@Thanatos Sand OK, so please explain how you propose nature 'did it'. Little atoms joined together into little cells that are operating according to some biological program spontaneously changed what they were normally doing, and said 'Hey, legs would be useful, and we can construct them just so.'?

That's a fallacious question that presumes I have to explain how Nature did something to correctly claim it did it. I don't and neither does anybody else. Using your flawed logic, someone would have to know how genetics works to be able to say reproduction is natural. They don't.

The Aztecs couldn't explain eclipses. I guess they weren't natural either.

Kuhn never said scientific knowledge didn't progress. You need to read his book again if you ever read it a first time.
— Thanatos Sand

What did he say about it then? Care to offer a correction?

As far as I know he said that science doesn't progress toward certainty because each time we have a revolutionary change we just exchange one uncertain paradigm for another.

He said that while there is progress, it isn't just determined by the truths of scientific practices and scientific observations, as some had claimed, but was also influenced by shifts in modes/practices (paradigms) that were also determined by human bias and flawed power systems and ideologies. He did not deny scientific progress itself.

↪Thanatos Sand How are they very different? Can you offer some definitions?

You would agree then, there are evident genetic differences between ethnic groups?

There are three human-constructed races: Mongolid, Negroid, and Caucasoid. There are no genetic differences/separators between these races. There are many ethnic groups within each race; they do have genetic differences between them.

They're different ethnic groups, different "racial" groups... If you want call them different sub-groups of the same race go ahead but you're blatantly obfuscating my point...

Sorry, different ethnic groups are a very different thing from different races. So, I didn't obfuscate your point, it was already self-obfuscated. You really need to educate yourself on this stuff; you're a bit lost here.

I think that racial categories are much more complex than just "black/white/asian/etc...". For instance, the Pygmy people are ethnically different from the Bantu people and the results of those genetic differences are stark and undeniable. Do you deny that there is an observable difference between the average characteristics of the Pygmy and Bantu people which stems from differences in their average genetic makeup?

You erroneously said there are genetic differences between the races. The Pygmies and Bantus are not different races. So, what you wrote doesn't support your claim at all.

Thomas Khun's theory that scientific knowledge does not progress, that it instead just shifts from one arbitrary paradigm to another without ever making any objective gains.

Kuhn never said scientific knowledge didn't progress. You need to read his book again if you ever read it a first time.

Genetic differences between individuals can loosely be approximated by comparing their shared genetic markers (all races share mostly the same genetic markers) but more importantly by comparing the prevalence of individual genetic markers within a given individual. For instance if we imagine that some "height genetic marker" exists, and we look at two individuals, the shorter individual will have fewer instances of that specific genetic marker repeated in their genome overall, and the taller individual will have more instances of that specific genetic marker.

The one who isn't informed enough is clearly you, since these differences can occur between two different people of the same race. Try not making "arguments" that undermine your already erroneous ones.

So if we look at larger groups, what we might do is take the mean prevalence of a certain genetic marker and compare it to the mean prevalence of that genetic marker in another group.

If we compared say, the mean "height gene prevalence" of the Bantu people (very tall) with the mean prevalence of that same gene in the Pygmy people (very short), guess what we would see? A massive difference (if indeed we've identified an actual "height gene").

And you undermine yourself again since Bantu and Pygmy arent' separate races. You should try to support your erroneous argument, not unintentionally refute it.

The reason why certain groups of people share characteristics is because their genes are clustered around the same average, and if that average is very different from that of another group, then overall there can be noticeable differences in the average characteristics of those people. The reality of gene marker prevalence is what makes traits heritable while also having a chance to be pronounced with variable degrees of strength (some offspring may get more repetitions of a specific genetic marker, others might get less, but it will cluster around the same average)

None of this supports your erroneous notion of genetic differences between the races. It's almost entirely irrelevant to anything that could support that.

Saying there are no genetic differences between races is like saying there are no genetic differences between individuals...

