerosis of the neurons is long and hard, but Stephen Hawking's body isn't sclerotic because of his body, it's sclerotic because his brain cells (his motor neurons) are atrophying. I'm sure he still gets plenty of sensory information from his body.

You need sensory information from your body if you're attempting to pilot a yacht, cook a complicated meal, breakdance or pleasure your partner.

It's not so important if you're calculating the entropy of a black hole or considering the topology of space-time. Or, I would assume, making declarative statements about revolutions or Truth-Events.
 
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nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
You need sensory information from your body if you're attempting to pilot a yacht, cook a complicated meal, breakdance or pleasure your partner.

It's not so important if you're calculating the entropy of a black hole or considering the topology of space-time. Or, I would assume, making declarative statements about revolutions or Truth-Events.

Hmmm... this is probably the most interesting thing that's been said in the entire thread.

I don't know to what extent the brain can operate optimally without the body. Do you think Hawking would have had the same career had he been born with another form of sclerosis that presented very early in life? I'm not so sure he would have developed the same "mind" had he been so disabled. Although, this is not to say that there aren't all sorts of severely disabled people with exceptional talents, because there are. Hard to say just yet. The combination of genetic factors that determine whatever it is that makes Hawking good at science might be enough to override the ones that gave him ALS.

My grandmother had MS, and in fact her body was paralyzed from the neck down, but over time, this made it nearly impossible for her to speak, then it did make it impossible. Over years and years, her brain slowly stopped working, she didn't know who was who, or where she was, and she had pneumonia all the time from aspirating food. Then she had cancer, which she survived somehow. There's a lot of study going on of people in these sorts of states, or worse, in vegetative states, to see just how much is going on and whether there's mind in there. There have been stories of people who were pronounced "brain dead" who talk about hearing everything that was going on around them and getting very angry at their families for agreeing to "pull the plug" before they woke up.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
This thread is now officially up its own arse.

I'm glad it's official now.

In that case perhaps we should be asking, where are Deleuze?

Here he is:
I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery [enculage] or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind, and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the author was bound to be monstrous too because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.
[Negotiations, p.6]
 
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