[snarks_when_bored]

Perhaps science is outside its jurisdiction with certain everyday pre scientific phenomena, like our consciousness or creativity. Science can't determine this yet, if it can at all.

I tend to think not. The scientific method is still a baby. Who knows what it will have deciphered a few centuries hence?

...if science does come from the id, do you think that there may be many sciences for different cultures, as there has been a variety of science (Ptolemaic, Newtonian, etc.) for ours?

It's fashionable in some quarters to argue that, say, electrons are 'social constructions', so if some society chooses not to construct electrons it just means that they have a different kind of science and world-view, no worse than our own.

This is arrant nonsense. It troops together with the view that the world view of radical islam is no worse than the world view of democratic pluralism. The inability to judge claims of truth bleeds over (sometimes literally!) into the inability to judge claims of value.

We should resist this post-modernist pestilence.

(Nice to hear from you Blind Eye. I hope your music-making goes well...)

[Knitting A Conundrum]

If people think electrons are social constructions, I beg them to put their finger in a power outlet.

[Blind Eye Jones]

Heidegger said "where words break off no thing may be" -- that beyond signs independent of the speakers, beyond text, narrative, or discourse, there is nothing. And I guess if a bear shits in the forest and there is nobody around to smell it, or write a post modern hermetic text about it or... oh, well, never mind!

"The inability to judge claims of truth bleeds over (sometimes literally!) into the inability to judge claims of value."

Claims of value are not intractable as claims of "good and evil." Values are mushy and imaginative and lead to conflict resolution, whereas "good and evil" lead to war. One problem with Islam is that it doesn't want to become secularized as Christianity and, therefore, is clinging to its dark pristine past. There has been no reformation with Islam, no persons equivalent to a Luther or Calvin, and it abhors the modern secular "evil" world. But in North America the problem has been more with the post modern -- especially the post modern idea of value creation in the shadow of the 'death of God.' One would think that experience alone should lead to the urgent need to discover the "truth," should lead to an exploration of what the past thought about the human condition, rather than stating there is no "truth" and dismissing the past as archaic, racist and sexist. The post modern lens is really obscurant and distorted, reflecting more its viewers own discontent with the present world than anything else. And the university, as the repository of greatness from the past, should be protected from such a skewed morbid perspective. Thankfully, POMO has become institutionalized and things have moved on: I hear the fashionable trend is over and is now mostly a footnote of the past.

"I hope your music-making goes well"

Well, music has great charms and (at the age of 51) I'm playing guitar more that ever. I'm getting into shredding and playing everything I thought extremely difficult. Creation wise, I'm in hibernation mode but I'm looking to create something by the end of spring. I was thinking of an opera about Judas Iscariot (a love triangle involving Mary and Jesus) where Mary falls for Jesus because he loves her "soul." Judas betrays Jesus out of jealousy just to get Mary which, obviously, doesn't work. Judas ends up in Hell but Jesus (according to the Bible) also goes to Hell before ascending to heaven. Jesus died really confused on the cross and Judas helps him out and becomes redeemed... not your Jesus Christ Super Star but a happy ending, nevertheless!

Anything new with you?