What is life?

[fleetmouse]

Meta, the Rorty quote is my sig. It has nothing to do with this thread. It just happens to attach itself to my posts.

But I'll note that you seem to have read things about Rorty, but little or nothing by him.

Here, just found a good blurb on Wikipedia:

Rorty's notion of human rights is grounded on the notion of sentimentality. He contended that throughout history humans have devised various means of construing certain groups of individuals as inhuman or subhuman. Thinking in rationalist (foundationalist) terms will not solve this problem, he claimed. Rorty advocated the creation of a culture of global human rights in order to stop violations from happening through a sentimental education. He argued that we should create a sense of empathy or teach empathy to others so as to understand others' suffering.

[fleetmouse]

BTW the cartoon was just for fun. Don't read too much into it.

[sgttomas]

...

Ugh, I can't believe I wasted 15 minutes on this. I'm also sorry that my opinion of Sgttomas seems to have dropped a couple notches. Are you really being serious?

Just one question. Did it happen? If you doubt that it happened, that's fine. But why? Just give me your reasons.

There's an oooooooold debate between Hobbes and Boyle that has never been properly resolved and is basically THE contemporary issue of truth and reality in our times.

What I don't accept is people who want to be Boyle AND Hobbes, depending on who their friends are. Just be consistent. Have an ontology and use it. The world can't utterly recharacterize itself according to who your friends are. But few actually understand their ontological categories of being and just apply a whimsical pragmatism. I don't accept that. This is a good case study for how people approach truth and reality.

Here is some more material: episode 1 is about Boyle and Hobbes. Episodes 6, 9, and 11 are also very relevant. This is about truth telling in science and how we form values.

-sgtt

[sgttomas]

Science really IS for losers.

What are we really working towards? That's really the important question underlying all of this. What is life? What are we really working towards? Suppose that experiment was valid and the results confirmed a hundred times over...what are we going to do about that? And it doesn't even have to be that experiment - it was just a good case study in scientism. What is the whole agenda of science really working towards? If it weren't this guys dubious work, then it's everyone else in our biotech world...that's the next frontier, isn't it? Life?

There were two really good issues in that video, for me.

1) the sociological ways of truth telling in science.
2) the utlimate question, the final frontier, Life, and human meaning and existence.

What is this life that we play with? I think the video was asking "What is Life?" in a constructivist sense: how do we build life. But that's an incredibly values-laden worldview. Who really has an answer to what this Life is? Don't we need to resolve that first? What do we hope to achieve without it?

Everything we will ever hope to be and achieve; everything we will ever know and do; it all ends. We are so marvelled by what we can do with life and what we hope to make of it. But what does it become? What really IS life?

The video I showed was human beings making life out of water. In contrast, I offered the perspective of religion that it isn't us who are the creators, but the created, and we have our response to Creation within that context. But who really asks what life is about, what it means, and what we are going to become? We instead ask what life is made of; and the purpose of life is driven through our present state of motivation (what I had for breakfast, who my friends are, what makes me popular, what my wife likes, what increases my dopamine levels, whatever...). That's the other context of science being for losers.

If science becomes some conglomeration of our self-interest, do we think we are on a good path? If the people doing the science don't understand the context of life and what it is for, why is it wrong to self-publish and push your own agenda in order to gain fame and wealth? Why isn't that what science is for? Who gets to define the mechanism? The church of science guys? Well, I don't agree with them, so what? Heresy? Who cares. It doesn't matter. If that's what you think science can do for you (set the course for appropriate human activity and value judgment), then you are a loser - because you will lose everything you think you will achieve by it.

-sgtt

- - - - - - -

Don't get confused thinking I need that experiment to be true in order to give me some great epiphany about life and change the whole paradigm of truth and reality. It can't do that. There's only so much of pushing around molecules that means a whole heckuvalot until you realize it's just flashy lights, buzzings noises, and so much activity without any meaning.

