The alien hypothesis?

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Take it easy, John Doe. Pop a Prozak or something. It's quite OK if you 
can't or don't want to try to come to grips with the scientific and 
methodological ideas in Zaman's article.

Imagine it, to put it into the simplest possible terms, as a thought 
experiment which proposes the scientific hypothesis that rocks and 
other "non-living" objects are actually sentient in some way (cf. those 
"oodles of scientists saying exactly that: that intelligent life as WE 
know it may be too narrow a definition" which you referred to 
previously.) Newton's math still applies. Now, go ahead and try to 
disprove that hypothesis experimentally. I think you'll find that the 
immanent sentience version is no more or less falsifiable than the 
Newtonian mechanist version. At least, I think that's part of what 
Zaman is contending in the article. In rejecting the hypothesis, all 
you've really got to go on is human "common sense" as the determinant 
of what's "scientifically" tenable and what isn't.

There are any number of resonances with Pynchon's work, which is just 
one of the reasons why the ideas might be worth bothering with here. 
And stamping your feet and sticking your fingers in your ears and 
shouting "la la la la" doesn't actually make them go away.

Btw, your narrow straw man definition of "language" as signifying only 
verbal utterances has nothing to do with the ideas of Derrida and 
Barthes, or with applied linguistics for that matter, and is pretty 
much on a par with your bowdlerisations of Baudrillard.

best

>> Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:45:31 -0700 (PDT)
>> From: John Doe <tristero69@[omitted]>
>>
>> "physico-social" force? This is a bunch of confused,
>> arbitrary metaphyscial gobbledygook..."replaced" in
>> what sense? What exactly is an "objectivist"? I never
>> met one - have you? Please introduce me to one...only
>> an idiot posing as a scinetist would try to make sense
>> of Newton's laws of motion reinterpreted in social
>> forms...that simply means we make cute metaphoric
>> descriptions comparing particle motion with human
>> activity; poets and fiction writers have excelled at
>> that for decades..."from the world beyond
>> itself"???....wha?.....an abstract "carrier" would not
>> be abstract if borrowed form particle physics; it
>> would have to represent a presumed REAL force or real
>> matter....I can't even bother with the rest...it's
>> seductive, and makes your brain go oooooo- cool..but's
>> it's not talking about anything tenable...

On 22/10/2005 jbor wrote:

> "[...] what may need to be ‘replaced’ in nature, in order to establish 
> a social explanation of natural phenomena, is the objectivist concept 
> of insentient ‘physico-chemical force’—by an empirically equivalent 
> sentient ‘physico-social force.’ The resulting theory of SAC-mediated 
> phenomena is subjectivist rather than objectivist, but it nevertheless 
> is Newtonian in form (mathematically) because it still is determined 
> by his laws of motion reinterpreted in social rather than physical 
> terms. Physico-social force is simply that influence or power arising 
> within anyone or anything that responds to information received from 
> the world beyond itself, whose response in turn tends to reciprocally 
> influence the world beyond via information that it itself disseminates 
> in some manner.
>
> The abstract ‘carrier’ of the physico-social force thus conceived, to 
> borrow a concept from particle physics, and in contradistinction to 
> the insentient objects of the objectivist world of OEC, is essentially 
> the Leibnizian ‘monad’ (Rutherford, 1995:124-175)—a term here 
> signifying any material body (or the elements or parts thereof) that 
> exhibits sentient behavior, whether in actuality or only apparently, 
> whether ‘human’ or ‘non-human’ (in Latour’s usage), whether living or 
> non-living. However, Latour’s ‘actant’ is essentially the same thing 
> in SAC and will be used in place of Leibniz’s monad. As interpreted 
> here, the actant: (1) is an innate sentience and intelligence that 
> underlies all existence, (2) is simultaneously both subject and 
> object, (3) is manifested through agent causation rather than event 
> causation, and (4) encompasses both humans and non-humans to include 
> all systems and subsystems thereof down to the elementary particle 
> level. [...]" (Zaman 2001)
>
> Cf. also Felipe and those "Sentient Rocksters" in GR (pp. 612-3).
>
> best
>
>> See also, e.g.,
>>
>> http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol002.001/05zaman.html
>>
>> http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol003.002/zaman.html
>>
>> Cf. "[...] there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have 
>> been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, 
>> it must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of 
>> assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the 
>> courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some 
>> other angle." (GR 89)
>>
>> best
>>
>> On 19/10/2005 Otto wrote:
>>
>>> This reminds me of Jonathan Culler's "On Deconstruction. Theory and 
>>> Criticism after Structuralism" (Cornell Univ., Ithaca, New York, 
>>> 1982). Maybe you should check the second chapter "Deconstruction" 
>>> for Nietzsche's reversal of cause and effect where it is shown how 
>>> the cause is imagined after the effect has been suffered. Got it 
>>> only in German.
>>
>
>