On the matter of anti-science and anti-rational, you raise an important point, Harold. Any theoretical edifice that does not have a compelling axiomatic framework to guide it is just scientism masquerading as science. An axiomatic framework is essential… like a corporation’s mission statement, it relates to strategy, and properly accounting for cause and effect. We know that Darwinism is not up to the task, for example, because it does not properly factor in the implications of entropy and the persistence of complexity across time. Natural selection relying on mutations, as the epitome of the dumb-luck hypothesis, is a joke. The whole infotech narrative on which genocentrism relies, in all its absurd inconsistencies, is a joke. I mean, genetic “data” (software) but no account of the “computer” that might “process” it? How anti-science is that? Neo-Darwinism is secular woo on steroids, lurching between ignorance and absurdity. A bucket of arbitrary facts and observations does not a science make. It is scientism that is anti-scientific… a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo authorized in the spirit of credentialism. We witness its abysmal failure in the breakdown of the peer-review process**. Of course the priests of scientism will be reflexively hostile to any encroachment on their dogma. It has been this way throughout history, whenever the most parochial religions encountered threats to their cherished beliefs.
** Horton, R. (2015, April 11). Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma? The Lancet, Vol 385. Retrieved July 20, 2015, from <http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1.pdf> http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1.pdf Binswanger, M. (2014). Excellence by Nonsense: The Competition for Publications in Modern Science (S. Bartling & S. Friesike, Eds.). Retrieved July 18, 2015, from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_3/fulltext.html Springer Link, Opening Science From: Harold Orbach [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, 25 July 2016 8:30 AM To: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: [Sadhu Sanga] How to judge what is pseudoscience? Steven Jarosek confuses BF Skinner with JB Watson but also misrepresents Watson: Skinner did not use rats but pigeons and human subjects, his own children in his famous Skinner nox. Watson did his PhD with the white rat, but at Chicago used a large variety of animals for ethnographic observations and at Johns Hopkins is most famous for his experiments with infants, e.g., the Little Hans experiment. After leaving Hopkins because of his affair with his assistant, later his wife, he went into the advertising field where he revolutionized the way grocery stores were organized, using open shelves and checkout counter displays of small items to encourage impulse buying. He also revolutionized radio and in turn modern TV advertising by using loud, jarring and speeded up voice tracks to get listener's attention and capture their impulses to respond. That is, he "experimented" on vast human subject populations. I find this whole line of religious spiritual anti-scientific and anti- rational propagandizing to be inconsistent with exploring Peirce's work and views or attempting to criticize and modify them. In the process, Peirce as a human with faults and follies is ignored as is his relation to contemporary pragmatism. Harold L. Orbach Emeritus, Kansas State University PhD, University of Minnesota Sent from my iPhone On Jun 22, 2016, at 10:52 AM, Stephen Jarosek <[email protected]> wrote: There was a time when homely grandmothers fussing over their pets were more in touch with principles of consciousness than scientists in labcoats, back in the days of Pavlov or BF Skinner, performing experiments on dogs and rats. One understood the sentient nature of other non-human creatures better than the other, even though the former were routinely disparaged with charges of anthropomorphism. The irony… anthropomorphism pitted against anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism relates to the materialist, infotech anthropocentrism portraying humans as the most special products of Darwinian evolution, that most complex, most perfect and intelligent of all of dumb luck’s creation. I think that homely grandmothers, by far, held the more realistic interpretation. Indeed, as much as I am a staunch critic of feminism, I must admit that the single one thing that I am grateful to feminists for is how they’ve opened up the narrative on consciousness (e.g., Dian Fossey and her work with primates). If it wasn’t for feminists, we’d still be stuck in BF Skinner… it almost hurts me to have to acknowledge this, but hey… let’s give recognition where it is due. It seems almost paradoxical that those who are least “scientific” can sometimes hold a more accurate representation of the nature of things than those who wear their labcoats like a badge of authority. Cheers, sj From: 'Serge Patlavskiy' via Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, 21 June 2016 10:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Sadhu Sanga] How to judge what is pseudoscience? >Consciousness is not something science cannot deal with, but the bedrock of >all science. There is a difference between consciousness as a tool of study and consciousness as an object of study. Science can deal with consciousness as a tool of study since every scientist possesses consciousness -- it is the activity of consciousness that results in such or other (to a certain extent adequate) model of the world. In this sense consciousness can be called "the bedrock of all science", as well as the bedrock of any cognitive activity too. But, from the above does not follow that Science can deal with consciousness as an object of study. To study consciousness we need to take into account the agency of informational factor which is ignored by current Science while studying (ordinary) physical phenomena. So, to study consciousness we need to elaborate and apply very special methods and models which correspond the nature of our object of study. Pseudoscience emerges every time we try to apply inappropriate methods and models. So, the Physics of consciousness is an example of pseudoscience. Best, Serge Patlavskiy _____ From: "Edwards, Jonathan" <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2016 10:08 AM Subject: Re: [Sadhu Sanga] How to judge what is pseudoscience? On 21 Jun 2016, at 04:32, [email protected] wrote: The concepts and propositions get “meaning,” viz., “content,” only through their connection with sense-experiences. Dear Robert, Thanks for the first enlightening post I have seen in weeks. Your quotes from Einstein make me realise that at least in is last years he, like other builders of physics before him, realised that there is no such thing as science divorced from consciousness or experience. Consciousness is not something science cannot deal with, but the bedrock of all science. What we cannot deal with is, as he says, the logical or mathematical rules of the proximal correspondence between dynamics and experience, so we have to make use of intuitions and spend most of our time looking at the distal logical connections in the dynamics. But what I would like to read up on, from your URL, is Einstein’s apparent problem with reconciling a field-based theory with individual entities. At the moment I do not see why there is a problem, as long as one thinks purely in dynamic terms. Individual entities become a problem if they are to be ‘things’ but if they are events that follow continuous dynamic laws of relation then I see no problem with fields. I suspect the problem arises only if people want entities to have a fixed size and shape - what Leibniz called extension and figure. But QFT does not require that. It merely requires that interactions between events have locations and even those are defined as most probable locations. My main interest is in Leibniz and I have a suspicion that his model resolves the issue very satisfactorily. It invokes some rather counterintuitive premises about reality, but my impression is that these are going to be necessary for a coherent model anyway. I will look at you site. Best wishes Jo -- --
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