Real scholarship which requires constant learning it would be better the eject all forms of hidden agenda and preconception.
Nothing wrong in any agenda driven approach but then it dents the thought process, dictates frames of reference, designs the perception and delves more on the outcome rather than the developing an outlook based on unbiased observation and broad perspective.
This type of approach devoid of or away from one's entrenched and often internalised preferences, perspectives and prejudices is difficult.
However, if we can manage such an approach it will pleasantly surprise us with an ability to grasp even subjects of which we may have hardly any prior knowledge.
This approach may produce scholars with humility and compassion rather than mere academic experts.
The first few steps of scholarly approaches are childlike curiosity, unbiased observation, extended reflection, perusing whether what is observed can be empirically tested, safely adopted and meaningfully used with optimum user-friendly application to enhance life in as many of its aspects for as many human beings as possible without harming other species to the maximum extent possible.
Once these preliminary steps are followed and then during extended reflection one can calmly evaluate the contextual relevance of or utility of whatever is observed and steadily study the concepts and philosophies that offer synergy with what one has observed.
Then there emerges a real scholar or scholarly writer who is one humble, curious and unbiased observer of synergy and synthesis, either occurring as an aspect of evolution or consciously effected through a culture of compassion, that enable to understand better the inter connectivity, interrelatedness and interdependence of life as a whole. POSTED BY BALAYOGI AT 2:05 AM
Poetry as Socio-proctology: Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom https://t.co/fcvWPvfQDS
Political freedom, however, does not correlate to Economic freedom. This is because politics involves a lot of virtue signalling and preference falsification and fake news.
Mathematical Economists were stupid because they thought Markets work by Magic. However Sen is being even stupider by saying that before we do Mathematical Econ we must first acknowledge something silly.
Markets work coz contracts are enforced, scamsters are punished, the medium of exchange is also a good store of value and unit of account etc, etc. All this stuff uses up scarce resources. It costs a lot of money. Development means more resources are available to do this stuff. Sen believes otherwise. He thinks Markets only work coz everybody first got together and had a long debate at the end of which they decided that people should acknowledge that they ought to be free to exchange.. words.
Smith was a shrewd Scotsman who saw with his own eyes that the enormous amount of money the English had invested in creating a legal system supportive of the Market was the reason it was ahead of his native land. The Scots got busy developing even better institutions which they paid for out of their taxes.
In other words, Sen's shite assumes Markets cost nothing to run and that there is Perfect Information, no Uncertainty, no Market Failure and so forth. If life evolved by natural selection, then Sen's work is worthless. If not, his oeuvre is the joke of an Occassionalist God.
Seeing any x as some y is always a silly thing to do. However, if you've fucked up big time, you may try to justify yourself by saying 'I saw your hat as a toilet. That is why I shat in it.
There is no necessary connection between Development and Freedom. On the contrary, poor agricultural nations which have become more Developed have only done so by reducing 'real freedoms that ordinary people enjoy'. Rich people may gain more freedoms but poor people are likely to have less freedom as a result of any process of Development.
Freedom is essentially subjective and ontologically dysphoric. It neccessarily features antagonomic preferences. Focusing on it is silly.
One reason why Development matters is because it increases the possibility of Exit for a widening class of people. Thus, Indians use the fruits of growth to relocate to places where the rights of cows and communists are curtailed.
Poetry as Socio-proctology: Chomsky & Berwick's 'Siege of Paris'. https://t.co/12DWUbqXzA
There is no 'Only' in Science. Philosophy may have its haecceity which only a particular individual instantiates, but philosophy is a waste of time.
'Us' is a dangerous word. It leads an in-group to conclude that its own particular shibboleths are universal features of all existence. Chomsky & Berwick represent failed research programs. They speak of 'Us' as if they are part of successful, or not yet failed, programs. This is delusional simply.
[They are precisely the appropriate ones to ask regarding the evolutionary origin of language.]
Nonsense. If language evolved, then it must be the case that it evolved on all planets similar to ours. The correct question to ask is 'why on planets with the following characteristics does language evolve?'
[We were not, of course, the first to ask them. We echo in modern terms the Cartesian philosophers Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, seventeenth-century authors of the Port-Royal Grammar, for whom language with its infinite combinatorial capacity wrought from a finite inventory of sounds was uniquely human and the very foundation of thought.]
These guys were Christians. Christianity believes that Adam gave names to things and then ate an apple and then was chucked out of Heaven and had to get a job and then some of his descendants decided to build a big tower to get to Heaven and then God smote them and confused their tongues.
Combinatorics was well advanced in ancient India as was linguistics. As an empirical matter, Indians saw that one could translate Religious texts into any language. The Christian West made a like discovery when it sent out missionaries to diverse lands.
However, it is not true that combining phonemes can allow us 'to express all that we can conceive' which is why we need maths and music and Art and making rude gestures.
