GLENN:
What's more, this aspect of the MOQ leaves the door open to all kinds
of nonsense, such as the belief that Sasquatch is an objective phenomena if
only the culture weren't so set on denying it.
True that the MoQ leaves the door open to all kinds of beliefs in all kinds
of
nonsense but is that really a door you would want closed by a metaphysics?
These kinds of beliefs were around before the MoQ. All the MoQ does is
alter the way they can be expressed and argued. If the MoQ closed the door
on any beliefs whatsoever it would not be a metaphysics. Beliefs are the
domain of religion, not metaphysics. If someone is arguing for the
existence
of the Sasquatch, the objective phenomenon argument doesn't lend any more
(or less) credence to their argument.
GLENN:
The belief
encouraged by the MOQ that parts of the real world are blocked from actual
view by cultural filters and enforced by cultural immune systems paves the
way
for this kind of conspiratorial, cultish mindset.
Surely this is not a belief but an observed phenomenon? It is evidenced by
Pirsig's Cleveland story and other such stories, and we see it in everyday
life:
an event calls your attention to something that you might have passed by
every day but never noticed.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: enoonan [SMTP:enoonan@kent.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2002 7:21 AM
> To: MOQ
> Subject: MD science/society independence
>
> GLENN: What's more, this aspect of the MOQ leaves the door open to all
> kinds
> of nonsense, such as the belief that Sasquatch is an objective phenomena
> if
> only the culture weren't so set on denying it. And guess what? The next
> inevitable step is the belief in institutionalized denial, whereby people
> become convinced the culture tries to enforce the mythos for its own sake.
> We
> already have the cult notion that the government is covering up
> extraterrestial visitations. We'd have more of this under the MOQ. The
> belief
> encouraged by the MOQ that parts of the real world are blocked from actual
>
> view by cultural filters and enforced by cultural immune systems paves the
> way
> for this kind of conspiratorial, cultish mindset.
>
> ERIN: I think it is true that the MoQ leaves the door open but I think
> that is
> why it is NOT paving the way for a cultish mindset, quite the opposite.
> For
> example withe aliens, we don't know if they exist or not so if we want to
> try
> and pretend we do then we are basically full of it in my opinion. In my
> opinion MoQ does open the way for you to be uncertain about something but
> I
> want you to explain to me how is the cult that aliens exist different from
> the
> cult that aliens don't exist?
>
> WILLIAM JAMES "Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every
> science
> there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of
> occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always
> proves
> more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science
> who
> will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is
> renewed,
> its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them
> than
> of what were supposed to be the rules."
>
> R. WILSON:
> "Do you believe in UFOs?" somebody asked.
>
> "Yes, of course," I answered.
>
> The questioner, who looked quite young, then burst into a long speech,
> "proving" at least to his own satisfaction that all UFOs "really are"
> sun-dogs
> or heat inversions. When he finally ran down I simply replied,
>
> "Well, we both agree that UFOs exist. Our only difference is that you
> think
> you know what they are and I'm still puzzled."
>
> An elderly gentleman with blonde-white hair and a florid complexion cried
> out
> in great enthusiasm, "By God, sir, you're right. I myself am still puzzled
>
> about everything!"
>
> And thus I met Timothy F.X. Finnegan, Dean of the Royal Sir Myles na
> gCopaleen
> Astro-Anomalistic Society, Dalkey, sometime lecturer at Trinity College,
> Dublin, and founder of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of
> Claims of
> the Normal.
>
> In fact, Prof. Finnegan signed me up as a member of CSICON that very
> night, in
> the Plough and Stars pub over our ninth or tenth pint of Ireland's most
> glorious product, linn dubh, known as Guiness to the ungodly.
>
> Now I hear that Prof. Finnegan has died, or at least they took the liberty
> of
> burying him, and I feel that the world has lost a great man.
>
> The Commitee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON)
> ,
> however, lives on and deserves more attention than it has received
> hitherto.
