Gary, Elliot, all
Gary
> Descartes claimed that it was a
> separate thing altogether and thus create 'The Mind / Body Problem'.
In Christopher Alexander's new book he too traces the source of the
currently dominate world- view to Descartes. But he also suggests that
the way that his work became integrated into it is not as Descartes
thought or intended. The old unintended consequences thing.
"The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640.
His idea was: if you want to know how something works, you can find out
by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you
are interested in.... ... from everything else, and you invent a
mechanical model, a mental toy, which obeys certain rules, and which
will replicate the behavior of the thing."
"However, the crucial thing which Descartes understood very well, but
which we most often forget, is that this process is only a METHOD. ...
Decartes himself clearly understood his procedure as a mental trick. He
was a religious person who would have been horrified to find out that
people in the 20th century began to think that reality itself is
actually like this."
(Alexander-Nature of Order-Vol 1, pg 16 )
The "Cleveland Harbor effect" has been alive and well probably for as
long as humans have.
3WD
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:19 BST