The New Agnosticism

[Dillinger]

Have any of you ever heard of this?

What is meant by the term, The New Agnosticism, is an attitude of mind which has also been called "model agnosticism" and which applies the agnostic principle not just to the "God" concept but to ideas of all sorts in all areas of thoughts and ideology.

The agnostic principle refuses total belief or total denial and regards models as tools to be used only and always where appropriate and replaced (by other models) only and always where not appropriate. It does not regard any models, or any class of models, as more "profound" than any other models, or any class of models, but asks only how a model serves, or fails to serve, those who use it. The agnostic principle as used here is intended in a broad "humanistic" or "existential" sense, and is not intended to be narrowly technical or philosophical only.

Models, as tools, should be tested in that kind of combat which Nietzsche metaphorically called "war" and Marx called dialectical struggle. It can be deliberately shocking because ideas should not seem any less stark or startling than they actually are.

As with Robert Anton Wilson (an author who has written much on this subject) I support a high-technology society rather than a more primitive one; I refuse to join those who glamorize the middle ages (which, like Wilson, I regard as a time of madness and superstition); I advocate space colonization, longevity research and other goals that may seem Faustian (or worse).

I will satirize the scientific establishment in this and other threads but, while doing so, I want to state that I believe the scientific establishment to be not nearly as nefarious as various religious establishments.

I will criticize Fundamentalist Materialism but understand that I am opposing the FUNDAMENTALISM, not the Materialism.

So... let's get it on.

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Meet me on the field at dawn. My choice of weapons, right? Bunsen burners, baby.

 

[Guest]

Damn Dilly

Where do you get these topics. First fjords now this. I'm so confused.

 

[sunstruck]

I had to read that three times before I got it, but I'm definitely on the side lines of this geek to geek showdown.

 

[Dillinger]

Allow me to define a few terms that might help those of you inclined to join in this discussion:

EMIC REALITY: the unified field made up of thoughts, feelings and apparant sense impressions that organizes our inchoate experience into meaningful patterns; the paradigm or model that people create by talking to each other, or by communicating in any symbolism; the culture of a time and place; the semantic environment. Every Emic Reality has its own structure, which imposes structure upon experience.

ETIC REALITY: the hypothetical actuality that has not been filtered through the emic reality of a human nervous system or linguistic grid. If you have anything to say about Etic Reality without using words or any other symbol please provide a full description of it to me at once.

INFORMATION: as used in mathematical information theory, this denotes the amount of unpredictability in a message; information is, roughly, what you do not expect to hear. In this sense, information may be "true" or "false," but is always a small surprise. Resistance to new information measures the degree of Fundamentalism in a culture, a sub-culture, or an individual.

NEUROSEMANTICS: the study of how symbolism influences the human nervous system; how the local reality-tunnel programs our thoughts, feelings and apparant sense impressions.

REALITY-LABYRINTH: existence regarded as a multiple-choice intelligence test; the sum total of reality-tunnels available to an open-minded or non-Fundamentalistic human at a given time and place.

REALITY-TUNNEL: An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism.

SYNERGY: those behavoirs of whole systems which cannot be predicted by an analysis of parts or sub-systems. A term popularized by Buckminster Fuller and roughly equivalent to Holism (for example - Gestalt in psychology and transition immediately following).

TRANSITION: used here in the sense of Transactional Psychology, which holds that perception is not passive re-action, but active, creative trans-action, and that the "observer" and the "observed" must be considered a synergetic whole.

-------------

(Thanks to R.A. Wilson for these definitions.)

 

[Dillinger]

Meet me on the field at dawn. My choice of weapons, right? Bunsen burners, baby.

Sure. But make mine a semantic bunsen burner.

 

[Marxist]

"Meet the new boss...same as the old boss."

 

[Dillinger]

A-Fuckin-xactly, Marxist!

 

[daniella469]

Have any of you ever heard of this?

Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah....I'm a Fjord lover...Blah

So... let's get it on.

OK

 

[APhil]

Third wing

I myself prefer Secular Humanism, rather than any broad form of agnosticism.

As for reality, we are here. Whether or not you choose to find another reality is up to you, as long as you know you are real.

 

[riff]

You people are too politcial. None of your paradigms matter because they are just constructs.

Contructs are tools. Use them for you. Do not be not be used by them.

And now I am off to eat honey, locusts, and shake my penis to the beat bongos.

 

[freescorfr]

About time too Dilly. I was about to go to bed.

Science is not 'value-free', scientists are not 'responsibility-free'. Science if correctly applied (with appropriate priorities) leaves no excuse for the current state of our world and for the suffering of our people.
What is lacking, as is so often the case, is not knowledge, not money, not manpower but willpower, the desire of humans to rise above that level of 'animals' which characterises perhaps the highest level of most corporate and political behaviour.
The creativity of the Renaissance and the social progress of the Enlightenment needs to be complemented today by the wisdom of our highly complex technological society.

I look forward to your development of your theme.

 

[Dillinger]

"All that is, is metaphor." - Norman O. Brown Closing Time

The late R. Buckminster Fuller (architect, engineer, poet, mathematician and gadfly) used to astonish audiences by remarking casually in the middle of a lecture that everything we see is inside our heads. If the consternation of the audience was voluble, Fuller would stop and explain, by drawing on the blackboard the diagram encountered in the elementary optics part of any first year physics course. While I can't actually draw the diagram here - the flow is as follows:

SPACE-TIME EVENT --> LENS --> EYE --> RETINA

The space-time event is the "object." The light rays from the object/event travel to the lens of the eye which, like all lenses, reverses them and the retina then registers the reversed "image." We do not see things upside down because the retina is part of the synergetic eye-brain system and before we have a conscious perception of the object/event the brain has already interpreted AND edited the signal into its system of classification, which includes turning it around to mesh with the general geometrical coordinate system the brain uses to "file" data.

Some people think they understand this the first time it is explained. Others, around the hundredth time it is explained, suddenly cry "Eureka!" (or some similar exclaimation) and think they really understand it at last. They don't. You don't. Not yet.

Nobody gets the full meaning of it until some experiments are performed which make it a vivid experience. Here is one easy experiment you can try to help make it a vivid experience, to help you understand it. Please give it a try, its not difficult.

Ask a friend to help and then obtain a newspaper that you have not already glanced over. Sit in a chair and have your friend, holding the newspaper so that you can read the front-page headlines, walk slowly away, across the room, until the headlines are blurry for you. Have your friend turn a page to ensure that you cannot read the headlines. Then have him or her, holding the newspaper in the same position, read a headline out loud. You will then "see" the headline clearly.

Again - just reading about such a demonstration does not make the principle as clear and deeply understood as actually performing the demonstration.

Aristotle, without knowing the modern laws of optics, understood this general principle well enough to point out once that "I see" is an incorrect expression and really should be "I have seen." There is always time, however small, between the impact of a signal on our eye and the "perception" or "image" in our brains. In that interval the brain imposes form, meaning, color and a great deal else.

What is true of the eye is true of the ear and of other senses.

On the face of it, once this is understood, there seems no escape from at least partial agnosticism - i.e. from recognition that all ideas are somewhat conjectural and inferential. Aristotle escaped that conclusion, and until recently most philosophers and scientists have escaped it, by asserting or assuming or hoping that a method exists whereby the uncertainty of perceptions can be transcended and we can arrive at certitude about general principles.

At least since Hume this Faith had gradually broken down. Various philosophers have expressed this collapse of certainty in different ways, but in essense the modern relativist position can be simply expressed by saying that there is no way of deriving certain conclusions from uncertain perceptions, for the same reason that there is no way of obtaining a definite sum if every figure in an account is estimated such as "about two dollars" or "about a pound and a half" or "about six or 7 pounds" etc. If perception is not absolute, no deduction from perception can be absolute. No matter how ingeniously one juggles with approximations, they do not magically turn into certainties; at best, they become the most accurate approximations.

