Hello my dearest Glenn,
GLENN: I haven't read Contact or seen the movie. I like Sagan because, like
>Steven J. Gould (who just passed away), he helped to popularize science and
>give it a human face, and probably sacrificed a good portion of his career
>as a practicing scientist doing it.
ERIN: I wasn't asking about whether you value ET research --I am not really
interested in that thus I didn't metioned it.
Since you didn't see the movie I will forgive your evasion of the actual
questions. My point was about the parallels between religion and science the
movie kept making. I thought if Sagan saw it then maybe you....
GLENN: I agree that psychology is in a sorry state. This is undoubtedly
because
>the hair-brained ideas of chaps like Freud and Jung set the science back
>about 100 years.
ERIN: I have a completely different viewpoint on why psychology is in a sorry
state. Psychology in its earlier state with William James,Sigmund Freud, and
Carl Jung were involved in psychology it wasn't taboo to cross subject
boundaries-philosophy,religion,literature, biology, etc.
I understand the need to explore a topic in depth you have to narrow the theme
a bit. But I wonder what this is costing us--we seem to be moving toward a
field of idiot savants.
If cognitive science ever gets an Einstein in our field I bet you any money he
will be more like James, Freud, and Jung then somebody studying memory of
word-pairs (sorry if I offended anyone who does that type of research it is
not that I don't see any value in it I just doubt our cognitive Einstein would
have such a limited approach)
GLENN:>I thought your joke about the thermos was amusing. However, it may have
>drawn a frown from the faithful here because if thermos's are
>inorganically aware, as the MOQ says, then it's perfectly reasonable to
>think that the thermos knows about temperature and reacts on that basis.
>Who needs science when you have ready explanations like this?
>Unless you're the type to tell rabii jokes at a rabinical conference, you
>might try being more sensitive to your audience in the future.
ERIN: Thank you for such a sincere concern of others feeling.
The joke was about the thermos observing the temperature, having a conscious
knowledge of the content's temperature and intentionally keeping it at the
actual temperature.
To take this SOM view of awareness and twist it to the role of inorganic value
is sloppy.
Perhaps cognitive science are clueless to awareness, consciouness levels since
we are knee deep in the SOM view?
There is a lot of computer simulation studies in cognitive science that try to
replicate real data.
If you use a computer as a metaphor for the brain you run into problems like
this joke.
Pirsig annotation number 13
"The hand that taps the computer keys is biological. The school that taught
the computer programmer how to program is social."
The awareness of the computer of this sentence is not the same as my awareness
of this sentence, (let alone a thermos on my desk awareness of this sentence).
Can you grant either knowledge of this sentence-- the kind the joke implied.
Always a pleasure,
Erin
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