| |
|
You've talked about a kneejerk 'anti scienc-ism' on Barbelith before, care to expand? It seems to frustrate you and piss you off. Do you get off on being in the hectored minority?
Hector me! Hector me! You know you want to! Yeah, baby, give it to me good!
Okay. This is where I piss everyone off and lose all my friends.
Grab some popcorn.
Firstly I don't feel that I, personally, am being or have been hectored. However I do find myself increasingly frustrated with what I see as the rejection of empirical analysis as a tool.
Yes, I get the fact that "reality" isn't something we experience directly, but is something that arrives third- or fourth-hand, via a complicated array of perceptual filters. And I get that this might lead us to conclude that there is no such thing as reality, and that we all create our own universes and so on and so forth. Totally getting that. Philosophically, it makes a certain amount of sense: the only thing we can ever possibly know for sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is the single moment of consciousness that we are experiencing now, at this very moment, and everything else is a matter of interpretation.
However.
Okay, let's start with cogito ergo sum. I don't know for sure that the world around me is real. It might all be a dream or a hallucination or The Matrix or whatever. I have chosen to accept the world that I percive as "reality". See, it works like this: If my reality is real, and I behave as if it isn't, I could get hit by a bus. If my reality isn't real, and I pretend that it is (whilst still paranoically checking for cracks, just in case I am in The Matrix), I don't really lose anything that I'm aware of.
So now I've accepted the reality that my perceptions are serving up as "real". What's next?
Say I recive a piece of information. How do I verify it? Surely no event can be interpreted unproblematically but must be given meaning by the interpreter?
Well... sorta. However, I would suggest that certain core facts can be established beyond reasonable doubt by empirical means, and that empiricsm remains the best tool in the box for establishing them.
If your best mate disappeared, would you want the police to tell you that on a quantum level your friend was both alive and dead, that they were putting their top psychics on it right now and that they were going to use purely intuitive methods to find them? If your friend turned up dead in a ditch, would you want their death investigated using forensic techniques or deconstucted?
This isn't just about the board. The board is just reflecting the anti-science vibe of society in general. It angers me, really angers me, that left-wing intellectuals have all jumped on the post-modern, anti science bandwagon. I feel like everyone wants to hand over the power-tools to the Nazis.
(Damn. This isn't coming out as well-reasoned as I'd like.)
I also feel a sense of real horror when I look at the way that most magickians reject science out of hand. (This isn't directed at the Barbelith Magick crew, BTW. It's a general observation.) One of the concepts I see cropping up again and again is the idea that if Magick works then "cause and effect" is dead. No, it isn't! All you're doing is introducing another kind of cause and getting another kind of effect. There's also a disturbing tendancy to reject widely-held concepts, such as Darwinism, simply because they are widely-held. I'm all for dragging out assumptions and giving them a good old re-examining, but that's not what I'm talking about. Questioning is good, but what I see time and time again is not questioning but a kneejerk, out-of-hand rejection. Moon landings being questioned by some random nutsack? Must be made up, then! Fred Hoyle once suggested that archeopteryx fossils were phoney? Must be faked, then! And don't even get me started on the whole "aliens built the pyramids" bit. Von Danniken me no Von Dannikens.
I'd just like to know what people think scientists do all bloody day.
"Ah, there's nothing like destroying some inconveniently anomalous fossils to give one an appetite."
"Yes indeed. Tediously re-confirming already accepted theories is what us white-coated, bespectacled creepazoids live for."
"Well, Heaven forfend that we should investigate anything new. Have you put in your application for that Proving Stuff Everyone Already Belives So As To Maintain The Status Quo grant yet?"
"Indeed I have. I hear you're up for the Concealing Anything That Doesn't Accord With Our Narrow-Minded And Hidebound Veiws Award this year."
"I am, but that'll probably go to one of the guys over in UFO cover-ups again. Still, nice to be nominated, eh?"
"Yes. Let us adjourn to the Trough of Darwinism and order up double helpings of sheepdrone mulch."
"Sounds good to me!" |
|
|
