Quantum Non-Linearity: Teetering on the Brink of the Nihilist Abyss.

Sunday, August 16, 2020

Teetering on the Brink of the Nihilist Abyss.

Implausible monsters emerged from Lovecraft's id; the worst of them was racism.

As I've said before; the move from atheism to postmodern nihilism is one short step for man but one giant cultural leap for humankind. Take this post by my favourite atheist PZ Myers where he remarks on generalised Copernicanism and contemporary authors who are bringing us a postmodern cosmic dread such as we see in an HBO production called Lovercraft Country....

Science has been spending a few centuries working to move the center of the universe away from us, so it fits with an ongoing trend. Now we just have to dislodge that center from white people, which is proving to be the hardest step of them all. Lovecraft Country, though, does its part in the decentering. Don’t read Lovecraft, read the more recent authors that have been bringing us cosmic dread without the petty racism. (Another author I’d recommend: the work of Ruthanna Emrys, who takes on the perspective of the fish men of Innsmouth.)

Hey, can we pretend Skepticon is taking place in Lovecraft country?

There is no need to pretend if you are as good as in Lovecraft country already. Myers calls Lovecraft a horrible racist (which no doubt he was!) but the monster of racism feels very Lovecraftian to me and of a piece with Lovecraft's id inspired cosmic dread. Like the monster from the id racism inhabits our subconscious and we inadvertently reify it into our social surroundings. In any case Lovecraft had such a jaundiced view of what he believed to be an utterly indifferent cosmos that race supremacism wouldn't be out of place in it and in fact in his mind would likely be a natural outcome of inter-species competition. Lovecraft's vision of the cosmos was so misanthropic that who knows what horrible things it could throw up.

I have a little knowledge of Lovecraft because one of my sons studied Lovecraft for his MA: I think he wanted a grindstone to sharpen up his faith! The LA Times, as quoted by Myers, tells us a bit more about H P Lovecraft:

Lovecraft helped create a genre now known as “cosmic horror,” stories filled with dread and terror at the knowledge that humans are not the most important things in the universe.

He was beginning to write at a time when science was making vast and profound discoveries,” says Klinger. “What he came to believe, I think deeply and honestly, was that human beings were insignificant little dust motes in this enormous universe and that eventually we would discover that we were not particularly significant.

No question that science in stages, starting with Copernicus through particulate theory, deep time, evolution, and deep space etc has left the old Christian order with a mighty lot to ponder; not that that's a bad thing, although as counter-reactions Christian young earthism and flat earthism are the rearguard actions of an incompetent, run-down and bankrupt religious culture. But let's not give up hope and faith yet, else, as the irony of satirical Christian artist Steve Taylor would put it:

Life unwinds like a cheap sweater

But since I gave up hope I feel a lot better

And the truth gets blurred like a wet letter

But since I gave up hope I feel a lot better

And let's not forget that even on evolutionary logic we find that science is telling us that we never left the centre. Or a better way of putting it: The die was heavily loaded in favour of life from the outset and therefore by implication loaded in our favour as well.

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/09/evolution-naked-chance.html

Relevant links:

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2019/05/teetering-on-brink-of-nihilist-abyss.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/09/many-worlds-theory-theory-devoid-of.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/05/whats-gone-wrong.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/08/deep-internal-contradiction.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/06/2001-spaced-out-odyssey.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-know-you-know-you-know-it.html

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yed05ld0xhcGJwaDQ/view

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeVXVQRVRPVFRaM1E/edit?pli=1

No comments:

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Sunday, August 16, 2020

Teetering on the Brink of the Nihilist Abyss.

No comments:

My Other Blogs

Papers and Essays etc

About Me

Blog Archive

Labels

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION