"You're gonna want cause & effect"---GR

[Paul Mackin]

On 8/18/2011 2:20 PM, Keith Davis wrote:
> It seems to me that this all ties into the discussion we were having 
> about awareness and self awareness. There is something there that we 
> can't identify, other than to say that it is "being" or "presence" or 
> "awareness of presence". We can say, "I'm like this or that", but when 
> we try to find the source of this or that, it evaporates into nothingness.

If you were living in the middle ages your scholastic philosophy would 
admit to self-evident principles, one of which would be that you exist.  
Descartes was not convinced but turned out not to be too convincing himself.

Kathryn Hume says we "have been taught" to see things as we do, but, 
when she's talking about such things as cause and effect, I believe she 
really means that we have EVOLVED that way.  Which of course took eons.  
(if only the scholastic had known about evolution they'd have been on 
firmer ground)

Of course, as Kathryn Hume indicates, the kinds of hard and fast truths 
that had to be UNlearned at the level of quantum physics have only at 
best a metaphorical connection with the supposition that we might evolve 
(by which she means learn) to view all life, not just human life, as 
valuable.

Hume is one of a group of P critics who tried to see ethical values in 
GR after the initial tendency to see only post-modern chaos.

P
>
> On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:29 PM, Ian Livingston 
> <igrlivingston at gmail.com <mailto:igrlivingston at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Kathryn Hume says, in Pynchon's Mythography, regarding this particular
>     subject in GR, "Where Pynchon is most serious and most literal is in
>     his insistence on an Other Side, on some kind of irreducible mystery,
>     on there being something beyond the world acknowledged by empirical
>     method.... We know more or less how gravity, magnetism, and
>     electricity work, but not really what they are. We now know there are
>     some things we cannot know--the simultaneous momentum and location of
>     an electron, for instance. We are philosophically aware that the
>     concepts of force and of cause and effect are human projections upon
>     the world.... Pynchon seems at times to be creating a metaphoric
>     extension of subatomic realities into the quotidian level of
>     existence. He knows that the cosmos looks to us as it does because we
>     have been taught to see it that way. If another perspective were to
>     develop--for instance, if we were to evolve an outlook that valued all
>     life, not just human and not just one's self--then the cosmos we would
>     see would differ dramatically from what we see now" (85).
>
>     On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 6:07 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com
>     <mailto:markekohut at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>     > There are an amazing couple-three sentences in Understanding Media
>     > wherein McLuhan basically riffs on that line, virtually uses it
>     without the
>     > direct address to the reader....or, changing up the metaphor,
>     > that concept in the West is the bassline way conceptual logical
>     linearity is
>     > embodied in our [the West's] language, he sez.
>     >
>
>
>
>     --
>     "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
>     creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
>     trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
>     of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
>     than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> www.innergroovemusic.com <http://www.innergroovemusic.com>


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