Jan 9, 2018 02:35 AM
(This post was last modified: Jan 9, 2018 02:36 AM by C C.)
Could the Force Really Be With Us?
https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/could-th...-auid-1006
EXCERPT: . . . In spite of all this, one of the great scientists of the twentieth century - Arthur Eddington - argued that a position remarkably similar to Jedi theology was not only perfectly consistent with modern science, but actually something we might have to reason to believe. Eddington is best known for being the first to offer observational confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
[...] If physics does not tell us what the nature of physical properties is, then what else gives us this information? Eddington believed that physics is a tool for prediction. Even if we don’t know what “mass” and “force” really are, we are able to recognise them in the world. They show up as readings on our instruments, or otherwise impact on our senses. And by using the equations of physics, such as Newton’s law of gravity, we can predict what’s going to happen with great precision. It is this predictive capacity that has enabled us to manipulate the natural world in extraordinary ways, leading to the technological revolution that has transformed our planet. But it is simply not the job of physics to tell us what the stuff of the universe essentially is. As Stephen Hawking put it, physics doesn’t tell us what “breathes fire into the equations”.
Given that physics tell us nothing of the nature of physical reality, is there anything we do know about it? Are there any clues as to what is going on “under the bonnet” of the engine of the universe? Eddington argued that the only thing we really know about the nature of matter is that some of it has consciousness; we know this because we are directly aware of the consciousness of our own brains:
MORE: https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/could-th...-auid-1006
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Michael Lockwood: "Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity." --The Enigma of Sentience ... 1998
The Paradox of Authenticity
https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/the-para...y-auid-922
EXCERPT: Never in history has authenticity loomed so large within so many influential practices affecting countless people and yet been sneered at, literally or metaphorically, by so many pundits of deconstructionism, postcolonial and cultural studies and other trendy philosophical schools. There are two sides to this paradoxical predicament.
Let's look at the first side. Authenticity – the exemplary, disinterested alignment of the subject's inner states and outer conduct or, in Bernard Williams' phrase, “the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren't” [...] Born as an antagonistic ideal of total truthfulness, critical of received social scripts, authenticity seems now co-opted and enervated by powerful economic forces: by the late 20th century it climbed to an unequalled popularity in marketing, the theory of organizations and management, and “nation-branding”.
[...] In these examples – fabricating authenticity for profit, demanding authentic participation in organizations, nation-branding – authenticity turns into inauthenticity. This deprives authenticity of its oppositional sting [...] reduces authenticity to the “mimetic” desire to be what everybody considers desirable to be. [...] Ironically, authenticity suffers from its own success. When hearing that Starbucks is successful solely due to it “sustaining coffee drinkers’ perception of the Starbuck experience as authentic”, we react as though the concept of authenticity was somehow misused, distorted. That perception, however, clashes with the widespread skepticism about authenticity in contemporary philosophy. We couldn't perceive a disfiguring of authenticity if the widespread philosophical critique of this notion had any traction.
Thus we need to explore the second side of the paradox of authenticity. Deconstructionist critics are a good starting point. If authenticity makes any sense, it must be predicated of a subject, individual or collective, capable of unity. Authors like [...] instead, urge that the self cannot be understood as a center of unified agency [...] The community, the group, the polity cannot be the locus of unified agency either: collectivities are just the juxtaposition of singularities. Their unity, constructed by an objectifying gaze, is false. Only difference exists. Therefore they dismiss authenticity, because even when it escapes essentialism and is “reflective”, it still aims at unity and suppresses the contingent, the bodily, the sensorial. Instead, subjectivity is best rethought as fragmented, un-unifiable.
If the deconstructionist view made any sense, we would not react to the colonization of authenticity by marketing and management as though it was a reductive and illegitimate high-jacking. There are five more things that undermine deconstructionism....
