DerekMartin.ca web development, spirituality, UFOs & the occult

I think my *new* new year’s resolution is to become as proactive as Derek.

i made a plan about 8 years ago, at that time it was about how i would take care of nurturing myself. then about 5 years ago i set some specific goals. i gave the paper to a frend and 2 years ago after forgetting all about it, we re-opened it. amazing is all i can say. for the most part i have stayed on the path i wanted to be on, even though i had forgotten about it. i guess if you have it in your mind, you work in that direction even when you are not aware of it. i am still moving forward, and a friend of mine said, if you move forward and fall flat on your face, you are still moving in the right direction. on that note i would like to say Happy New Year to the world, keep on moving forward, we will all end up in the same place. see you there ! lol

I was baffled by some of the stuff you are saying about consciousness. There is a vast, VAST cog sci literature on this stuff that, especially in the last 20 years, has been especially fertile. You toss the term around, but you ignore every major issue, and all the positions that have been explored.

You say, “scientists do not realize that what they believe literally creates their reality.”

Which scientists?
How do you know they don’t believe this?
Should they?
Is it true?
How do you know if it is?

I can tell you that a lot of scientists have taken that idea (although more in a more rigorous way) very seriously indeed. You can trace that all the way back to Kant. Recently, people working on embodied cognition have done a lot of stuff relating to the way minds constitute worlds (vs passively representing it). Andy Clark’s work is good place to look.

You say “Science wants you to believe that Objectivity is good and Subjectivity is bad.”

Who the hell is “Science”? Read Peter Galison or other people who study the anthropology of science … there is no monolithic voice. Read Kuhn or Popper or Feyerabend or Hanson for classic investigations into what kinds of things we can say with certainty about “science”

Also, what the hell do you mean? Do you mean, scientists say that, epistemologically, we require certain objective standards to have knowledge? If so, that’s pretty uncontroversial (although the actual details are subject to debate)

Or, do you mean, “scientists don’t take seriously the subjective aspects of our experience and our mental life” This is VERY far from the truth. In fact, in cog sci, in many ways scientists have taken this more seriously than a lot of philosophers and psychologists have. And scientists (especially people working in AI, but also biologists, hell you can take that back to Uexkull and the early cybernetics and general systems theorists) have often posited quite radical theses about the subjective nature of what we take to be the objective public ontology of the world. Recently, Varela comes to mind, as does Cantwell-smith, and most of the AI world. The dynamicists and anti-representationalists working in robotics and neuroscience fit here pretty well too.

Hell, as it turns out, the alleged incorrigibility of reports of our subjective experiences is beginning to look a little suspect. Lots of experimental setups can be created in which we are plain wrong about what we think we think. And there’s a few strains of work in philosophy of mind now that have cast some doubts about the kind of access we think we have to how we feel. Dennet’s paper “Quining Qualia” is a good taste of that.

Anyways, you say a lot of stuff, but you don’t pay ANY attention to the work that thousands of create and careful scholars have done on any of these issues.

Finally, you say “There are those who say experience cannot be trusted, because our senses and memories are not dependable.”

Well, that’s the very foundation of modern philosophy, and the legacy of Descartes is centuries of work trying to beat back skepticism. I mean, you can’t just gloss over that in a sentence. Its a huge issue. What is knowledge? How do we know when we have it? What is the difference between shit that is true, and shit that ain’t?

“Because I feel it is true” doesn’t count as an answer. We’re too good at knowing things to get very far with an argument that we don’t. Check out the Sokal affair for a very funny look at how that’s played out when postmodernists play scientist.

I know there was a book published called ‘philosophy in the matrix’ or something like that. Check it out. You might get better arguments in that than quotes from Morpheus and the various exploits of Luke Skywalker.”

Incidentally, a blue van just parked just down the street from you. I’d keep an eye on that if I were you.

I was baffled by some of the stuff you are saying about consciousness. There is a vast, VAST cog sci literature on this stuff that, especially in the last 20 years, has been especially fertile. You toss the term around, but you ignore every major issue, and all the positions that have been explored.

You say, “scientists do not realize that what they believe literally creates their reality.”

Which scientists?
How do you know they don’t believe this?
Should they?
Is it true?
How do you know if it is?

I can tell you that a lot of scientists have taken that idea (although more in a more rigorous way) very seriously indeed. You can trace that all the way back to Kant. Recently, people working on embodied cognition have done a lot of stuff relating to the way minds constitute worlds (vs passively representing it). Andy Clark’s work is good place to look.

You say “Science wants you to believe that Objectivity is good and Subjectivity is bad.”

Who the hell is “Science”? Read Peter Galison or other people who study the anthropology of science … there is no monolithic voice. Read Kuhn or Popper or Feyerabend or Hanson for classic investigations into what kinds of things we can say with certainty about “science”

Also, what the hell do you mean? Do you mean, scientists say that, epistemologically, we require certain objective standards to have knowledge? If so, that’s pretty uncontroversial (although the actual details are subject to debate)

Or, do you mean, “scientists don’t take seriously the subjective aspects of our experience and our mental life” This is VERY far from the truth. In fact, in cog sci, in many ways scientists have taken this more seriously than a lot of philosophers and psychologists have. And scientists (especially people working in AI, but also biologists, hell you can take that back to Uexkull and the early cybernetics and general systems theorists) have often posited quite radical theses about the subjective nature of what we take to be the objective public ontology of the world. Recently, Varela comes to mind, as does Cantwell-smith, and most of the AI world. The dynamicists and anti-representationalists working in robotics and neuroscience fit here pretty well too.

Hell, as it turns out, the alleged incorrigibility of reports of our subjective experiences is beginning to look a little suspect. Lots of experimental setups can be created in which we are plain wrong about what we think we think. And there’s a few strains of work in philosophy of mind now that have cast some doubts about the kind of access we think we have to how we feel. Dennet’s paper “Quining Qualia” is a good taste of that.

Anyways, you say a lot of stuff, but you don’t pay ANY attention to the work that thousands of create and careful scholars have done on any of these issues.

Finally, you say “There are those who say experience cannot be trusted, because our senses and memories are not dependable.”

Well, that’s the very foundation of modern philosophy, and the legacy of Descartes is centuries of work trying to beat back skepticism. I mean, you can’t just gloss over that in a sentence. Its a huge issue. What is knowledge? How do we know when we have it? What is the difference between shit that is true, and shit that ain’t?

“Because I feel it is true” doesn’t count as an answer. We’re too good at knowing things to get very far with an argument that we don’t. Check out the Sokal affair for a very funny look at how that’s played out when postmodernists play scientist.

I know there was a book published called ‘philosophy in the matrix’ or something like that. Check it out. You might get better arguments in that than quotes from Morpheus and the various exploits of Luke Skywalker.”

Incidentally, a blue van just parked just down the street from you. I’d keep an eye on that if I were you.

Great post! That exactly made this movie, my favorite one. It’s just a pity that you are not Christian. I agree with everything you said.

Our sense of reality is limited by knowledge. But when we wake up, we realize that there is a higher reality than what we can see or perceive by our senses. It’s that spiritual part, that we just did not know, but still we can’t deny.

Great post! That exactly made this movie, my favorite one. It’s just a pity that you are not Christian. I agree with everything you said.

Our sense of reality is limited by knowledge. But when we wake up, we realize that there is a higher reality than what we can see or perceive by our senses. It’s that spiritual part, that we just did not know, but still we can’t deny.