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Obviously by posting off course.
I have been thinking for the past one week or so. to post or not to
post - to post or not to post......and I even wrote few times and then
deleted.....
So with fear I a m p o s t i n g..........
Not sure this would be of use but I found the fear between the art and
design group and the science and technology group quite interesting.
And my analysis is that the art and design want the seal or approval
of the science whereas the fear of science come from not able to
understand beauty.
I came across a very hilarious Article on this few weeks ago by
Steven Pinker, entitled ‘Science is Not Your Enemy: An Impassioned
Plea to Neglected Novelists, Embattled Professors and Tenure-less
Historians’.
And reply by Iain McGilchrist’s Steven Pinker.
Science is Not Your Enemy
‘The great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were
scientists. Not only did many of them contribute to mathematics,
physics, and physiology, but all of them were avid theorists in the
sciences of human nature. They were cognitive neuroscientists, who
tried to explain thought and emotion in terms of physical mechanisms
of the nervous system. They were evolutionary psychologists, who
speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal instincts that
are “infused into our bosoms.” And they were social psychologists, who
wrote of the moral sentiments that draw us together, the selfish
passions that inflame us, and the foibles of shortsightedness that
frustrate our best-laid plans.
These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau,
Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted
their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data. The
mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had yet
to be invented. The words “neuron,” “hormone,” and “gene” meant
nothing to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel
back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman
science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around
a stumbling block. What would these Fausts have given for such
knowledge? What could they have done with it?
Click for the full article.....http://178.62.31.128/steven-pinkers-essay/
Ian's reply......
‘Steven Pinker is, of course, both clever and influential, and there
is much that I would agree with him about. So when he makes what he
calls an impassioned plea for an understanding between science and the
humanities, something that I feel strongly about, too, and indeed
believe to be of the greatest importance for our future, it seems
churlish to find fault, especially as I am grateful to him for the
opportunity to explore in more detail issues about which it is obvious
we both care very much. But for all that he claims to be setting out
to reassure his colleagues in the humanities, I doubt that his essay
will have the desired effect. In fact I fear that it may appear to
some to exemplify everything that those in the humanities fear to be
the case about the contemporary science establishment.
The marriage, or at any rate the peaceful cohabitation, of science and
the humanities is essential for the health of our civilisation. I
speak as someone who has a foot in each camp, and an interest in their
rapprochement. I agree wholly with Professor Pinker that each can
learn from the other. And Professor Pinker is right to recognise that
all is not as well as it might be in this relationship. Perhaps he
feels he is offering therapy.
However in any relationship there are at least two points of view, and
two stories to tell about where the trouble lies. And to engage
successfully in therapy you need to see both.
Professor Pinker seems aggrieved at the lack of respect accorded to
science among the humanities. They use terms such as ‘scientism’ that
he does not like. They call the philosophy of some scientists naïve
and simplistic. They do hurtful things like refer too often to the
ills entailed on us by technology and science, instead of being
grateful for their undoubted achievements. How could his partner treat
him so bad, when he has done so much for her?
But his partner has her own story to tell. According to her, the
humanities are in danger of submersion. She sees – something which
Professor Pinker himself recognises – the number of students taking on
courses in the humanities at all levels dwindling. At the same time
she hears the call from government for more and more young people to
go into technical subjects such as science and information technology.
She sees budgets being cut and money being diverted from arts and
humanities faculties to science. She sees the multimillion dollar
research programmes, the empires that are founded on expensive, sexy
machines. She finds herself having to defend the study of Mesopotamian
civilisation in terms of its relevance to current needs – tourism, or
the Middle East foreign affairs desk. Rightly or wrongly, she
identifies the scientific and technological mindset as a potent cause
of this uncivilised, utilitarian way of thinking which leaves almost
everything in the humanities out of the picture. She sees on TV, hears
on the radio, and reads in the papers scientists pronouncing on
everything under the sun, as though being a good geneticist or a good
astronomer gave you some privileged insight into what sort of thing a
human being is, what sort of a place the world we live in might be,
and whether or not there is a God. At the same time, in a mirror image
of Professor Pinker, she sees among many of her scientific colleagues,
in Professor Pinker’s words, ‘a philistine indifference to [the
humanities] that shades into contempt’. She hears him refer to a
belief in a spiritual dimension to life as ‘superstition’. Professor
Pinker, she hints, is not the only one round here who has a right to
be miffed.
Click for the full article......http://178.62.31.128/reply-to-steven-pinker/
http://iainmcgilchrist.com/
Jinan
TEXT DISTORTS, DIGITAL DESTROYS, WORLD AWAKENS
http://jinankb.in
http://existentialknowledgefoundation.org/
www.re-cognition.org
https://independent.academia.edu/JinanKodapully
09447121544
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