@fresco,
fresco wrote:
Quote:His conclusions are correct but his reasoning may be wrong... His conclusion about set theoretical logic are obvious since for over two thousand years people have been trying without success to apply logic to human behavior with the purpose of teaching morals, but since moral behavior is not logical behavior it cannot be taught...
Chumly should perhaps address his use of the words "pop-culture" to Niels Bohr.
Piaget (already discussed) showed that logic was a subdivision of semantics not always present in adults. His genetic epistemology (assimilation-accommodation) was an attempt to resolve Kant's noumena-phenomena division, and concurs with the non-dualistic implications of "observation" in physics at the micro-level, and with (Kuhn's) paradigm shifts at the macro-level. "Two thousand years of morality" is a side issue.
From the point of view of the scientist/philosopher such questions of ontology and epistimology must always be at the fore; but that is a relative handful of individuals in this world while everyone knows, and must manage morality... I know you do not get it, but even in the dark ages of Europe there were some who were educated and intelligence, but they could not hold back the general tide of ignorance rolling over the landscape... If you have this well educated and knowlegable clique responsible for all our gains in technology which only increase the exploitation of the environment and of humanity, then morality will not be learned, and immorality will master the people so that the forms and institutions that support all esoteric pursuits of knowledge will fall...
Humanity is not made less ignorant by the education of the few, and the few better understand that fact, that they actually empower ignorance as never before when they do not demand that their technology actually serve the needs of mankind... Science, aloof from moral considerations, is an enemy of humanity if only because humanity still ignorant and deprived of moral conditioning will use it for suicide...
Look, if you go to the houses of God, which are really the homes of ignorance, it is not those in attendance who are thought fools, but all the educated... And this mass of ignorant are kept ignorant because their authority, their political power -is so easily manipulated... But history often shows examples of the maniplators becoming the victims of their vitims, of tables being turned... Among the educated there has always been a great contempt of democracy, and if you look a Germany for an example, it was the educated elite who most often attacked the republic and democracy, and this invited tyranny...
If they want democracy to be less obnoxious, they must carry the poor uneducated unwashed masses with them, and give them some reason to be knowledgable...Try to tell the poor they need a degree to become a Mcslave and they will laugh in your face and stick you up...The gulf between the educated and the ignorant is widening, but it is the ignorant who are trying the hardest to maintain some sense of morality even if they do not understand what they are trying to grasp or talk about... That will not stop them from striking out for self preservation... For them, there is little difference between attacking ignorance and attacking the ignorant...
I get the feeling here that while I can understand you, that you can never understand me... Try to approach the problem from the view of the whole person... Is it any better for a person to be a super rational nerd than a super moral Bible thumper??? The wealthy and powerful in this land have fed and nurtured a fraction of super rationals that they exploit and turn to their purposes rethlessly, and all the while doing nothing to truly improve the situations of the primarily -irrationals- who form the vast majority of the population...
Most of our education is indoctrination, and only in certain parts, essentially, in math, science, physics where true education is possible is there any education... But part of why we are falling so far behind in the sciences is the total we are spending on education across the board, and why should the people support that which they see as giving them no benefit???... And by benefit I mean giving to them the happy, cerefree lives of a moral society...Technology, as always, supports wealth and power because wealth and power will not support that which gives them no direct benefit...And this cozy relationship leaves out most of the people whose lives and living conditions are not improved, but eroded... The whole society has lost the ability to nurture the whole man, the whole person; one both moral and rational, sensitive to emotions, empathic, and thoughtful...
I am not going to make the argument that since the rich and the powerful have made the world too dangerous for the ignorant to have any control, that they should not have political power... That argument was already made by Plato... It is because the poor were denied political power that they could then effectively be denied education, and it is because education of the few, the elite, has come at such a price, that so many reject their so called progress whole... We should have all benefitted from education... There will always be people like myself who cannot be educated, but all should be educated, and all should know the benefit of the general education... It should not all go to profit or the defense of wealth or the expansion of poverty and immorality...
