The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #169010   Message #4095169
Posted By: Donuel
27-Feb-21 - 01:08 PM
Thread Name: BS: How can we restore a reason renaissance
Subject: RE: BS: How can we restore a reason renaissance
I suppose there is wit, half wit and no wit like pfr.
If Einstein lived in the time of twitter and became concerned about how many likes he had on Twitter we would have no General or Special relativity.
BE YOURSELF and avoid ENTROPY. Einstein said "As humans we have the ability to move against the current or tide of spacetime.
My perspective/bias is Psychology and Physics.
Entropy in psychology is FORGETTING , it is loss of consciousness: it is when we forget who we are and wrongly identify ourselves with a false (or game-playing) self. Being one of the boys replaces our innate uniquness. The reverse of entropy is consciousness, or ‘self-remembering’ – which is when we see through the game and remember what we forgot. Esoteric psychology has long acknowledged this principle of Self-forgetting, which lies behind so much of what we do. When we do not acknowledge this principle, then everything we do tends to become part of the on-going endeavour to avoid the truth, and even love itself ends up as a means of forgetting. Love ought to wake us up, but it slides over imperceptibly into sentimentality, attachment and pain.
FORGETTING ALLOWS LIES TO LIVE and stalls invention and discovery..........I am using novelty in a way that is not entertainmnt. We can entertain ourselves to death but novelty in the way I mean is a much bigger paradigm shaking event and thinking process. I have seen glimpses of novelty in MOAB over the years while it is mostly absent in the rest of threads here. (Certain bright members excluded)

Yet, this pre-occupation with ‘game’ rules (for this is what evolutionary psychology comes down to) is a manifestation of a curious and unacknowledged one-sidedness. Physics, as we all know, is a search for fundamental laws, laws that apply across the board, laws that are intrinsic to the nature of the universe itself. Why do we assume that there are no such equivalent laws to be found in psychology? Contemporary psychology thinks only in terms of extrinsic laws, - rules that are arbitrarily imposed. One reason that immediately comes to mind is that we do not see mind / consciousness as being fundamental in the same way that we see matter as being. We are, as professor of physics Amit Goswami (1993) says, as confirmed material realists – we believe that only matter is real. BULLSHIT without the Higgs there is no matter/masss. The truth of the matter (pun intended) is that we have chosen to go down this road a long time ago, and we certainly aren’t showing any signs of wanting to question that choice now. Our predisposition to see the universe we live in this way leads to some rather peculiar, if not down-right contradictory conclusions, however. The inevitable conclusion of material realism is that the only meaning to be found in life is that meaning which is conditioned by natural selection, i.e. we only find stuff meaningful because it suits the game of ‘survival of the fittest’ that we do. Philosophically, this is the same as saying that, in the final analysis, everything is meaningless, which is in keeping with the important Western tradition of philosophical pessimism. The problem with this conclusion has been pointed out quite often, however: if everything is meaningless, then so too is our assertion that ‘everything is meaningless’ meaningless; it is a null-statement. We think that when we make this statement we are saying something meaningful, but if that meaningfulness is ‘meaningful’ only because of the way in which the arbitrary rules of natural selection have caused our brains to be designed, then it is not meaningful at all, in any real sense of the word. If such is the case, then it is inescapable that anything we say must be tautological, i.e. incapable of referring to anything outside itself. This notion of ‘tautological meaning’ is, as we shall shortly see, central to our understanding of psychological entropy. Extremofiles to humans beings are not extrmeophiles to Nature. Even the Overlords of antiquity are extremophiles compared to us. The thing is that the O's are now dumbed down and are suffering from a condition I call PSYCHOLOGICAL ENTROPY.

Jung, writing in the first half of the twentieth century, had no recourse to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and had to apply classical thermodynamic theory to the dynamic, self-organizing system of the psyche, which it is not able to model. He did the best he could, Capra argues, with the limited understanding that was available. Science has moved on along with psychology.

There are people smarter than us and the opposite. I am in good company when I say there are extraterrestrial intellegences that exceed our own who also can not see the whole of reality.
We have seen how science shapes society in good nd bad ways. In the 20th century 'survival of the fittest' caused much fascist harm. Now the Higgs can do some unifying good in society.
We should move beyond Carl Jung since science has moved beyond where we were. Abraham Maslow’s assertion that neurosis is, at root, the rejection of novelty, i.e. the unknown. This would mean that ‘laziness’ (in Scott Peck’s particular usage of the word) corresponds to neurosis, or ‘sticking to the known’. Within the mainstream of contemporary psychological thinking, however, there is no place for concepts such as mental entropy as a result we are in the curious position of trying to describe mental functioning without admitting the existence of any law of energetics and special senses.This makes us EXCEPTIONALLY prone to lies. Rather than looking into the possibility that the psychic domain may be subject to universal laws in the same way that the physical domain is subject to, say, the law of gravitation (be it emergent or fundamental), it seems that we want to see everything that goes on in the mind as being due to conditioned laws only. Conditioned laws are rules that are arbitrarily set up, much like the law that prohibits driving a car when under the influence of alcohol; Thhe law can save lives so that we can survive and reproduce as successfully as possible. Both biological drives and ‘environmental selection on the basis of reproductive performance’ come down to evolution in the end of course, and it is evolutionary psychology that makes the major claim on our attention at the present moment. That this is generally considered to be ‘the way to go’ is clearly demonstrated by our interest in such endeavours as the Human Genome Project, and the popularity of academics such as Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, who have (separately) articulated the principles of evolutionary psychology in a number of high profile books.
The loss of novelty in humans is an entropy that has serious aspects of pschological Entropy as it applies to Society and the smartest and dumbest of us who never learned to think in the first place.
Or simply put it seems some of us are forgetting to defend ouselves
against the dark art of lies.

Qui bono? The criminals, thats who.