Thomas_More
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I know you have no respect for anything that isn’t specifically human.
I doubt you ever saw the COSMOS series, and, if you did, you probably scoffed at it.
Why don’t you read some Sagan? Not just skimming on the net, but an actual book by him? I recommend Cosmos, The Cosmic Connection, Forgotten Ancestors, and The Demon-Haunted World – and also ask how someone you consider a “mere” Romantic was able to work on so many scientific projects.
“My children were born to dream.”
(Chief Joseph).” In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.
“Spirit” comes from the Latin word “to breathe.” What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word “spiritual” that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science.”
” I’d guess that he was a romantic leftist liberal of some kind – ”
Well, you’ve got Sagan summed up to your satisfaction.
If those experiments are futile and injurious to live beings, and are aimed at finding “proofs” to shore up myths like free will, the keystone of human supremacist prejudices, then contemplation would be better.
And contemplation of nature and its processes, both outside and within us, is surely to be encouraged.
I can see you are not a fan of quiet and sustained thought. Is that why you, or another member, said some time ago that classic novels can be junked in socialism, because they are bourgeois?
(Echoes of Maoism there?)
As Ronnie Ross said, the trouble is people spend too much time working and not enough time thinking.
” These philosophers imagine they have drawn their theories, not from concrete material, but from the innermost of their brains, while, as a matter of fact, they have but performed an unconscious induction, a process of thought, of argument not without material, but with indefinite and therefore, confused material. Conversely, the inductive method is distinguished only by this that its deduction is done consciously.“
Who, the materialists? Their entire corpus is about impressions from without resonating like a harpstring (Diderot) on our organs and producing thoughts and feelings. So I don’t know which contemplatives you are talking about. The Carthusians?
” we must remember that our mental effort can be successful only because of our previous, if involuntary, experiences and adventures which we, by help of our memory, have taken along into our cell.”
Quite so.
He should have said, “I am, therefore I think.” He expressed it as an idealist, not a materialist, and contemporaries like Gassendi proclaimed him a cruel oaf and a hack.
Descartes spat his venom at the dead too, urging the posthumous anathematization of Montaigne, a far superior thinker and, unlike the hack, a principled man.
” Quite how you can know from that what is going on in your brain you don’t explain. In any event, only empirical research is going to provide the answer.”
I know simply that I have not ever been responsible for a single thought or feeling i’ve ever had. And I know that every thought or feeling has emerged from a prior impulse. Philosophy tells me that, without my needing a doctorate in neurological science.
