An e-mail string of interest

[degringolade]

The hard part for me has been trying to get over the idea that there is an absolute truth that I can understand.

I disagree with you quite a bit concerning the concept of evolution.  I think that it is quite real but the methods and means by which a species adapts is not subject to a natural "law", but rather, a reaction to a contingent set of circumstances.  It is the circumstances that drive the requisite changes. That being said, sometime adaptation rhymes.

I think that you and I have been conditioned into a mode of thought that seems to make us think that the world can be made rational/logical by a deep enough understanding.  Over the years, I am circling around the idea that the world really doesn't need to make sense and that the cosmos is quite indifferent to our attempts to tell it what to do.

Oddly enough, it has been in my attempt to write a trashy fiction book, that I have stumbled onto a tome that has given me significant food for thought lately.  I hadn't realized that the trashy and macabre fantasies of HP Lovecraft actually had an academic following.  Now, I have no problem with that, as an academic pursuit, it rates right up there with free market capitalism.  As soon as one becomes an academic rather than a scientist or philosopher, the field of study becomes a form of wanking, and as wanking is a pleasurable pastime and free of sin, I don't choose to judge them.

My big beef with the way that academics pursue problems is that they all seem to think that the rules generated by past academics constitute a canon of approved thought and approach.  "I can see further because I have stood on the shoulders of giants" doesn't really get you anywhere if the giant is passed out drunk down in a ditch.

Almost all scientists have been trained as academics.  Engineers as well.  Academics want things that fit within what brings in the paycheck to pay the mortgage and keep on good terms with their fellow academics.  What academics want most is someone to say that their interpretation of the law is correct.  The rhetoric coming out of the sciences today is merely cover for a couple of centuries of "success" and self-congratulation concerning their own infallibility.

I don't think that any such thing as a "Law" exists except in the minds of men.  It is especially prevalent in the minds of the academy. 

I do think that there are trends and possibilities that crop up frequently.  After all, God does play dice.

have all been produced by laws acting around us.

 

Bullshit.

The biggest problem with Darwin, is he said something.

From then on, he was wrong.

 

Very good.

 

In a similar vein, as I have offered before, it is hard to find a better example of a human douchebag talking out his ass while being admired as the most advanced thinker of his time, in both science and philosophy, than Herbert Spencer. With regard to having effect on European and even American society, which he did via best-selling books, lectures, etc., probably no "thinker" of science or philosophy has had as big an impact on the average “intelligent” man in society before or after. In 1876, this douchebag considered to be a great thinker told the members of something called the Anthropological Institute, that humans differed in the volume, complexity, and plasticity of "mental mass", and accordingly in "quality of thought".

So, only 150 years ago (after existing over 300,000 years as a species, to put things in perspective) everybody was sure Herbert Spencer was right. What has to be admitted, is nobody at the time had any idea what the fuck Spencer was talking about, because Spencer did not know what he was talking about.

 

I realize the proposition that humans act less intelligently than animals is a hard sell; but an example of humans not being intelligent, is that the supposedly smartest humans at the time, believed what Herbert Spencer said. Animals would never believe something that they do not understand. The ironic thing is that Spencer thought he was helping along the human species using rationality and words, and he was a great example of somebody doing the opposite - and so are the equivalent humans in science today a mere 150 years down the road. What TED Talk neuroscientists say when they discuss consciousness, is basically the same level of sophistication as what Spencer said. What they know that is sophisticated, is physical stuff.       

 

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Gould.html