> Prof. Finnegan always asserted that the idea for CSICON derived from a
> remark
> passed by an old Dalkey character named Sean Murphy, in the Goat and
> Compasses
> pub shortly before closing time on 23 July 1973.
>
> Actually, it started with two old codgers named O'Brian and Nolan
> discussing
> the weather. "Terrible rain and wind for this time of year," O'Brian
> ventured.
>
> "Ah, faith," Nolan replied, "I do not believe it is this time of year at
> all,
> at all."
>
> At this, Murphy spoke up. "Ah, Jaysus," he said, "I've never seen a
> boogerin'
> normal day." He paused to set down his pint, then added thoughtfully, "And
> I
> never met a fookin' average man neither"
>
> (About Sean Murphy nothing else appears in the record except a remark
> gleaned
> by Prof. LaPuta from one Nora Dolan, a housewife of the vicinity: "Sure,
> that
> Murphy lad never did any hard work except for getting up off the floor and
>
> navigating himself back onto the bar-stool, after he fell off, and he only
> did
> that twice a night.")
>
> But Murphy's simple words lit a fire in the subtle and intricate brain of
> Timothy F.X. Finnegan, who had just finished his own fourteenth pint (de
> Selby
> says his fifteenth pint). The next day the aging Finnegan wrote the first
> two-page outline of the new science he called patapsychology, a term
> coined in
> salute to Alfred Jarry's invention of pataphysics.
>
> Finnegan's paper began with the electrifying sentence, "The average
> Canadian
> has one testicle, just like Adolph Hitler -- or, more precisely, the
> average
> Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the
> average Anything actually existed." He then went on to demonstrate that
> the
> normal or average human lives in substandard housing in Asia, has 1.04
> vaginas, cannot read or write, suffers from malnutrition and never heard
> of
> Silken Thomas Fitzgerald or Brian Boru. "The normal," he concluded
> "consists
> of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits."
>
> Thus began the science of Patapsychology, Prof. Finnegan's most
> enduring,and
> endearing, contribution to the world -- aside from the computer-enhanced
> photos of the Face on Mars with which he endeavored to prove that the Face
>
> depicted Moishe Horwitz, his lifelong mentor and idol. This, of course,
> remains highly controversial, especially among disciples of Richard
> Hoagland,
> who believe the Face looks more like the Sphinx, those who insist it looks
>
> like Elvis to them, and the dullards who only see it as a bunch of rocks.
>
> Nobody should confuse Patapsychology with parapsychology, although this
> precise misunderstanding evidently inspired the long and venomous
> diatribes
> against Finnegan by Prof. Sheissenhosen of Heidelberg. (We need not credit
> the
> allegations of Herr Doktor Hamburger that Sheissenhosen also dispatched
> the
> three separate letter-bombs sent to Finnegan in 1982, '83 and '87. Even in
> the
> most heated academic debate some limits of decorem should remain, one
> would
> hope.)
>
> Sheissenhosen evidently believed that "parapsychology" represented an
> unprovoked attack on his language and thought, and that Finnegan often
> leaped
> from shadows; he even suspected the Dalkey sage of slinking and of hiding
> behind a belly laugh, although the latter seems physiologically
> impossible. (I
> tried it once and found it made me more visible, not less.) In fact,
> Sheissenhosen never did correct his original error of misreading
> patapsycholgy
> as parapsychology. You will find more about the
> Sheissenhosen-Finnegan-LaPuta-Hamburger controversy in deSelby's Finnegan:
>
> Enigma of the Occident, Tourneur's Finnegan: Homme ou Dieu? and/or
> Sheissenhosen's own Finneganismus und Dummheit (6 volumes).
>
> Patapsychology begins from Murphy's Law, as Finnegan called the First
> Axiom,
> adopted from Sean Murphy. This says,and I quote,"The normal does not
> exist.