[fleetmouse]

Why not just admit you were a big tool for falling for this hooey? Let it pass.

[sgttomas]

Why not just admit you were a big tool for falling for this hooey? Let it pass.

I think you are responding to your own characture of me.

It wouldn't matter if I had chosen an article about culturing penecilin, the principle would have been the same; there is a problem of knowledge by the aims and methods of science. All of what we call "science" amounts to an extension of our imagination, without any organizing principle or value or meaning to shape and guide it. There is no such thing as "realism" in science, because it is all self-referential. It may be useful, but that utility is situated within the aims of the social meaning of science.

I was hoping to go about this subject in more of a step-by-step process, but my rhetorical technique just got you hung up on rock-flinging cave men and we never really progressed from there. I consider the discussion of scientific merit to be utterly pointless. I am talking about the merit of science.

How do you know the experiment was wrong? I haven't seen a self-consistent approach from what you've offered me. If I took the same approach I can easily cast into doubt the manufactuing of penecilin:

I'm not going to criticize the paper because it postulates a mysterious mechanism with no coherent physical cause, though. I read the paper and call it crap by virtue of the sloppiness of the work. I disbelieve it, not because I'm predisposed to find it unlikely (although I do), but because it's an appallingly bad paper.

...If I were to take this principle of proposing "incoherent mechanisms" and "sloppy work" then I deny there is any validity to a single "scientific" claim...ever.

I don't consider there to be a single coherent mechanism proposed by any theory of science. I consider the entire enterprise of science to be sloppy. The principle reason is the presumption of the observer in the system necessarily introduces a self-referential worldview that cannot be transcended by the means of science. The entire meaning of science is unaccounted for and therefore every single scientific result is equally incoherent and sloppy: there is no explaination for the observer in the scheme of science, yet everything references the observer, so nothing has any objective meaning. This was the debate between Boyle and Hobbes...if you care to actually see that I"m presenting you depth and not cave-men, there is a subject to discuss here. But that's up to you.

What I am saying is that you may find that video to be appauling and laughable to the point of immediate dismissal, but I see the entire scientific enterprise in the same way.

Do you have any means of engaging in dialogue on that subject, or shall we just both let it pass? I don't mean to chase you around the thread to demand that you accept my worldview. This was my attempt. If you have something meaningful to contribute to the subject I've brought up, then I'm happy to discuss it. But I don't see anything valuable to what you've offered me. It's all meaningless, presumptive, technique without any truth or reality to it.

What's to "fall for" in that video, then? Science without an explaination of the observer is narcissism.

In contrast, there is Creation. Ultimate attribution of Life to a means of existence and a vitality of subsistence entirely and necessarily beyond the scope of human investigation by recourse to mechanism. The difference between a scientist "creating life" from water and reflecting upon the Creation of life from water by the Creator are two mutually exclusive worldviews.

It won't matter how you try to attribute science to reality, I can demonstrate the circularity of reasoning and the subjectivity of your beliefs as being ultimately nothing more than the product of your imagination.

The argument of "well then you try to tell me that this rock is just part of your imagination when I hit you on the head with it" is missing the point. It isn't that there aren't facts of the matter. It's the attribution of cause and the presumption of meaning that are what counts for reality.


-sgtt

[sgttomas]

Here's the immediate problem of knowledge; the crux of the Boyle -v- Hobbes debate...

Remember when you replicated a scientific experiment yourself, be it in highschool or university, or your job, or just for fun as a hobby? What kind of knowledge did you derive from that versus the kind of knowledge you get when you believe in the report from a science journal, or scientific americian, or larouche pac? Are there different kinds of knowing involved there? What kind is really necessary to know the "truth of the matter"?

This is initially what I was trying to tease out of you, but you were pretty obstinantly sticking to your high-church dogmas that it was beneath you to have to consider (in)validating a truth claim by recourse to experimental results: be it your own or others. Something that "science" has given us, is a system of trust, based on utility; it also creates "epistemic cultures".