MORE: https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/the-para...y-auid-922
https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/could-th...-auid-1006
EXCERPT: . . . In spite of all this, one of the great scientists of the twentieth century - Arthur Eddington - argued that a position remarkably similar to Jedi theology was not only perfectly consistent with modern science, but actually something we might have to reason to believe. Eddington is best known for being the first to offer observational confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
[...] If physics does not tell us what the nature of physical properties is, then what else gives us this information? Eddington believed that physics is a tool for prediction. Even if we don’t know what “mass” and “force” really are, we are able to recognise them in the world. They show up as readings on our instruments, or otherwise impact on our senses. And by using the equations of physics, such as Newton’s law of gravity, we can predict what’s going to happen with great precision. It is this predictive capacity that has enabled us to manipulate the natural world in extraordinary ways, leading to the technological revolution that has transformed our planet. But it is simply not the job of physics to tell us what the stuff of the universe essentially is. As Stephen Hawking put it, physics doesn’t tell us what “breathes fire into the equations”.
Given that physics tell us nothing of the nature of physical reality, is there anything we do know about it? Are there any clues as to what is going on “under the bonnet” of the engine of the universe? Eddington argued that the only thing we really know about the nature of matter is that some of it has consciousness; we know this because we are directly aware of the consciousness of our own brains:
"We are acquainted with an external world because its fibres run into our own consciousness; it is only our own fibres that we actually know; from these ends we more or less successfully reconstruct the rest, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct monster from its footprint."
We have no direct access to the nature of matter outside of brains. But the most reasonable speculation, according to Eddington, is that the nature of matter outside of brains is continuous with the nature of matter inside of brains. Given that we have no direct insight into the intrinsic nature of field and particles, it is rather “silly”, argued Eddington, to declare that they have a nature entirely removed from mentality and then to wonder where mentality comes from. On this basis, Eddington concluded that the most simple and parsimonious view consistent with our direct and observational knowledge is some form of panpsychism, according to which the underlying nature the stuff of the physical world is, as Eddington put it, mind stuff....MORE: https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/could-th...-auid-1006
- - -
Michael Lockwood: "Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity." --The Enigma of Sentience ... 1998
The Paradox of Authenticity
https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/the-para...y-auid-922
EXCERPT: Never in history has authenticity loomed so large within so many influential practices affecting countless people and yet been sneered at, literally or metaphorically, by so many pundits of deconstructionism, postcolonial and cultural studies and other trendy philosophical schools. There are two sides to this paradoxical predicament.
Let's look at the first side. Authenticity – the exemplary, disinterested alignment of the subject's inner states and outer conduct or, in Bernard Williams' phrase, “the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren't” [...] Born as an antagonistic ideal of total truthfulness, critical of received social scripts, authenticity seems now co-opted and enervated by powerful economic forces: by the late 20th century it climbed to an unequalled popularity in marketing, the theory of organizations and management, and “nation-branding”.
[...] In these examples – fabricating authenticity for profit, demanding authentic participation in organizations, nation-branding – authenticity turns into inauthenticity. This deprives authenticity of its oppositional sting [...] reduces authenticity to the “mimetic” desire to be what everybody considers desirable to be. [...] Ironically, authenticity suffers from its own success. When hearing that Starbucks is successful solely due to it “sustaining coffee drinkers’ perception of the Starbuck experience as authentic”, we react as though the concept of authenticity was somehow misused, distorted. That perception, however, clashes with the widespread skepticism about authenticity in contemporary philosophy. We couldn't perceive a disfiguring of authenticity if the widespread philosophical critique of this notion had any traction.
Thus we need to explore the second side of the paradox of authenticity. Deconstructionist critics are a good starting point. If authenticity makes any sense, it must be predicated of a subject, individual or collective, capable of unity. Authors like [...] instead, urge that the self cannot be understood as a center of unified agency [...] The community, the group, the polity cannot be the locus of unified agency either: collectivities are just the juxtaposition of singularities. Their unity, constructed by an objectifying gaze, is false. Only difference exists. Therefore they dismiss authenticity, because even when it escapes essentialism and is “reflective”, it still aims at unity and suppresses the contingent, the bodily, the sensorial. Instead, subjectivity is best rethought as fragmented, un-unifiable.
If the deconstructionist view made any sense, we would not react to the colonization of authenticity by marketing and management as though it was a reductive and illegitimate high-jacking. There are five more things that undermine deconstructionism....
MORE: https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/the-para...y-auid-922
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