> The average does not exist. We know only a very large but probably finite
> phalanx of discrete space-time events encountered and endured." In less
> technical language, the Board of the College of Patapsychology offers one
> million Irish punds [around $700,000 American] to any "normalist" who can
> exhibit "a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary
> Playmate of
> the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal,
> average or ordinary."
>
> In a world where no two fingerprints appear identical, and no two brains
> appear identical, and an electron does not even seem identical to itself
> from
> one nanosecond to another, patapsychology seems on safe ground here.
>
> No normalist has yet produced even a totally normal dog, an average cat,
> or
> even an ordinary chickadee. Attempts to find an average Bird of Paradise,
> an
> ordinary haiku or even a normal cardiologist have floundered pathetically.
> The
> normal, the average, the ordinary, even the typical, exist only in
> statistics,
> i.e. the human mathematical mindscape. They never appear in external
> space-time, which consists only and always of nonnormal events in
> nonnormal
> series.
>
> Thus, unless you're an illiterate and malnourished Asian with exactly 1.04
>
> vaginas and 0.96 testicles, living in substandard housing, you do not
> qualify
> as normal but as abnormal, subnormal, supernormal, paranormal or some
> variety
> of nonnormal.
>
> The canny will detect here the usual Celtic impulse to make hash out of
> everything that seems obvious and incontrovertable to Saxons, grocers and
> other Fundamentalist Materialists. Patapsychology follows in the great
> tradition of Swift, who once proved with a horoscope that an astrologer
> named
> Partridge had died, even though Partridge continued to deny this in print;
>
> Bishop Berkeley, who proved that the universe doesn't exist but God has a
> persistent delusion that it does; William Rowan Hamilton, who invented the
>
> noncommutative algebra in which p times q does not equal q times p; Wilde,
> who
> asked if the academic commentators on Hamlet had really gone mad or only
> pretended to have gone mad; John S.Bell, who proved mathematically that if
> any
> universe corresponds to the equations of quantum mathematics that universe
>
> must have nonlocal correlations similar to Jungian synchronicities; etc.
>
> In the patapsychological model, the normal having vanished, most
> generalizations, especially about nonmathematical groups, disappear along
> with
> it. The monorchoid Mr. Hitler, for instance, could not generalize about
> "the
> Jews" within the patapsychological model, because first he would have to
> find
> a normal or average Jew, which appears as intracible to demonstration as
> exhibitting the Ideal Platonic Jew (or the Ideal Platonic Chicken Farm
> complete with Ideal Platonic Chickenshit.)
>
> As Korzybski the semanticist said, all we can ever find in space-time
> consists
> of Jew-1, Jew-2, Jew-3 etc. to Jew-n. (For the nonmathematical, that means
> a
> list comprising Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Ruth, Jesus, Woody Allen, Richard
> Bandler, Felix Mendelsohn, Sigmund Freud, Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable,
> Noam
> Chomsky, Bernard Baruch, Paul Newman, the Virgin Mary, Albert Einstein,
> Lillian Hellman, Baron Rothschild, Ayn Rand, Max Epstein, Emma Goldman,
> Saul
> Bellow, etc. etc. etc. to the final enumeration of all Jews alive or
> dead.)
> Each of these, on inspection, will have different fingerprints, different
> brains, different neuro-immunological systems, different eyes, ears, noses
>
> etc. different life histories, different conditioning and learning etc.
> and
> different personalities, hobbies, passions etc... and none will serve as a
>
> norm or Ideal Form for all the others.
>
> To say it otherwise, world Jewish population stood at about 10 million
> when
> Hitler formed his generalizations. He could not possibly have known more
> than
> at maximum about 500 of them well enough to generalize about them;
> considering
> his early prejudices, he probably knew a lot less than that. But taking
> 500 as
> a high estimate, we find he generalized about 10 million individual
> persons on
> the basis of knowledge limited to around 1/20,000 or 0.00005 % of them.