No, as you've helped show above, saying there are no genetic differences between races is a true statement. Saying there are no differences between individuals is ridiculous. I'm surprised you didn't say it above.

On the other end of the spectrum, everyone is so afraid that if we discover genetic differences between races it would lead to racism that to even broach the topic might be taken as offensive, likely made more paranoid by the growing movement of race realists obsessed with IQ test scores.

There are no genetic differences between the races.

The post-modern dogma which surrounds science isn't so unique in my view.

There is no post-modern dogma concerning science. To what post-modern thinkers and which of their theories are you referring?

There must be some creative intelligence at work when it comes to positive adaptation.

No, there musn't. Tha'ts religious talk.

If not, how would you explain a centipede developing multiple virtually identical legs at the same time? It is hard to imagine that it developed one stump first by accident, that allowed it to thrive compared to other members of its family...

Nature has more than shown it's a very potent and creative creator in the existence of the universe, it's many wondrous phenomena, and all the different life forms--including humans'--on Earth. So, the development of legs on a centipede shouldn't make you doubt Nature did it without any divine intelligence.

So to come back to BC's quote at the top, one must surely want to say that there are facts of human nature if only that they are social constructers that are not, or not entirely social constructs. And at the same time, one has to accept that whether a Jew or a Negro is fully human is a matter of constructive dogma. Have the postmoderns won, or is there still a use for the scientific view? Is it worth trying to disentangle the construct from the concrete?

Saying there are facts of human nature doesnt' change the fact that many of those facts are constructed by human choice of classification and that our views and notions of those facts are always mitigated by the human constructs of language, culture, and society.

As to races, they are a separate human construct even from the human construct of biological and anthropological classification as humans are not scientifically classified by the color of the skin or width or breadth of their eyes. So, to say the races arent different, is not only recognizing human constructs in the classification of the races, it is respecting the materially-supported "constructs" of Science, Biology, and Anthropology that reject the notion that racial classification is actually scientific..

Strap Tasmaner--See, this is the sort of thing that makes sense if you want to do literary history or cultural history as a science. From my point of view, reading Don Juan is about as different an experience as you could hope to have from the experience of reading The Prelude. From that point of view, lumping together Wordsworth and Byron is bizarre. That's not a critique of your approach; it is a statement that my purposes in reading and discussing poetry are different.

No, It makes sense if you know literary history well; you clearly don't. There's nothing scientific about it. To reject Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake as Romantic poets makes as little sense as rejecting Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis as Jazz musicians. In other words it makes no sense.

For your purposes, everything you said may make sense. I have no doubt that it makes sense to someone like Jameson. But I am not interested in doing literary history or criticism as a science. That's why I'm not rebutting each and every one of your points. I'm not doing science. I explained my historically based usage of the term "postmodernist" and it is avowedly unscientific, but it provides, I think, a complete explanation of why I don't apply the term the way you do.

Again, I'm not doing literary history/criticism as science, and you haven't shown I have. You, however are doing it as bad science, as you take an incomplete notion of the term "Postmodernist' and incorrectly apply it as if it were true. And you haven't rebutted any of my points, and you haven't even addressed my field-supported reasons for including my novels in my list. So, since you are not engaging that, I won't be reading or responding to any more of your posts on the matter. And you only gave a complete explanation of your misuse of the term "Postmodernist." That was pointless. You don't just not apply the term the way I do; you apply it incorrectly and ignorantly of the term's aesthetics and history.

My usage has a certain provenance. Pre-Jameson & friends it was the standard way to use the word. It may not work in your circles, but you're not claiming some sort of "ownership" of the word, are you?

Your usage has no provenance as Jameson was the first scholar to establish Postmodernism as a genre. Your ignorance of the field and the term "Postmodernism's" history is showing again. And "my circle" is the academic English field and the field of Modernist and Postmodern lit scholars, of which I am one. That has much more provenance than what your circles think.

