tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969281918175291060.post6713441537102828679..comments2023-10-30T01:29:52.015-07:00Comments on Homeless Tom: Voyage into Flatland?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13718601770472939313noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969281918175291060.post-91724057288863283572009-04-14T13:09:00.000-07:002009-04-14T13:09:00.000-07:00Tom,
Thanks for the reply/clarificaiton.
Once upo...Tom,<br />Thanks for the reply/clarificaiton.<br /><br />Once upon a time there were people like Saul of Tarsus that thought they had good medicine.<br /><br />Sure they believed in it.<br /><br />I get your point; though your response triggered something in my mind: another hypothesis.<br /><br />Paul likely had no friggin' clue ultimately why he was doing what he was doing. <br /><br />Calling it "interior" as opposed to "exterior" doesn't do it justice (but I'd not be surprised if such phenomena were labeled as such). <br /><br />Perhaps "karma convolved with the unconscious" is more apt a descriptor of where I'm trying to point.<br /><br />It's evidently easy to put a meat machine on autopilot. It's hard to get said person to become aware he's on autopilot.Mumon Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01116967568502451788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969281918175291060.post-40202152921348759982009-04-13T11:08:00.000-07:002009-04-13T11:08:00.000-07:00But, Mumon, the issues I'm address have everything...But, Mumon, the issues I'm address have everything to do with interiority.<BR/><BR/>The Atlantic article is blantant at reading Paul as being wholly out to increase the market share of Christianity in the gentile world. Wright sees that as Paul's sole motivation. And, no doubt, letters and a better understanding of the world Paul was in contribe to this exterior assessment.<BR/><BR/>But surely it is at least also true that Paul was motivated by his religious belief [interiority] to get out the Good News.<BR/><BR/>Wright damns Paul for writing, “Let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.” He says this shows Paul to be, effectively, still tribalist in his approach. But those words are about WORK regarding a religion that was both spreading and threatened. One can direct ones WORK or EFFORT; there's nothing damning about a commitment to universalizing love in that.<BR/><BR/>The problem with respect to imperial scientism is that Wright's approach reads what happens wholly from the outside, without consideration to what Paul was like on the inside.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13718601770472939313noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969281918175291060.post-71646743734101398192009-04-13T07:31:00.000-07:002009-04-13T07:31:00.000-07:00Tom,Apologies for the delay in responding, but the...Tom,<BR/><BR/>Apologies for the delay in responding, but the idea of "scientific imperialism," is no more or no less than, say, "number-theoretic materialism," because both disciplines contain within themselves the notions, nah, the rather well developed ideas of their respective disciplines limitations.<BR/><BR/>"Interiority" is simply not within the language of science to describe, let alone denigrate, just as the notions using sets of subsets of the continuum aren't within the province of number theory, except insofar as they're used to show that they're not, uh, in the province of number theory.<BR/><BR/>That's my main beef with Wilber - he should and probably does know better.<BR/><BR/>And, as a straw-man, often folks like Dawkins are invoked, but Dawkins will be among the first to note that even if it is granted that we are no more than electro-chemical-physical processes, we still have an enormous value on experience (and hence "interiority.")<BR/><BR/>Of course, I don't really have a dog in these fights except insofar as that Shinto guy at sumo matches might act, metaphorically speaking. <BR/><BR/>Or to put it another way, I'd prefer the contestants to play fairly, even though it's not likely that a result or agreement will be reached.<BR/><BR/>Let me toss a bit of salt into the ring.Mumon Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01116967568502451788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969281918175291060.post-54598553340258213472009-04-03T08:54:00.000-07:002009-04-03T08:54:00.000-07:00Mumon,I was really only meaning to get to the idea...Mumon,<BR/><BR/>I was really only meaning to get to the idea of "flatland," not to denegrade science.<BR/><BR/>Wilber [and I] laud the dignity of modernity and the advances of science! Hooray, science. It is just that scientific imperialism denegrades or denies interiority, and the mysterious [to any objectivist robot] contribution of emotion, feeling, insight or conscious experience.<BR/><BR/>"Green" is not just the measure of a wave length.<BR/><BR/>I am no Christian, but the writer of the Atlantic piece needs to, at least, recognize that Paul might have been motivated by something other than self-interest.<BR/><BR/>Truly, the article is ridiculous. Before he was in prison, Paul spent most of his time making tents, instead of accepting payment to be a preacher full time. [see I Cointh 9, I think it is.]<BR/><BR/>Were he really attending to an ambition of making himself The Big Cheese of something or other, he'd surely have re-scheduled his tentmaking time wholly to writing and rallying people to join Jesus Incorporated.<BR/><BR/>I'm no great fan of Paul. I think he was duplicitous, but only for reason of broadening the pathway to salvation, as he saw it.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13718601770472939313noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969281918175291060.post-34090845483832488742009-04-03T04:06:00.000-07:002009-04-03T04:06:00.000-07:00I get this far:But as the Big Three dissociated, a...I get this far:<BR/><BR/><I>But as the Big Three dissociated, and scientific<BR/>imperialism began its aggressive career, all ‘Is’ and all ‘we’s’ were reduced to<BR/>patterns of objective ‘its’, and thus all the interior stages of consciousness –<BR/>reaching from body to mind to soul to spirit – were summarily dismissed as so<BR/>much superstitious nonsense. The Great Nest collapsed into scientific<BR/>materialism – into what Wilber calls “flatland” – and here the modern world, by<BR/>and large, still remains.</I><BR/><BR/>In order for Wilber's narrative to be convincing, to me at any rate, one would have to downplay the advances in linguistics, automata, theory of computation and related areas that have shed light on the limits of language itself.<BR/><BR/>Moreover, the philosophic of science has evolved so that science talks about and deals with things that are observable.<BR/><BR/>That it says nothing about "interior stages of consciousness," whatever that is, is because <I>it's not observable</I>, in the sense that an outside observer can do anything with it.<BR/><BR/>Science doesn't talk about the metaphysical, and "higher consciousness" or not, because we know better what language is, what measurements are, and how they can be usefully applied to learn more about where we are. The idea that this therefore defines a metaphysic - that anything outside the observable is "superstition" while not even wrong, as they say,it is also, I would think, <I>not exactly a pressing issue</I>, especially given the plethora of moral imperatives needed to get by in this world.<BR/><BR/>On the other hand, that Atlantic article in discussing Paul is bizarre in the extreme, and no less revisionist than the atheist views of Paul, except for the fact that the latter make a better moral case against Paul, if by his fruits he'd be judged.Mumon Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01116967568502451788noreply@blogger.com