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BS: 'Transitions' -an article on change
| Bill D | 24 Jan 13 - 04:46 PM | |
| GUEST,Lighter | 24 Jan 13 - 05:52 PM | |
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BS: 'Transitions' -an article on change
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Subject: BS: 'Transitions' -an article on change From: Bill D Date: 24 Jan 13 - 04:46 PM http://www.arachnoid.com/transitions/index.html This guy THINKS... he has many pages on his site, but I go back and find new ones sometimes. If you want some thought provoking ideas, take 10-15 min. to read it... and several hours or days to digest it. (One footnote at the bottom says: "In five billion years, we humans will probably be a distant memory, hopefully replaced by creatures who can't stand Country & Western music and who know how to escape the expanding sun.) |
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Subject: RE: BS: 'Transitions' -an article on change From: GUEST,Lighter Date: 24 Jan 13 - 05:52 PM Interesting site. Am not terrifically - or, I should say, entirely - impressed by the assault on (seemingly) all psychology, psychologists, and psychiatrists (whom he seems to confuse with psychoanalysts and the like): http://www.arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology/index.html He seems to assume that "social sciences" are universally thought to be as reliable as "physical sciences," and he relegates the social kind to "The Land of Oz." Sounds kind of extreme to me. There are obviously (and obvious) incompetents in every field, and when they strike the right chord they thrive - at least for a while. Is anthropology, for example, as groundless as astrology (which isn't even a "social science")? And without philosophy (also placed in "Oz") there'd be no science. And the "mind" doesn't exist? If that were true other words, all the electrochemical reactions going on in your brain would result in nothing distinguishable from any other electrochemical reactions. That's a good one! If I think I have a mind, what's doing the thinking? Even if the mind is the result of exclusively physical activity, it's still the mind. What else do you call it? Even if other kinds of chemical reactions in nature resulted in some kind of mind (like a "swamp gas mind," for example), it would still be a kind of mind - and not anything else. What's he got against minds, anyway? If the feeling we have of mental activity is an illusion, just what is being fooled? As for the alleged impossibility of proving any negative at all, it's only true in the sense that I can't prove I'm not really a brain in a vat. Just as Newtonian physics is still trustworthy at the macro level, you can often prove a negative in everyday life to a perfectly satisfactory degree: the degree that only a crank would continue to argue with. But maybe there are no cranks. Wait, this is the Mudcat BS section! |