Btw, do you really think Barthes couldn't have given Hawthorne a postmodernist reading if he had wanted to? I'm betting he could have. Guy was a magician.

Again your ignorance of the term "Postmodern" and what it means shows. We're not discussing the reading of the literature but the literature itself. So, whether or not Barthes could give a text a "postmodern reading," whatever that may be, is irrelevant.

P.S.: It is not a good habit to assume that the people disagreeing with you just don't know what they're talking about, haven't heard of or haven't read certain authors, etc. Sometimes people might just disagree with you.

P.S., it's a good habit not to correct someone who clearly knows more than you about the subject, and the only one who showed you don't know what you are talking about is you. Maybe you should stop showing that and show some humility in a field in which you are not well-versed. So, as I said, we are done. If you are not even going to address my reasons for including my texts, our discussion is pointless.

Have a good one.

↪Thanatos Sand
Btw, have you read D. H. Lawrence's book about American literature? He describes Poe in terms that would strike the contemporary ear as "deconstruction." Might be up your street.

I haven't, but Poe is definitely at the Postmodern spectrum of High Modernism, particularly with his emphasis on the irrational uncanny, preventing the return to the autonomy of the self High Modernism likes but Postmodernism abhors. The fact both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida have written famous essays on his "The Purloined Letter" affirms that connection.

corrected post

You seem to have taken what I said as a claim to know for a fact that, for instance, Phil Dick is not a postmodernist writer, rather than an expression of my opinion that he is not.

But not Dick,

You literally said "but not Dick." You did not say "possibly" not Dick or "it's my opinion it's not Dick." So, either avoid making such affirmative corrections or don't deny making them when you do.

Given a precise definition of "postmodernist," I suppose it could be a fact that Dick either is or isn't a postmodernist. By and large literary criticism does not achieve this level of precision. For example, it has never seemed to me that Blake and Wordsworth and Keats and Byron have all that much in common. I don't particularly care if someone wants to call them all "Romantics," but I remain largely skeptical of "schools" of art except where a group of artists are demonstrably self-conscious about it (as with the Surrealists, say). Even then, differences regularly overwhelm similarities.

This paragraph is entirely disingenuous of you since you initially corrected my list and even called it "really strange." If you didn't think there was a somewhat stable definition of "Postmodernist," you wouldn't have done so. And Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron have a lot in common since they all focus on Poetry of the self, hence they are Romantic like the Medieval Romantic tales. And you know very well that genres like "Romantic" and Postmodern are no different than "Blues" or "Punk" or "Science Fiction: while they have malleable, not entirely definable borders, they do have accepted and recognizable ones. So, one can say PKDick is Postmodern while Nathaniel Hawthorne is not.

So you are working with a definition of "postmodernist" broad enough to encompass these diverse writers, and given this definition and your method of applying it, it is a fact that the authors you mention are postmodernists. If I could be compelled to embrace this definition and the method of applying it, then I would be compelled to accept it as a fact that Phil Dick was a postmodernist. We would be doing literary history as science.

You clearly read my post poorly. My definition isn't broad, it's just better informed than yours. And I made It clear that I wasn't the only one considering these authors to be Postmodern, scholars as noted as Jameson, Bloom, and McHale did so, too. I'm sorry you've never heard of them. And I never said anything about clear "facts." You don't speak about clear facts with genres, but you can make solid arguments for the inclusions of works in them as I did. You can't say it's a fact Frankenstein is Science Fiction, but many, including myself, make solid arguments for it being such. I did the same with my novels in the Postmodern genre. You have yet to counter that.

But part of the point of any science is what it cares about and what it doesn't. If you're doing orbital mechanics, the color of the bodies involved is irrelevant. If you want to select particular features and ignore others, you can of course classify authors however you like, and those classifications are objectively right or wrong, relative to the criteria of classification. What do you choose to ignore about a writer's work? Not only is there room for debate on what to count and what to ignore in a given artist's work, it is clearly acceptable to ignore nothing at all, and forego doing science here at all.]

This paragraph doesn't address anything I said, so it's irrelevant to the discussion. It's amazing how you have failed to address my reasons for including my texts in the Postmodern genre at all. Considering that is the subject of the discussion, you really should.

I don't have any such science. I think of certain authors as postmodernists, and have some rough and ready reasons for doing so: there was a cohort of authors coming up in the late fifties and sixties who began taking the conventions of fiction as something they could play with within their works of fiction. They produced fiction that was noticeably odd by the usual standards. I call those guys "postmodernists," not least because John Barth did, and because some of them were self-conscious about it. It's also the point in history when most writers become academics.

I'm sorry, but your definition is incomplete as Postmodern is used in the field. You correctly address the temporal part of a certain class of Postmodern writers, but you completely ignore Postmodernism's aesthetic aspects as defined by such notable scholars as Fredric Jameson, Harold Bloom, Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, and Roland Barthes. Postmodernism is a strain of Modernism, so it shares and builds off of many of its aesthetics. To ignore or reject that aesthetic component of Postmodernism as you have done is failing to recognize Postmodernism.

I don't see Phil Dick doing anything remotely like that, despite being a contemporary, so I don't think of him as a postmodernist.

And my initial response to you and my passage above shows why that's a mistake.

To this end, Groundhog Day has probably done more to advance philosophical thinking than most (if not all ) post-modernist philosophers for the reasons I've stated.

This statement only has value if you identify which Postmodern philosophers, and which of their works, you have read.

That's a really strange list. DeLillo and Pynchon, sure. But not Dick, Faulkner, Gibson, McCarthy, or O'Connor. (Roth and Morrison I haven't read.)

Calvino's the other obvious choice. Maybe Vonnegut? Maybe John Barth. Maybe DFW?

I don't know if you're going to regret this, but you just made an erroneous correction of my correct claim giving no aesthetic or literary foundation to justify it. Not only that, you took an erroneous shot at it by calling it "really strange" without explaining that. That's not polite discourse.

Dick's Borgesian work is considered by traditional scholars from Bloom to Jameson as Postmodern in its refusal to congeal or finalize its realities like the early Postmodern author Borges, and Ubik is a paragon of Late Capitalist criticism so relevant to Jameson's definition of Postmodern fiction. Gibson is the Shakespeare of Cyberpunk, as Postmodern/Deleuzian a genre that is out there, deconstructing notions of human and mechanized existence. Brian McHale, in his seminal, Postmodern Fiction, identifies Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom as the beginning of Postmodern narrative fiction where the intertextual narrative itself deconstructs ontology and epistemology, undoing the stability of the former often found in Postmodernism. The same dynamics are found in both McCarthy's The Crossing and Morrison's Beloved, not surprising, since both authors are very Faulknerian. O'Connor's work represents the embracing of chaotic spirituality in Modernist fiction, a Postmodern quality moving away from HIgh Modern deep skepticism of relgion, as seen in Postmodern texts like Roth's The Counterlife, Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and the films Blade Runner and The Proposition.

Barth is definitely a "High" Postmodern author, Vonnegut is a PKDick & Pynchon copying hack.

↪Thanatos Sand The biggest problem I find with your ideas and posts are that they are just boring. They add nothing, they create nothing, the inspire nothing. They are literally empty

Ah...and finally the banal, ambiguous, and nebulous personal attacks. Considering the "quality" of the ideas you do like, I consider your disdain for mine a compliment and a comfort.

Yes, we can see The Book of Rich says quantum vibrations are the mind. Too bad your link doesn't say that.

Keep trying.

No, it being the best way of explaining that view of science wasnt' proven in that link. Sorry.

And you have no brand of science; just lovely fantasies from the Book of Rich.

Sorry, that's the Book of Rich speaking again. Too bad it's far from a best seller.

You talk to Penrose; my post was addressed to your arguments, not his. And I have no idea if I agree with him on his notion of "swampy" when I don't even know what he means by that.

The point is that pretty much everyone agrees that materialization is swampy.

Oh boy. You're speaking from the Book of Rich again. Not only does not everyone agree that materialization is "swampy," but not everyone even knows what (or agrees on) what swampy means.

Now, if you have problem with this, then you can keep trying to keep the myth of materialism alive on philosophy forums, but it is pretty much dead on all physics forums.

The only one who has been trying to keep a myth alive on this forum has been your trying to keep your myth of "all is quanta" alive. It should and would be dead if you didn't keep repeating it like a mantra.

The total nonsense of everything magically popping out of the brain including the illusions that it is not popping out of the brain. Such silliness is the best that modern philosophy can propose? No wonder it is considered irrelevant.

The only one who has mentioned the nonsense of everything magically popping out of the brain has been you right there. And your silly "all is quanta" mantra nearly replicates that. No wonder it is considered greatly silly.

LOL. It wasn't just an opinion or a request; it was a statement that how we've been debating has been wrong and how we need to change it. So, your statement was rooted in selfishness:

It is fascinating to see how this has sparked an argument. but an argument is there to proof one right other wrong. and such in not the topic we are going for.

Your telling everyone they need to debate the way you want them to is an argument rooted in selfishness.

No, Postmodernism also describes an artistic aesthetic that includes Frank Gehry in architecture, John Cage in music, the films of Charlie Kaufman, and (in literature) a more unresolved, ontologically-emphasized form of writing that includes works by:

Philip K. Dick
William Faulkner
Don DeLillo
Phillip Roth
Toni Morrison
William Gibson
Thomas Pynchon
Cormac McCarthy
Flannery O'Connor

and others.

Bold is for demarcation. You know that, but you troll anyway.

Of course it doesn't, nor am I saying it did. I think that Rich has a point, but that Rich doesn't appreciate how radical the statement 'no subject, no object' is

.

The problem is you keep saying Rich has a point, but you don't specify what that "point" is, and the point he's been largely and avidly making is the erroneous and unfounded one that "all is quanta."

People are, by and large, instinctive realists. They believe that the world of the senses, and the world described by science, is the real world. It is very hard to see it otherwise.

That is true, but Science's descriptions of the world are certainly not to be unfoundedly rejected and saying that "all isn't quanta" doesn't mark one as a instinctive realist.

↪Thanatos Sand Entanglement (non-locality) and other quantum effects has now been demonstrated for protons. The Schrodinger Cat puzzle demonstrates the entanglement of large states and small states. One cannot draw a boundary.

You just supported what I previously wrote about your erroneous notion of "all is quanta":

↪Rich "No, nobody in physics supports your "all is quanta" claim. So the only ones setting physics back 100 years is you and that claim."

No, nobody in physics supports your "all is quanta" claim. So the only ones setting physics back 100 years is you and that claim.

Einstein's asking a rhetorical question about the moon does not prove "all is quanta," and Einstein never said it was.

I agree with all that, man.

Science fiction is a wonderful thing.

I never said you said we should get rid of the word animal; I said you erroneously said we shouldn't use it, as you did in your post here:

Which animal are we supposed to be comparing ourselves with? This has been a classic ploy throughout history, to compare certain types of humans or human behaviour to animals as a justification for assigning a particular status to them. But there is massive diversity among animals.

You haven't shown why we need use the particular word animal at all. It is clearly as I have mentioned a word that is applied selectively for different purposes.

And I have shown why we should use it since I said it was the proper classification just like we have proper classifications of words. So, if you don't want to use the proper scientific classification of "animal' to describe humans, then you'd be a hypocrite to call a shark a "fish" or a dog a "mammal," since they are classifications, too. Since I'm sure you don't want to present yourself as uneducated, I'm sure you'll avoid doing so.

↪Thanatos Sand How do abstractions like "good" or "evil" transcend productivity? Just explain it. I'm always suspicious when people use the word "transcend".

Because good and evil are concerned with more than productivity. If productivity was humanity's only concerns, we would all put some people into slavery and others into extremely low-wage labor with no concern of the "good" or "evil" of it. However, since many of us--if not enough of us--do concern ourselves with being "good" and not "evil," we put aside our sole fixation on productivity for concerns of human dignity, human rights, and the minimalization of suffering. Thus our concerns for "good" and "evil" can transcend issues of productivity.

If you want to get rid of classifications like "animals," you would have to get rid of all the words in our language as well.
— Thanatos Sand

That is not true. We often get rid of words in our languages without having to abandon a whole language. We also keep words that refer to fictional entities.

Of course it's true since you cant' have a language of words without classifications of those words to give them specific functions...such as verbs, adverbs, adjectives. So, if you refute the need for classifications as you did, you refute the need for language; we know that's not a good idea.

In what situation is there an urgent need to describe something as animal?

I never said anything about any urgent need for anything. But we're still animals.

I thought he said we were nothing more than animals.

We are all animals; we just happen to be highly intelligent and advanced ones. If you want to get rid of classifications like "animals," you would have to get rid of all the words in our language as well.

They denote moral and immoral behavior that can be irrelevant to and transcend productivity.
— Thanatos Sand

CAN someone "transcend" the economic system?

That's the second time you straw-manned me. I never said one could transcend production. I said "good" and "evil" denote moral and immoral behavior that can be irrelevant to and transcend productivity, and they can.

They denote moral and immoral behavior that can be irrelevant to and transcend productivity.
— Thanatos Sand

CAN someone "transcend" the economic system?

As you can see, I said transcend "productivity," not transcend the "economic system."

Do you really want to discuss things or are you merely just trolling the forum and trying to argue with anyone that posts something that doesn't agree with you?

The only one who has been trolling is you. I made this polite initial post to you:

"No. "good" and "evil" go beyond productivity. They denote moral and immoral behavior that can be irrelevant to and transcend productivity. For example, it could be argued that it would be productive to force a group of people into slavery for the productive good for the majority, but an ethical notion of good valuing human rights and freedom would call this "evil."

And all you did was respond with a troll-post that failed to address anything I said. So, I responded as politely and relevantly as possible. So, your trolling and our discussion is done. I won't read any more of your posts on this thread.

Your misreading my post and constructing a simplified but incorrect version of the system of morality I'm talking about instead of getting real mental picture of the system I have.

No, I read your post perfectly fine, and the only one constructing a simplified but incorrect (and ahistorical) version of "good" and "evil" is you. Congrats.

The thing you don't even understand is that our "human morality" that we base our societies on today in fact creates thing like wage slaves who often have to work longer and harder than those above them while at the same time they get less wages and benefits than others which I see as unfair (ie because it uses the same double standard used in slavery).

The thing that you don't understand is what you are discussing has nothing to do with the terms "good" and "evil" and the great cultural history behind those terms.

Although we are often taught as children to be kind and respectful of each other, as adults the game we call human morality becomes different where some are still expected to obey, while other merely preach to others how they need to behave while at the same time merely using anyone and everything around them. Or as they say "Do as I say, not as I do", or at least if your in a position where you can get away with it.

This is a fascinating ramble, but it has nothing to do with the terms "good" and "evil" and their history. You need to stay focused...or finally get focused.

While I may be a bit Machiavellian I'm aware that when one thinks of others as merely things and how they can be used, it may hard to perceive them as human after some time and/or if one behaves as such they can no longer really expect to be treated as a human being if it is too obvious they don't respect human life themselves. ]

This is true, but again, we are discussing the terms "good" and "evil," not analyzing why humans behave in certain ways. Again, it lacks focus.