Number 92 : May 1998 |
Dear Theo,
Here are some of more of those endless replies.
Re: Your reply to me (C90, p25) - I agree that there is significance in emergent properties. I still say that the extra meaning we put on reality creates an artificial subjective experience for us. Knowing this can help us to understand our reactions to real events.
Re: Mike Rossell (C91, p22) - If there were no humans to look at flowers there would be no beauty in a flower in the sense that it is perceived by human brains. The bee may or may not (ie. I don't know) have its own equivalent but probably quite different sense of beauty. Human emotion cannot be ignored since it is an intrinsic mechanism of the brain.
Re: David Taylor (C91, p32) - Thanks for the biology lesson.
Re: Prospect Magazine (C90, p25) - You included a quote from Isaiah Berlin in C89 p4.4 and said the source was the September issue of Prospect - I then misunderstood this to mean that you subscribe to the magazine - my apologies.
Re: Scientology (C90, p25) - This cult has been discredited and its unusual beliefs have been publicised. I certainly dissociate myself from direct participation with it. However the origins, beliefs and the story of its founder make very interesting reading. It was interesting to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica extract concerning Scientology. The summary is okay but will only give the barest minimum of insight into the topic. To get an adequate insight you have to read much more material. I wonder how many people read these extracts from encyclopaedias / dictionaries and feel they have understood enough to not require any more reading. But summaries are useful things (I myself have got dictionaries and encyclopaedias. I also gave a glossary at the end of my last offering to PDG). One also has to remember that 'adequate insight' is a fuzzy quantity (like most things in life).
I have recently been thinking about society (yet again !). In particular about the balance of freedom and restriction in society. Too much of either is a bad thing. Too much freedom leads to chaos and an increase in the level of conflict between individuals. Too much restriction leads to repression of individual wills and a lack of the creativity needed as the wild factor.
Fortunately, in contemporary UK life, this balance is there. There is substantial freedom to act as we please and acquire what we want, the licensing ingredient being one's level of wealth. We are also restricted - by the Laws of society and by society conditioning (principally through the mass media). Money is not only the license that enables you to realise your freedoms. It is also a way of recognising that people have different aptitudes.
I realise there are many inadequacies to society, but I'll leave that for the next exciting episode.
Till next time,
Vijai Parhar
Vijai : Thanks for clarifying Prospect. My quote from was Reuters, which itself quoted Prospect. I’d never heard of the magazine, so its name didn’t lodge in my mind - I should have done a "search" though to find out what you were on about. Another problem associated with "endless replies".
I agree with you also on Encyclopaedias. These are bound to oversimplify - as anyone knows when they read articles on subjects they know lots about. This is true even of authoritative encyclopaedias such as EB. I always find this thought rather wearying - to think that all these volumes of (mostly) fascinating stuff is merely skimming the surface of the ocean of knowledge before us, which is itself only a tiny subset of what is out there to be investigated. At such thoughts I alternate between the "why do I waste so much time sleeping !" to the "why not eat, drink and make merry, for tomorrow we die" approach.
Theo