Poetry as Socio-proctology: Gopal Guru's cure for Untouchability. https://t.co/CvLA5J0eup
Poetry as Socio-proctology: Prof. Sarukkai, Dr. Ambedkar, and the ethics of to... https://t.co/t9Aj5VLgdf
Poetry as Socio-proctology: Aakash Singh Rathore's double-bind https://t.co/VFtuyB9MJh
The Next Big Thing
M Bussey - 2019
… A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes Its smallest parts are here
philosophies Challenging with their detailed immensity Each figuring anomniscient scheme of things But higher still can climb the ascending light …
...
hi Ganesh,
thank you for making this point and raising this question. Indeed how could it be otherwise? And yet this is precisely the problem that modern science completely ignored.It was almost like a magic trick. The idea was that we could assume that all of the conditions for existence are uniform and fixed. If so then everything we write in science could simply assume some original existence.
Then science became a study of what things do assuming they exist. But everything that is interesting about the living and conscious world has to do with origins of existence; completely left out of modern science thought. And while post modern science was forced to consider such a variation or system dependency or formal dependency it was considered exceptional or unique to the quantum world.
The causality you are alluding to is properly referred to as formal cause in Aristotle‘s repetition of an ancient four-cause framework. The closest that contemporary scientists come to recognizing it and say I am considering boundary conditions on a dynamical system. Boundry conditions act like regulators on the natural laws of dynamics that might otherwise be formulated in a general law context. So in that sense the boundary conditions are modifying the general laws. For example whether an organism can live or not is decided by its ecological niche conditions. Obviously if it does not live none of its dynamical laws can be expressed. But more than that such contextual creations exist within the living organism and especially where its information processes have evolved into complex organs such as a brain/mind system.
As a result of this modernist myopia we have tried all kinds of ways to simulate formal cause variation with efficient causes, and that just won’t work.Before causes our compliments and cannot be conflated but they can be related. So I argued strongly for a new look at scientific causality.
John
John Jay Kineman
25 Feb 2019
Dear Dr. Puri,
> BMP: If we look out at Nature we see specific body plans that characterize the different species of life from cells, to plants, insects, animals and humans. It is not an haphazard variety of all kinds of organisms. There is a specific number of organisms, even if scientists have not counted them all. We might even say a fixed number, because we do not see new species arising in Nature although we think they evolved consecutively based on fossils in the geological column [disputed by all but the most ardent Darwinians].
"Most ardent Darwinian" is like "most ardent heliocentrist" or "most ardent denier of phlogiston". It is a meaningless, useless phrase! It is only a wording that shows you have, with all due respect, no idea what you're talking about. I'm not saying this to cut this discussion short; I'm ready to discuss any of the points I raise below, and more. I'm saying it because it's so glaring to me as a biologist.
You will hardly be able to find _any_ biologist who disputes that we are, in fact, seeing new species arising in nature – and that this is the very reason why the term "species" is so hard to define! Are carrion crows and hooded crows one species or two? Are wolves, red wolves and coyotes one species, two, or three? Or indeed more, given the diversity of wolves? Is the London Underground mosquito a species of its own, just 100 years old? In 1971, a lizard species was experimentally introduced to a little island in the Adriatic Sea; by 2007 the new population had become significantly more herbivorous, complete with changes to gut anatomy, head shape and bite strength – is that a new species? Why or why not? The paper on the lizards is here https://www.pnas.org/content/105/12/4792.full , I've attached the pdf.
For most branches of the tree of life we have no fossils whatsoever. Fossils are important when we have them, but they're only one part of the evidence. Other parts are the anatomy of living organisms today, and their DNA.
> But let us look at what Nature itself tells us about the species of life it presents to us. There is a fixed number that does seem to decrease but not increase. They are specific forms that seem to be based on some type of blueprint that is remarkably consistent for all specimens within a species over a long period of time, some millions and even billions of years.
You will sometimes find claims that, for instance, "sharks have hardly changed in 400 million years" or "lobefins have hardly changed in 400 million years" or "crocodiles have hardly changed in 200 million years". All such claims are very, very superficial. All these groups have interesting, complicated histories of externally visible change, and the DNA of lobefins actually changes rather fast compared to that of other animals of their size and habitat.
> Just as we accept laws of physical nature, there may also be laws governing biological forms that we may not be aware of as yet.
For a long time (say, 1860s to 1950s), many biologists tried to find such laws (and to explain them from the laws of physics). The proposed laws have all either turned out to be completely wrong, or to be just general tendencies with lots of exceptions.
> The thought or idea 'tiger' as a species or kind is universal, whereas the tiger you meet in the jungle is a particular specimen. If the universal changes, the particulars will also. Whereas if the particular changes, which regularly happens, it does not change the universal.
There is no universal here. Species or any other groupings of organisms cannot be understood – and not for lack of trying! – as an abstract value, "the real thing", surrounded by a scattering of "deviations" from this "type". The diversity we observe _is the real thing_. This is Darwin's greatest insight.
Over time, this diversity can shift to another place, far enough to leave no overlap with the earlier place; it can also split, and for some time afterwards it can also merge again.
david marjanovic
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