>
> It seems, then, that Naziism could not have existed, if Hitler knew the
> difference between norms or averages (internal estimates, subject to error
> due
> to incomplete research or personal prejudice) and the phalanx of discrete
> nonnormal events and things (including persons) that we find in the
> sensory
> space-time continuum outside.
>
> Similarly, the male human population currently stands at 3 billion 3
> million
> 129 thousand, more or less (3, 004, 129, 976, the last time I checked the
> World Game Website a while ago. ) Of these 3 billion+ discrete
> individuals,
> Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin and other Radical Feminists probably have not
>
> known more than about 500 to generalize from. This means that Rad Fem
> dogma
> consists of propositions about 3 billion critters based on examination of
> less
> than 0.00000001 per cent of them. This ammounts to a much more reckless
> use of
> generalization than Hitler's thoughts on Judaism. You can no more find the
>
> male norm from Gandhi, Gen George Custer, Buddha, Bill Clinton, Louis
> Pasteur,
> Kung fu tzu, Bruno, Father Damien, Ted Bundy etc. than you can find the
> Jewish
> norm from Emma Goldman, Harpo Marx, Felix Mendelsohn, Spinoza, Barbra
> Streisand, Nathaniel Branden, Emma Lazarus, Jerry Seinfeld etc.
>
> Now you know how the word "feminazi" got into the language. The two
> ideologies
> have a strong isomorphism. They both confuse the theoretical norm with a
> vast
> array of different individuals -- and they both have no idea how to create
>
> even a tolerably scientific norm (which will still differ in many respects
>
> from the actual series of individuals the norm allegedly covers.) .
>
> CSICON applies the same Deconstructive logic all across the board.
>
> For instance, to return to our starting point, whatever your idea of the
> "normal" UFO -- whether you consider it a spaceship, a secret US
> government
> weapon, a hoax, or a hallucination etc. -- such a general idea will render
> you
> incapable of forming a truly objective view of the next UFO that comes
> along.
> The only way to cancel such pre-judgement lies in patapsychology (and in
> general semantics.) You must remember the difference between the
> individual
> and unpredictible event that gets called a UFO and your past
> generalizations
> about "the UFO" or the "normal" UFO."
>
> Otherwise you will only note how this UFO fits your Ideal UFO and will
> unconciously ignore how it differs therefrom. This mechanical reflex will
> please your ego, if you like to feel you know more than most people, but
> it
> will prove hazardous to your ability to observe and think carefully.
>
> People who think they know all about Jews or males or UFOs never see a
> real
> Jew or male or UFO. They see the generalized norm that exists only in
> their
> own brains. We never know "all" -- we only know what I call sombunall,
> some-but-not-all. This applies also to dogs ( the patapsychologist will
> not
> say "I love them," "I hate them," "I fear them" etc. ), and to plumbers,
> bosses, right-wingers, left-wingers, cats, lizards, sitcoms, houses,
> nails,
> Senators, waterfalls and all other miscellaneous sets or groups.
>
> Personally, I see two or three UFOs every week. This does not astonish me,
> or
> convince me of the spaceship theory, because I also see about 2 or 3 UNFOs
>
> every week --Unidentified Non-Flying Objects. These remain unidentified
> (by
> me) because they go by too fast or look so weird that I never know whether
> to
> classify them as hedgehogs, hobgoblins or helicopters-- or as stars or
> satellites or spaceships -- or as pookahs or pizza-trucks or probability
> waves. Of course, I also see things that I feel fairly safe in identifying
> as
> hedgehogs or stars or pizza trucks, but the world contains more and more
> events that I cannot identify fully and dogmatically with any norm or
> generalization. I live in a spectrum of probabilities, uncertainties and
> wonderments.
>
> Perhaps I got this way by studying Finnegan's work. Or maybe I just drank
> too
> much linn dubh during my years in Ireland.
>
> O rare, Tim Finnegan!
>
>
>
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