 

[sunstruck]

You people are too politcial. None of your paradigms matter because they are just constructs.

Contructs are tools. Use them for you. Do not be not be used by them.

And now I am off to eat honey, locusts, and shake my penis to the beat bongos.

Riff I think summer vacation is getting to you. Lay off the mushrooms.

 

[Dillinger]

Did anyone try the experiment?

Now - consider this well-known illustration, to be found (in one form or another) in most general psychology texts.

http://www.uic.edu/com/eye/education/illusions/images/glass.gif

If you see the line on the right as longer than the line on the left, your brain, working on habitual programs, has deceived you. The placement of the circles seduce the eye-brain system into seeing inaccurately. You have just had a mild hallucination.

Is the blue side on the front or the back of the cube:

http://www.eyetricks.com/0103.gif

Count the black dots:

http://www.optillusions.com/illusions/01.gif

The processes (optical and neurological) by which "miracles" and "UFOs" are created and by which you "create" the chair across the room from you right now, are fundamentally similar to what just happened when you looked at the lines in the first illustration. If you think the chair is somehow more "objective" than a poem by Dylan Thomas or those lines, you might try the expensive experiment of hiring three painters and three photographers to come in and make you a "realistic portrait" of the chair. You will find that, in the photos as much as in the paintings, a personality has somehow given a meaning or a richness to the "object."

Now don't misunderstand me - I am not attempting here to endorse what you might consider Absolute Relativism - the idea that one generalization is as good as another. Some generalizations are probably much more accurate than others, which is why I have a lot more faith in the chair I am sitting on than I have in the Virgin of Ballinspittle. But these generalizations remain in the area of probability. They never attain the certitude claimed by the Pope, Dr. Carl Sagan, The Amazing Randi, CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), and the priests of other Idols.

 

[Guest]

 

[Dillinger]

Thanks LL. You say the lines are the same because you've seen similar optical illusions and you know that is the right answer - however, when you look at it, your brain tells you that the line on the right is longer.

Is anyone else finding this interesting? Should I continue?

 

[glamorilla]

I can dig it.

 

[naudiz]

I'm loving it.

 

[Guest]

 

[sunstruck]

I'm going to bed, but I'll check it out in the morning.

 

[riff]

You are getting me into my mode of perception is reality is perception.

Fine.

Amelia sits on my right thigh. I can feel the warmth of her tiny body there. In a distint spot. I look down and validate the form as that of cat and conclude that the warmth I feel and the dispersion of he body-mass are coincidental: where Amelia appeals to be- Amelia kitty is.

Natural. I presuppose that where my cat shall be, there she shall be with all concurrent effect.

I should now comment on the beauty of her markings. Such as the almond shape on her head- but I look at her happy sleeping form and think. Pretty kitty. She cannot help her fur pattern. And I am only flattered that she might find warmth on my thigh... but we all have warm thighs.

I hear a lot of stuff about "god" and all that.

I think that if I look at my behavior, I will reveal to myself the form of my "gods."

I believe in something that is called God- the nameless mono. Diety? Human construct. We are any god we want to be.

Choose carefully.

 

[Dillinger]

Thank you Sunstruck, LL, glam, Naudiz - I'll plan on continuing to expand on these concepts.

Riff - its a good mode to be in. Its actually a heightened state of awareness. Sometimes pondering these concepts puts one in a frame of mind that is not unlike getting high. Timothy Leary and other Neuroscientists would liken this to the 5th Circuit in the 8 Circuit model of the brain/nervous system.

http://www.deoxy.org/gif/bubbles.gif

If this interests anyone - you can read about this model at http://www.deoxy.org/8circuit.htm

and some interesting comparisons to Gurdjieff, Antero Alli, Chapel Perilous, Samadhi and Star Trek at:

http://www.deoxy.org/cirtable.htm

---------------

"the map is not the territory"
"la correspondencia no es el territorio"
"il programma non è il territorio"
"la carte n'est pas le territoire"
"die Karte ist nicht die Gegend"

 

[Dillinger]

Another experiment - one that's been arouhd a long time...

The ancient Greeks - or at least the handful of them who's ideas we are taught in school - were well aware of the fallability of perception. An illustration well-known in Athens during its "Golden Age" went like this:

Take three bowls of water. Make one of them quite hot, one medium-temperatured, and the third quite cold. Put your right hand in the hot bowl for a while and your left hand in the cold bowl. Then put both hands in the medium bowl. The same water will feel "cold" to your right hand and "hot to your left hand.

(Again, doing the experiment teaches more, neurosematically, than merely reading about it.

 

[Dillinger]

Certitude Through The Ages

Greek philosophers (or at least the handful of them who's ideas we are taught in school), despite their awareness of the fallability of perception, still thought there was a path to certitude. They called this the path of Pure Reason (henceforth to be referred to as PR).

The argument for PR goes that, even if sense data is fallible, we have a higher faculty which is not fallible and which knows truths a priori. This argument has collapsed over the centuries for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the things that philosophers thought they knew this way (through this "higher faculty") have often turned out to be simply not true. For instance, even as late as the age of libertarian free thought in the 18th Century, Kant still thought PR "knew" intuitively that Euclidean geometry was THE true and only geometry. Nowadays, mathematicians have several varieties of non-Euclidean geometry, all of which are equally vaild (consistent) and all of which are as useful as Euclidean geometry, although in different areas.

In the 13th Century, Thomas Aquinas thought he had the infallible method of arriving at certitude - a combination of PR and Holy Writ (henceforth to be referred to as HW). This is still believed in countries such as Ireland and Portugal, but is not generally accepted in civilized nations because PR itself has been proven fallible, as I've already mentioned, and because there are many varieties of HW around - Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Jewish, etc. as well as such modern products as Oahspe and the Urantia book - and there is no known empirical test to determine which HW is the "real" HW.

In the 19th Century, Kierkegaard circled back to the pre-Aquinas era of Christianity and suggested, again, that the way out of this perpetual relapse into uncertainty is a "leap of faith." Kierkegaard was such an intricate writer that any criticism of him will be denounced as superficial by his admirers, but in essence his argument is that all other methods of seeking certitude have a concealed "leap of faith" in them, which their devotees conveniently "forget" or overlook. So Kierkegaard asks: why not admit frankly that we are taking a "leap of faith"?

Robert Anton Wilson provides an answer to Kierkegaard's "leap of faith." He says there is an alternative which appears to him - and to many others - as more reasonable - namely to avoid the "leap of faith" and remain agnostic about all methods, although willing to learn from them in an open-minded way. The justification for this is entirely empirical and only probalistic, of course. It is that those who have taken a flying "leap of faith" generally look rather silly within a few generations, or sometimes even within just a few years.

So what is left? The Scientific Method, of course. (Henceforth to be referred to as SM). This is the alleged source of certitude of those I've mentioned earlier in this thread and whom we could call "The New Idolators" (as Marxist so aptly put it - "meet the new boss, same as the old boss").

SM is a mixture of SD (sense data: usually aided by instruments to refine the senses) with the old Greek PR. Unfortunately, while SM is powerfully effective, and seems to most of us to be the best method yet devised by mankind, it is made up of two elements which we have already seen are fallible - SD (sense data) and PR (pure reason) can both deceive us. Again: two fallibilities DO NOT add up to one infallibility (got that DCL? *grin*). Scientific generalizations which have lasted a long time have high probability, perhaps the highest probability of any generalizations, but it is only Idolatry which claims none of them will ever again have to be revised or rejected. Too many have been revised or rejected in the past century alone.

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.