uwot wrote: ↑Sat Mar 12, 2022 10:23 amSo you have bought into Gelernter's straw man argument, and in your view if I do not confess to being "a 'troubled soul' in that sense", then either Gelernter or I is a liar. It's a false dichotomy Gus, and a slippery slope.
It is more accurate to say that I do not buy into anyone's argument. However I am
aware of their argument which means that I am aware that we require interpretation. My larger interest is really in that area -- that we
interpret and that we
must do so. People will cobble together large, satisfying interpretive models even on the basis of sketchy, partial and even imagined and invented notions. This is the area that draws my attention these days.
In the larger picture, and as I constantly point out, we live and think and imagine in the *shadow* of the former metaphysical explanatory system (described as
The Great Chain of Being). Yet there came along another means of gathering information from the world which, obviously, challenged and in many ways confronted, attacked and confounded the former interpretive model (scholasticism). To make a long story shorter, Nietzsche's argument and his observations have to do with what happens inside a person when their *horizons* get erased. I am mentioning things that I suspect all of us know about yet it is important to bring it out to
then be able to talk about what *lost souls* means. A lost soul is a result and a consequence of having lost a *platform* within a larger, interpretive viewstructure that *satisfies*.
I doubt that you read what I wrote when quoting
Waldo Frank's condensed view of the issue, however in my view it is crucial stuff. So the 'death of Europe' refers to the collapse of a unified, holistic and moreover unifying interpretive system. And the loss of such a platform has consequences for the individual, obviously, and certainly for the mass.
There are a hundred different reasons why I am interested in this dislocation. The consequences are vast indeed. And many theorists have written at extensive length about the consequences of the loss of the ground under our feet (or the wiping away of the *horizon* in Nietzsche's terms).
So now I will touch very briefly on Gelernter's view. That view is that the existing and reigning explanatory system (in this case *Darwinism*) has been punctured to a certain degree as an explanatory model by advances
within science itself about which Darwin could not have been aware. That's it really. That is the Primary Assertion. That the explanatory model has become insufficient to explain -- but
what? The answer to the question of *what*, if I understand correctly, is where did this extremely complex information come from? Or how did it manage to (what is the right word?) assemble itself when, in fact, it begins to seem as though the code or the *information* had to have been assembled prior to the development of the structure that arose as a result of the information-coding.
This I would turn in to the crucial question:
How did it manage to (what is the right word?) assemble itself when, in fact, it begins to seem as though the code or the *information* had to have been assembled prior to the development of the structure that arose as a result of the information-coding.
[My view, perhaps simplistic, is that the *information* had to have existed before even the entire Creation expanded out of that event we describe (it really is a meaningless description) as 'the Big Bang'. Is that a religious view? Or is it a necessary science-based intuition?]
But the above statement is just my own view.
Returning to Gelernter
et al:
That is where their quandary lies (the information problem). And it is not at all a 'bad argument' nor is it a deceptive argument. It is an honest argument. It is not either an argument
born out of a theological posture that then *cobbles together* some pseudo-scientific view which amount to the inelegant melding of one epistemological interpretive system (scholasticism) with another, competing system ('science-method').
So part of what I would say to you -- a gentle suggestion -- is to 'turn the lens of examination around' and focus it on yourself. Doing that, you might be able to see that you have turned Gelernter into a 'straw man' in the sense that you likely do not understand what he (and what they) are talking about because (I guess) it would cause you to have to examine a range of *certainties* that you operate with and under. In this sense they talk about *you* as a sort of arrogant certainty that bulldozes over any argument that challenges that certainty.
As I have suggested many times you, Uwot, are part of a cultural and intellectual movements that is highly and intensely active and also
interpretive. There are foundations to the views you hold and yet you have, as all do and all must, cobbled together a vast activist-interpretive model which has also come under the aegis, consciously or unconsciously, of a reductive theorizing not a little influenced by Marxist-Lenninist theory. Your systems, your interpretive models, are
totalizing.
So it is in this sense -- and this is just one of them -- that *you* can and should be examined in greater depth. I think this is in accord with one important element of what Nietzsche proposed. I suggest it tentatively. We are in processes of confrontation and reorganization of the entire perceptual system (the lenses) through which we *see* life, the world, and reality. The process is difficult and also dangerous. It has all sorts of different levels of consequence.
Well, it's an argument from ignorance. When you don't understand how something works ta-dah, magic! It may be that the ultimate source of life and consciousness is some god, but as long as alternative inferences can be drawn, it is only the faithful who commit to a view.
However that is not the argument that is being made and it does not resolve itself into an assertion about *magic*. My understanding of it is that it stops at the point it asks the core question. It does not have an *answer* to that problem of where did the *information* and the *code* come from.
Look out Gus, it's a trap! Those who define Darwinism in that way are setting you up to believe that anyone who thinks evolution is a better explanation of biodiversity than intelligent design, believes it with the same fervour as those who insist god did it. A 'Darwinist' in this sense is a straw man.
You really have a very simplistic mind Uwot. You are caught within reductive binaries that you have applied. No one of those three men, all of them trained scientists and deeply committed to scientific method and investigation, would state their views in your reduced terms.
You are employing the straw-man fallacy. It is tedious and time-consuming to confront and correct your reductionist assertions.
So it is in this sense that you *asserted views* seem to dominate your mind and personality. In this specific sense your views begin to resemble those held by religionists who have no other choice available to them but to operate within a sort of dogmatic edifice.
Are there alternatives? Yes, I think there are.
BTW have you been keeping up with
Tico's mind-boggling work in relation to these issues? Inform yourself, son!
It's really funny.