Overlooking the obvious

Quoting again the New York Times (and Jason Epstein) to make a point about how the ordinary intellect operates:
"...A few weeks after being released, in June 1981, Mr. Abbott, now a darling in leftist literary circles, stabbed to death a waiter in a Lower East Side restaurant, and his champion [that is, Norman Mailer] became a target of national outrage...

The episode was the last great controversy of Mr. Mailer’s career. Chastened perhaps, and stabilized by what would prove to be a marriage with Ms. Church, a former model whom he wed in November 1980, Mr. Mailer mellowed and even turned sedate. The former hostess-baiter and scourge of parties became a regular guest at black-tie benefits and dinners given by the likes of William S. Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt ... His editor, Jason Epstein, said of this period, 'There are two sides to Norman Mailer, and the good side has won.'"

Epstein's evaluation is just silly, and yet who would question his point until it was pointed out that what happened to alter Mailer's behavior, was not -- that his good side won -- what happened to Mailer was that his hormones calmed down as he aged. Of course it is no credit to me to have noticed this bald fact, Jan Cox used examples like this often.

The Extreme Empiricism of Jan Cox

A radical empiricism underlies one of the tools Jan used to help people explore the world and themselves. What is often called 'self observation' was variously described by Jan to his students. Regardless of the emphasis in his descriptions, attention to the so-called inner world of man was critical. He carried the scientist's empiricism to the job of understanding one's internal thoughts.

This approach is unpopular in the scientific arena since often scientists are unwilling to credit this approach, labeling it as subjective. Had they tried it, the scientists of the physical external world would have realized that subjective is not a good adjective. Had they sincerely directed their curiosity on themselves they would have realized one's thoughts are not any kind of unique phenomena, in content, or in source.

The ordinary thoughts of one man are about as unique as one chicken in a noisy hen house.
The internal cackling is not subjective since it typifies a species. Is not the typical sound of species an interesting important and relevant field of study?? Just because with man there is an internal quieter side to the typical human chatter does not make it a less scientific subject. The internal chatter, if studied, reveals that man's internal life is not original, not autonomous, and not for the purpose the thinker assumes. The scientists of the external world miss these crucial facts, and since they have not turned a systematic attention to their own internal world, or wondering about the soundness of the positivistic aversion to internal study, their caveats about this approach lack intellectual weight.

There are complications to the intellectuals' interior experience also, which prevent them often pursuing the path of self-knowledge, but we can talk about that later. And later we can discuss Sagan's rather amazing contention that the human brain has stopped evolving. Oh really, and how could we test that statement? So check back.

The Meaning of religion

This just came to my attention, a quote from the New York Times, dated August 19, 2007 (by Mark Lilla, but that is irrelevant, he is typical of the academic establishment in this regard.) The quote: "We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men....We..assumed that...human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that political theology had died in 16th century Europe..."
What is interesting here is the lack of knowledge of what religion could be. The obvious assumption is that Islamic extremism is religious:, religiously motivated, concerned with theology.

Actually the motivation of these people (what I am calling Islamic extremism) has nothing to do with a sane definition of religion. This battle between cultures is hormonal. Bin Laden is no more religious than, oh, Pat Robertson. These desicated ideas are merely the wallpaper over the surge to dominate. Without understanding the basis for the conflict any solutions will be equally accidental and temporary. In another's phrase: "Ignorant armies clashing by night." And history continues. Academe continues. It all fits and is appropriate. Some people with a particular intent though can profit from looking beneath the wallpaper to the actual stucture of the room.

The Death of Socrates

written by Plato, is an account that produces shivers for some. Find it and read it. One thing that struck me was the ending of Plato's account and his use of adjectives. The effect was identical to the attempts I might have made to describe Jan Cox. But adjectives, modifiers, are beside the vision. They are fill-ins for one's ignorance of an actual present reality. His use of modifiers underscores that Plato missed the point. Just interesting. One is tempted to draw parallels, perhaps introduce the topic of Gurdjieff's handling of "the passing on of his legacy." The temptation is not irresistible. For now.

What is the point of being Plato, what is the point of being Paul....

Be fruitful

How interesting it is the many ways plants and animals react to stressful situations. Magnolia trees will bloom in drought conditions, construction site conditions with cement dust sinking into every timbery pore. They will bloom white blossoms although the leaves are shrunken and sparse and the naked skeleton of the tree sticks out like some famine victim.

Now females of the most complex primate species, they, will lose the ability to have children in quite stressful situations. What is the difference? The flow of life goes through each species, and a certain struggle to survive persists in both these examples. The tree blooms in an almost conscious attempt to leave seeds for another tree to grow. All of the tree's energy must be going to that seed. The woman, in constrast, must be around herself to nurse and protect a child for more than a decade after the child is born. Therefore in sub survival situations it makes no sense for the whole species if a woman has a child, and she then dies. A magnolia seed drops on the ground and may start a new tree. An human infant must have surrounding adults to live.

The contrasting reactions, having seeds or not having seeds, work for the same goal. The tree blooms to carry on a whole species, and the woman does not bloom to carry on the species. In our example, it is better to protect the life of the woman by having her not conceive, in sub survivial conditions, since her odds of surviving herself are improved by her not having a child in these rough conditions: her survival enlarges the chances of later conception in perhaps better conditions. Thus her not being fertile in famine conditions protects the whole species speaking of species survival as a whole.

Be fruitful, for the species at the physical level --- and at other levels also, an interesting admonition.

The limitations of a dual reality sketch

A new picture of the relation between the so-called mental and physical realms of man's existence comes to mind after reading this article at the bbc website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7073807.stm
There is a creature called a colugo described as a 'furry kite' for the way it glides from tree to tree. Sounds like a flying squirrel to me, though it doesn't look like a flying squirrel, and the substance of the article is that this creature is man's nearest relative after primates. Anyway what a good picture of the reality of thoughts. Thoughts are better described as "gliding," if we picture the ordinary conception of thought as "flying" in polar opposition to the physical, gravity-bound earthly world. In my picture of the relation of thought and physical reality, the ordinary view is of thought as something not gravity bound. The colugol points to a picture of something gliding, that is, it could appear to be flying, but, really, the motion is gravity bound, the motion is falling, and so the motion of the colugol, and I would argue, human ordinary mentation, is physical, gravity defined like all matter, despite the opinion of most. A limited metaphor perhaps but already I like the idea of an new adjective: colugolic. "Colugolic" is something made of the same substance as that composing that which it is supposedly the opposite of; an only apparent opposition.

The nature of thought

The nature that is of ordinary, mechanical thought, --- is binary. It's purpose is NOT to investigate reality, not to convey anything remotely covered by the adjective 'truth.' Binary means everything is compared, everything is one of two things. This dualism is inappropriately used to define anything except the external world. Reality is complex in a way which must be seen and cannot be conveyed accurately with so-called rational thought. Mechanical rational thinking is a useful tool, of course, and mechanical thought has served man well from an evolutionary perspective--- it is the tool of humanity's progress-- because this binary function does well the thought required to imagine the external world in a new way, and by this ability to picture changes in the physical world around us, most of what we call progress has been achieved.