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from the smeared-electrons-and-live/dead-cats dept.
Review of a couple of recent publications, in The Boston Review
People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.
Aristotle emphasizes another characteristic. Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man, according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal. But on reflection, the first set of characteristics arises from the second. It is only because we reason and think and use language that we can be hoodwinked.
We'll get to the quantum mechanics in a bit.
The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker's What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason. Becker covers the sweep of history, from the 1925 birth of the "new" quantum physics up through the present day.
So, verifiable, experimental, experienced proof?
Not only can people be led astray, most people are. If the devout Christian is right, then committed Hindus and Jews and Buddhists and atheists are wrong. When so many groups disagree, the majority must be mistaken. And if the majority is misguided on just this one topic, then almost everyone must be mistaken on some issues of great importance. This is a hard lesson to learn, because it is paradoxical to accept one's own folly. You cannot at the same time believe something and recognize that you are a mug to believe it. If you sincerely judge that it is raining outside, you cannot at the same time be convinced that you are mistaken in your belief. A sucker may be born every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday June 09 2018, @05:33AM (1 child)
OK, I'll give it a shot. You see, men are men, and if men are not men, then there is really nothing for them to be. It is curious that my source for this Fine Article is at the moment caught up in a contentious debate between a trans- (something), and a TERF. But the contested issue is whether or not gender is biologically determined or socially constructed. A bit too much nuance for the average weekend SoylentNews crowd, but I think we can handle it.
The Fine Article, however, is not about that at all, it is about the Copenhagen interpretation of the quantum physics, with its idea that there is not natural gender, and that phenomena are theory-dependent (contra Einstein), and the Ashtray lobbing Thomas Kuhn, with his idea that science is done in a particular "paradigm", and more importantly that shifts in scientific paradigms are not rational. So the topic of whether gender, and thus orientation, and ultimately Kurenai, are real, are tangentially related.
I was waiting, and am still waiting, for someone, possibly Gaaark? To read the full article, so we could have one of janrinock's "intellectual discussions". If we ever do, my one comment might be, "What we have here is another naive realist, scared of reason that comprehends itself." But then, I like Hegel. If only he was Greek.
Let me know if this fell off the Cliff, instead of being Notes.
(Score: 1) by fritsd on Saturday June 09 2018, @12:32PM
Hegel's writing style is much too longwinded for me to understand properly.
And I've got a bad cold and it's my weekend.
But I'll read TFA, on your recommendation.