The alien hypothesis?

Sat Oct 22 18:50:26 CDT 2005

If a guy as smart as Pinker can't make snese of
Barthe's supposed "ideas" on language, that tells me
that there's gotta be a whole lot of obscurantism
going on in his notions...and as far a Zaman is
concerned; look, to make a hypothesis scientifically
meaningfull, it is implied, if not explicitly stated,
that at some point you have to TEST that
hypothesis...otherwise, what ya got is not an
hypothesis so much as idle speculation...so hey, I'm
relaxed about it - if Zaman want's to propose that the
sun is a sentient entity, he's free to do so all he
wants; sounds like oodles of fun!...but...if he's not
willing to set conditions of testability on that
surmise, or 'hypothesis', then he's not gonna be
regarded by serious scientists... and..I would venture
to bet, though 'course I can't PROVE this readily, I
don't think anyone ELSE is gonna be much taken by his
proposition, which is by the way a very old one at
that...sure, any college sophmore understands that
"our" definition of "life" may not embrace enough
possibilities to include what MAY be out there, or
even here...but, as with anything else, for practicle
purposes, there IS such thing as being too
open-minded...if we make allowances for rocks then we
may as well scrap our working definition...and that's
the whole point; every scientist knows that it's a
working, provisional definition...but ya gotta start
with SOME parameters...to define something ya gotta
have some idea not only of what it is but what it's
not...otherwise then you have REAL "semantic
constructs" not worth a  damn...paradigm shifts STILL
happen within accepted frameworks; Relativity had
aspects that were very counterintuitive..at
first...then, when elucidated it was shown that it
essentially augmented, not supplanted Newtonian
physics...things followed from things..it wasn't THAT
weird...not as weird as saying "the universe is made
of cheesey poofs"...and leaving it at that...so I
simply don't see the value of such an unrestricted
postulation....Richard Feynman once said that one way
of thinking of the method of coming up with ideas in
science was as "imagination in a strait jacket"...you
have to have be able to look at things very
differently, but not SO differently that you toss out
all things we thus far feel we know...as provisional
as they are... 

--- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> 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 forceby 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 Latours
> usage), whether living or 
> > non-living. However, Latours actant is
> essentially the same thing 
> > in SAC and will be used in place of Leibnizs
> 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.
> >>
> >
> >
> 
> 
> 

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