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[paulhope]

There's a lot I've been meaning to write about here, but I've been too stressed out to sit down to write any new free and deep thoughts. Instead, I've been tinkering endlessly with the GUI for the experiment I'm supposed to already have five participants' worth of data for. I finally thought I had settled on something, and so ran Katie through it

Comments

[force_of_will]

In reference to Wilbur I want to ask this...

How are we ever going to escape the commerce of argument? We are surrounded by opinion as a commodity, as well as the display of fact. We are becoming or have become an information society where there is profit in producing opposing opinions. In that, there is an inherent incentive to produce criticism, and for any text, to write a counter-argument. We have generated a whole culture that both wants to hear both sides of the argument, and then bake and sell their own opinion. So you're never going to get consensus on any subject. It is the historical dialectic of our times...

And so, Wilbur's "story" doesn't read all the different from a lot of others. I hold, as far as I can tell, a lot of similar views, I just don't care to sell them so much as bug people freely with them. ;-) Having studied science (3 years of engineering physics at Ohio State) and mythology and comparative religion (and then a little philosophy), the stories of our being are always, I find, both remarkably the same, and filled with conflict. In the manifold of being, reductionism, and all communication is reductive, leaves something out and so having an awareness of complete being has an element of the ineffable, of mystery, stemming from the divide between word and object. Carried unto a person, this divide is foundational of dualism itself.

But this is probably too much already of my foolish babel.

Take Care, Seb
Will

[paulhope]

We have generated a whole culture that both wants to hear both sides of the argument, and then bake and sell their own opinion.

I think there is a lot of truth in what you say about the commodification of opinion, but there are important ways in that opinion is not always a commodity (=def something produced for sale.) There are a lot of people who produce opinions not for sale, but to satisfy their own ego at hearing or having others hear their own voice. I think this complicates the market metaphor.

But here's another problem: so, it may be true that you and Wilbur have roughly the same ideas. So do, I'm sure, a lot of people. It doesn't seem to take any expertise to come up with those ideas, just a varied background and dissatisfaction with reductionism. But then why, to use the market metaphor, doesn't the glut of this opinion drive it drive Wilbur's profits to zero? How does he get money for this institute of his with the slick website?

A lot of it seems to be the marketing--he appears to be a shameless self-promoter. So the reason for his success is, I guess, information assymetry.

Despite my sympathies with what you were saying about the attraction of him, I'm still suspicious of Wilbur. I think that the idea that one can successfully take in everything, reject nothing, and make progress is hugely flawed, and I think that may be what he is trying to do. Science, religion, philosophy, and everything else should be brought together, but I don't think it can be done if it keeps all science, all religion, all philosophy, etc.

Thanks for responding so thoughtfully.

The Purchasing Power of Ignorance

[force_of_will]

One thing that I see rarely if ever mentioned is the thirst for culture, and by extension knowledge in youth. It is only because children are born into ignorance (if not a blank slate) that many careers and professions exist. So there is always a market for any idea be it old or new, full or reduced, especially one which affords "answers' to the problem of living correctly. Again I might tie these comments up now with your post on ethics and ethical behavior, and I might theorize this is why we seek to know the future at all. To make predictions for our lives. Youth is the age where taking ones place in the world and society appears in reflection and imagination.

When you get older you may start to, if you haven't already, notice that youth tends to "recycle" things after 15-20 years or so and that these cycles also coincide with a sense of nostalgia for older people. As an example "punk" rock wavers, and then is reborn.

Ignorance always leaves a place for the Wilbur's of the world, and births a segment of the populace which is going to fall sway to a smart man with some unique spin on old ideas. Scientology is pretty big...