The problem with science II

A casual reader of brennakimi's post might assume that she is talking about Faith.Please watch those subtitles.

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So, what IS the scientiic explanation of human nature?Can you provide a link to the scientific representation of our experience that you are talking about?Or is this more of a "in general" type of thing?

All right then. I can agree with that. May be it`s concrete to you. But how do you make it concrete to me? YOUR daily experience of living is an abstract concept to me. I can relate to it, of course, since I have my own experiences to go by and I can assume that there is some commonality between them. valid as this assumption may be, it is still an assumption

The poem was just a hook to hang the argument on. The content of the poem wasn't important (well, not for the argument anyway!). Yes, the scientific establishment can produce as much pseudo-science as the beauty parlour. That's how it seems to me too. I think we're in the old Existensialism vs Positivism debate here, with the two of us in the Existensialist camp, you on the Christian wing with Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, me on the atheistic wing with Nietzsche and Sartre. What do you think?

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

I'm talking about any scientific explanation of human nature here. I'm not criticising any particular scientific theory. (Well, not here anyway, but see my opening post for a specific criticism ).

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Why do I need to make it concrete to you?

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

I think we are in some camp or other together, and against Positivism sounds right, but I'm not sure this says it. I really can't stand Nietzsche and Sartre but I'm not sure it's their atheism that's the problem. I appreciate Nietzsche's perspicacity though not his conclusions, but I think Sartre was just massively confused about everything. Kierkegaard doesn't enthuse me either, though. I read him as more of a liberal Christian than an existentialist. Wasn't the idea of a "leap of faith" his? That has made nothing but problems ever since, for anyone trying to talk about what Christian belief really is. It's certainly no blind leap of faith. But I always liked Dostoevsky.But it will do for a working model of our situation here.

i doubt it.
just because someone doesn't marry doesn't mean she's gay. she had some ailing family member or other and the guy she was clearly goofy over wanted nothing to do with her.

Maybe the Romantics are more to your taste. You might be interested in the biography of John Stuart Mill. He was educated by his father in a strict rationalism, learning Greek at the age of 3, philosophy at 5, and so on. In his early 20s, he had a breakdown, which he ascribes in his later autobiography to an over-rationalist tendency stemming from his education. He claims that it was only reading Wordsworth, and finding in his poetry those bits of life that his education hadn't taught him, that he managed to get over his breakdown.Take a look at the Wikipedia entry on John Stuart Mill. You might find it interesting.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

I stand corrected.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

i mean. i could be wrong. but ...oh crap. i didn't get those files of that computer...
ah well. lemme see if wiki has it.ah yes. emilly dickinson died just four years after her chronically ill mother.
the wiki article discusses some thought on homosexuality, but i imagine (and the article suggests) there's no concrete evidence for this. many different movements try to posthumously claim famous people for their ranks (like asperger's and einstein). i doubt there's much to it. she did go to seminary after all.
but all the research i did for my project (although it was in eigth grade) suggested she was in love with charles wadsworth.

No, I don't think it has anything to do with any particular school of thought from the past really. This started in my mind, as I recall, with the absurd attack on robinrohan's use of the term "logic," which escalated to an attack on him personally. That struck me as indicative of the whole conflict at EvC in some sense, defining a divide between two different sensibilities or frames of reference so wide as to be unbridgeable, beyond the science vs. religion dispute but possibly in some way related to it. I forget at what point NWR suggested Snow's "Two Cultures" as a framework for what I was trying to talk about, but it caught my attention. The book arrived and I don't yet know how useful it will be.Various forms it has taken in my mind. Not up to trying to explain any of them, and may find some of them don't serve my purpose and that others not on the list would do better. Just for the sake of whatever they might evoke of the problem.The shriveling of human experience
Humanities versus Science
Humanism versus Behaviorism
Philistinism of science
Instrumental talk as opposed to meaning
Reduction of human beings to animals
Literature versus Science
Careerism versus culture, civilization, true knowledge
Survival versus Meaning
Sociobiology versus Everything Human
Analytic Psychology versus Cognitive or Brain Psychology
Brain talk versus experience talk
Implicit morality in supposedly value-free or scientific approaches to social problems
Social science as such with its built in biases in its definitions of its own research projects.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Hi, Brenna. I feel a lit crit rant coming on: you're the occasion, not the target I was aware of those general outlines about Auntie Em (my favorite poets are like family to me, so there's Auntie Em and Big Bill--you can probably guess who he is).I'm wary of reading the poet's work through the poet's life. The notion that to understand the work we must first understand the life is, in its purest form, a genetic fallacy. On the one hand, poems are made things, and they take on their own patina of meaning once they leave the poet's hand; on the other, what is known about a poet's life is often constructed on a scaffold of speculation and supposition. The relationship between the artist's life and art is, ultimately, unknowable.The poem, the thing made--that, to me, is primary, although some knowledge of the poet's life can be useful. Postmodern criticsm would sever any connection between the author and the text, often denying any authentic meaning to the text at all, since it is a social and cultural construct patched together around gender, class, race, power, and wealth, so that under close scrutiny it deconstructs into icons, symbols and enactments of those forces. (I've often wondered why people who feel that all texts deconstruct themselves bother to write anything at all, but that's another rant.)To know that Emily Dickinson pined for a clergyman ulitmately explains nothing about the things she made: I might learn (or learn more) about loss through the death of a pet, but every subsequent poem I write that invokes loss is not about dead puppies.I think JavaMan's literary analogy fits well with his larger theme of what is (or isn't) wrong with science.To categorize or describe a phenomenon or thing does not exhaust its meaning or significance, but the cataloging process can seem almost imperialistic, as though science seeks to encompass and subsume the object of study, and, necessarily in the way of cataloging, set it aside and move on. The human subjects of scientific investigation can be left feeling, like Prufrock, "pinned and wriggling on the wall," a sensation intensified by the "thin slice" approach of scientific investigation: the narrower the focus, the more likely the human subject (or group) is to feel a trivializing effect, as various disciplines tell them what is "really" happening in one behavior or another.Our view of a dead poet loses depth, the rounded figure flattened by telephoto perspective: a human being who changed ceaselessly becomes a fixed sum with which to parse all their work; or, worse, each poem must correspond to specific events.To throw a masterwork of ceramics, the potter does not have to achieve near-perfect focus and poise for a life-time, only for a few moments. The poet likewise seeks a particular creative cast unique to each poem, and that cast may bear little resemblance to what we find in biographies and critiques.You can conclude or even know that Auntie Em pined for a particular man, but that won't tell you what was on her mind when she wrote that poem. Science can tell me much about how being human works, but little about what it means. Scientists who forget that do themselves and science a disservice, but the tendency to do so is human, not scientific.P.S. Give it a decade or two and try Em's work again. You might be surprised at how much she will have learned.

True. All Marxist categories of "forces" -- all in the service ultimately of "deconstructing" -- read "destroying" -- western culture itself. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You Don`t