Glenn, Lawry, Roger and y'all:
Who wants "an honest to goodness social pattern"? Who wants to know about
social level mediation of the intellect? Who wants to see how the laws of
physics relate to its cultural parents? Glenn, I'm hurt that you found
nothing in my "oldest idea" post about all this.
Physics, the study of inorganic reality, is mediated first by biology.
Scientific equipment amplifies the eyes and ears enormously, but it
basically boils down to the senses. Social values act as a second filter and
so its role is little harder to sort out. SOM hard sciences are especially
difficult in this respect for historical reasons, namely a political battle
with a church that was persecuting scientists. In anycase, the flaws and
unexamined assumptions of SOM in its tendency to reduce organisms to objects
and it becomes much more of a problem when we get to the social sciences;
anthropology, politics, psychology, history etc. Applying the standards of
scientific objectivity to the study of humanity only shows the absurdity and
inadequacy of those standards.
As the "oldest idea" post tries to explain, I think SOM has derived some of
its worst assumptions in an unwitting and unconscious way. There's a
re-curring theme in the mythology about separation; cast out of the garden,
wandering in the dessert, and the like. Further, there is a split, a duality
about this spiritual loneliness; spirit and the flesh, father and son,
heaven and earth, god and the devil, etc. This lonliness sort of translates
into SOM's mere subjectivity and the separation from god and nature
translates into the objectification of the physical world. See what I mean?
I don't want to get into the "speed of light" debate too deeply, but I think
books like Fritjof Capra's TAO OF PHYSICS aptly demostate that intellectual
models can be derived from any culture. Alot of the social level mediation
in the hard sciences comes in at the creation of the hypothesis, the
interpretation of the experiment, peer review and the whole publishing
thing, the parts that tend to be more verbal than mathematical.
DMB -
Lawrence DeBivort wrote:
>Light can, relative to an observer, move faster than its constant, if its
>source is itself moving in such a direction that it augments the speed of
>the light it emits. This is one of the (correct) implications of Einstein's
>hypotheses. Unfortunately, the notion of the constant became translated in
>popular knowledge into an absolute maxium speed.
glenn responed.....
No, sorry Lawrence. Superluminal speeds can be reached but not by the
way you describe them. The "popular knowledge" you state here is what
Einstein's special theory of relativity states. It's admittedly not a
commonsensical notion. By the way, this one is REALLY hard to justify
being derived or mediated by social values.
Glenn
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