So asking you, "how do you know the experiment was invalid", you responded by referencing the epistemic culture that you attach yourself to. But I was questioning how you know that this experiment was designed to fit within that culture and to justify why something outside of that culture is invalid? You never did reference any actual attempt to reproduce the experiment, just referencing to people who found the experiment "vulgar" by their cultural taste, and as "beneath them" to have to attempt to reproduce because it was obvious bullshit.

Fine. So it's all bullshit. I think all of science is bullshit. How am I supposed to accept your cultural notion of vulgarity as an authority? This incoherent and ad hoc use of personal experimental validation and authoritarian judgment cannot possibly be a self-consistent approach to knowledge. On that very basis it is invalid, never mind how it can address the question of its own meaning (or rather, its complete inability to do so).

...do any of these concepts even mean anything to you? Am I just boring you? I can go throw rocks at rockets somewhere else if you just have no desire/aptitude/time/sensibility or whatever to question your cultural values.

Back to the Boyle -vs - Hobbes: a key argument was that actually scientific knowledge is inherently inaccessible because the aparatus required and the training needed to engage in the epistemic culture of science created barriers to knowledge either by class, wealth, locality, or by the shear impracticality of having to personally verify the exponentially expanding realm of possible knoweldge.

It's one thing to say that the results can't be reproduced and to hold the knoweldge as unverified; another to classify the experiment as "vulgar heresy".

Both of these avenues: the problem of the observer and the problem of knowledge are so deeply flawed and beyond repair, yet we operate as if it doesn't matter. It doens't matter that what we know is meaningless and arbitrary, as long as we can make stuff with it? What does that mean about human life? Who are we becoming?

I utterly reject this.

-sgtt

[met]

I find it your critique of science interesting, ST. On the sociology of science, it occurred to me once that the essential premise of science - "Only the usual thing ever really happens and everything that's real is also mundane and repeatable" - is itself an extremely bourgeois assumption. In fact , it's intimately, intrinsically, and inextricably bourgeois - a projection of bourgeois wishes and hopes that things will remain pretty much the way they are, forever....

[fleetmouse]

I find it your critique of science interesting, ST. On the sociology of science, it occurred to me once that the essential premise of science - "Only the usual thing ever really happens and everything that's real is also mundane and repeatable" - is itself an extremely bourgeois assumption. In fact , it's intimately, intrinsically, and inextricably bourgeois - a projection of bourgeois wishes and hopes that things will remain pretty much the way they are, forever....

Why do you think religious people consider science "the enemy"? (I'm talking about the religious people on this board, and not all of them, but certainly you in this post, sgttomas in this thread, and Meta constantly)

[met]

I find it your critique of science interesting, ST. On the sociology of science, it occurred to me once that the essential premise of science - "Only the usual thing ever really happens and everything that's real is also mundane and repeatable" - is itself an extremely bourgeois assumption. In fact , it's intimately, intrinsically, and inextricably bourgeois - a projection of bourgeois wishes and hopes that things will remain pretty much the way they are, forever....

Why do you think religious people consider science "the enemy"? (I'm talking about the religious people on this board, and not all of them, but certainly you in this post, sgttomas in this thread, and Meta constantly)

Well, i can't speak for st but from an xian perspective - and not necessarily an overall 'religious' one - there's the claim that extraordinary things like the resurrection DO and DID happen and also the apocalyptic hope that, any day now,God will change things dramatically.

But those differences are obvious, right?

And are they really affective? (I mean, do N. American - ie 'bourgeois' - 'religious people' REALLY harbor a heartfelt immediate hope for the Apocalypse? )

Maybe it's just a palace quarrel among the priviledged... a lust for (intellectual, social and symbolic) power?

I dunno.... and I'm not sure I completely understand the question. Have any ideas? What do you think?