The WELL: inkwell.vue.86: Erik Davis - TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

#44: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 20 Sep 00 10:59

Wed, 20 Sep 2000 10:59:00 PDT

Thanks, Tony! This is a great discussion! [Read entire topic]

#43: Tony Barreca (tbarreca) Wed 20 Sep 00 10:55

Wed, 20 Sep 2000 10:55:00 PDT

I sense convergence here approaching violence in its rapidity, since even I granted the validity of other knowledge domains informed by other mechanisms (i.e., "poetic" or "mythic" knowledge. Personally, I think these forms are essentially "deep structured" or "hard wired" into our nervous systems, and in such a way that the proposition that they are may turn out to be not susceptible to analysis by any of the physical sciences. But that's a whole other conversation.)

Erik, I really like your metaphor of different machines yielding different results. However, I must ask you to elaborate with any thoughts you may have on how we can integrate the whole, given that science itself is non-integrative.

Jon, your comments have been a tremendous, and much-needed, contribution to this discussion! Thanks, and keep 'em coming! [Read entire topic]

#42: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 20 Sep 00 09:55

Wed, 20 Sep 2000 09:55:00 PDT

For the record, when I characterized science as a belief system, I didn't mean to seem dismissive. I think our contention started over a question of the visible, and what is or is not outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Along the way I tried to make the point that 'science' and 'belief' are not antonymns.

I think (believe!) that science is undiminished in its power to define and explain when we acknowledge that no paradigm is absolute... no?

To my mind, science is just a rigorous examination of 'beliefs' to determine whether they are valid, and how they are valid, and to construct a model of the world that is viable based on analysis of the evidence. An assumption of the absolute truth of any paradigm is counterproductive, I would think, because it is a barrier to further inquiry. I guess this is Fortean thinking... [Read entire topic]

#41: Erik Davis (figment99) Wed 20 Sep 00 09:38

Wed, 20 Sep 2000 09:38:00 PDT

I think that postmodern relativism adequately describes the crisis of knowledge, or of subjectivity, or of the stormy sea. I am just not too interested with it as a merely critical tool that "shows up" science for just being ideology, power, discourse, etc. In other words, how do we map the stormy sea, understand its flows, the patterns of the spume? To do this work is no longer simply postmodern. Bruno Latour is someone who does this remarkably well -- a "science studies" guy who has no belief in sacrosanct science, but also gives it the specific anthropological reality it deserves, understanding it as a specific function of instruments, institutions, discourse, training -- all the anthropological structures that construct science and its statements. And he also insists that these structures are social and historical, that they do not possess the "god's eye view" on the field. But he does not reduce them to mere "discourse," but sees them as profoundly productive structures that carry on, rather than revolutionizing, the work of human understanding. [Read entire topic]

#40: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Tue 19 Sep 00 22:20

Tue, 19 Sep 2000 22:20:00 PDT

Yeah, well.

I reckon Bouwsma sniffed the demon, or at least gave him flowers. You can think in circles with this stuff, but I've tried (though not always able to reason from the deception) to be both skeptical and present, and to go for the bare attention.

While you seem bored with postmodern relativism, you (and Tony) also seem to move from one ideological template to the next without casting anchor. Could be that we're all on different parts of the same stormy sea, completely untethered. [Read entire topic]

#39: Erik Davis (figment99) Tue 19 Sep 00 21:26

Tue, 19 Sep 2000 21:26:00 PDT

Well, again, this is the kind of debate I tend to instinctively withdraw from, and watch the way one watches a tennis match: bobbing your head at each point as they bounce across the fundamental divide,however you consider that divide: subject/object, mind/matter, apollo/dionysus...

Not that I dont have my ways of thinking about it. I do think that scientific beliefs, esp. current ones, have a different status than other sorts of belief. The metaphor I use is technological: belief systems, paradigms, organizations of experience, narratives, cultural perceptions, etc, are like different machines. The subject (whatever the hell that is) engages a particular machine, which produces certain effects. Those effects are quite different when compared with one another. The machinery of science -- peer review, falsifiability, instruments, repeatability, disciplinary language -- is one mighty mofo, and I am no longer interested in the leveling approach of cultural studies/relativist critiques that claim that this machine is just "the same" as all the other ones because it also depends on beliefs which, on some level, "pre-select" which perceptions count.

That said, my critique of science is largely ideological: in *this* society, the machine of science is coupled far too tightly with all sorts of other, more nefarious machines: capital machines, repressive machines, authoritarian machines. So Im also no longer interested in the sacrosanct approach to science vs other ways of knowing the world. Whatever E.O. Wilson wants to proclaim, scientific knowledge *is not integrative* in itself. That is, it may integrate vis a vis other domains of science (though what we actually see, in actual practice, is a multiplication of perceptions, technologies, "facts," specialization, etc), but it is not integrative vis a vis the human subject. And it is the human subject, and the way it -- we, I -- respond to various machines of belief and perception, that interests me.

For example, I just wrote a piece on Descartes and The Matrix for an Australian cyberculture journal. I love the demon, but what interests me is not the "philosophical" problem the demon poses about skepticism, the status of knowledge, the ontological status of the subject, etc. What interests me is the "existential" problem the demon poses: that is, if you *actually* engage Descarte's thought experiment (Which no one studying philosophy actually does), how does that make you feel? What does it do for your experience as a subject? This question is not idle, because I take Descartes' demon to be foundational: he lurks at the very basis of these sorts of debates about science and reality, grinning, licking his chops. [Read entire topic]

#38: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Tue 19 Sep 00 20:45

Tue, 19 Sep 2000 20:45:00 PDT

Bet he's not far away...! [Read entire topic]

#37: Tony Barreca (tbarreca) Tue 19 Sep 00 20:29

Tue, 19 Sep 2000 20:29:00 PDT

Jon! Such a Kantian!

Of course what you say is true. Descartes' famous "demon argument." But I don't think all perception is created equal, and at the end of the day, you don't either!

Where's Erik? I'm sure he'd get a laugh out of this exchange! [Read entire topic]

#36: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Tue 19 Sep 00 19:15

Tue, 19 Sep 2000 19:15:00 PDT

You don't see it because it's elusive!

All perception is an act of faith, in a sense, because there is no direct perception, so this entity we call 'self' depends on the mediating wetware to pass on a more or less accurate interpretation of phenomenological reality. We get sufficient evidence of the accuracy of the interpretation that we *believe* it to be 'real,' however there is always room for doubt. [Read entire topic]

#35: Tony Barreca (tbarreca) Tue 19 Sep 00 15:42

Tue, 19 Sep 2000 15:42:00 PDT

Jon, you are, I believe, correct on the spelling of the name (I had inadvertently to the name of one of my professors, Richard Kuhns).

I'm not sure that I agree with you about beliefs without evidence. Unfortunately, we get into one of the situations that Erik mentioned in which we place the burden of the discussion on the definition of evidence. Many would argue that there is little to no "evidence" for the existence of God, for example, though many surely share a belief in God. I'll let it go at that. But I also apologize for not reading your previous post carefully enough--you certainly made the point about scientific evidence there.

However, I don't think that perception is "elusive" when we can't "see" what we observe. I know that you do not mean "see" literally. But the point is that if a theoretical object is not scientifically detectable, then its ontological status is at least uncertain from a scientific perspective, irrespective of the theoretical arguments that can be made for it. In fact, much of what passes for "modern physics" is an attempt to detect entities postulated by various theories. Presumably once such entities are intersubjectively detected, there is an evidentiary basis for accepting them as "real." Again, I don't see any elusiveness there. [Read entire topic]