quote:

---

There is nothing inevitable about alienation. When your child begins to speak and ask questions, do you disown him? Or do you answer him in language appropriate to his emerging intelligence?

---

Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. That's a pretty alienating statement. The only reason why I have an agency in the world is because I have a mind. Everything else is just stuff. I can understand why some people object to this.

One does not disown a child when a child asks questions. Obviously not. When a child asks a question about the world around eir, it necessarily is demanding how the world exists independently of its mind. If the question is not about the parent, then the parent in answering shares in the child's growing alienation from the world: the question sets up a barrier between the child and the object of the question. When a child asks a question about the parent directly, this sets up a barrier between the two as the parent is now transformed into an object; do you think that a parent's discomfort at the question "how was I made?" is an accident?

So this Cartesian alienation is merely a formalisation of a necessary process in science: as we are attempting to understand the world as it exists independent of, we must establish a line of separation--a sort of alienation--between us and it. There is no science without this.

quote:

---

Do you let him drive the car at age seven, or make him wait... even though he doesn't like it?

---

Who is the parent? I don't know whether there is one - and neither do you. You may assume that that there isn't one, because you can't see it... because your instruments are not yet sufficiently refined to measure it. You may assume that the universe is your plaything, just because there isn't anyone around to stop you. But neither of those assumptions will save your neck, if/when you tinker with things so much larger than yourself. An orphan can get himself killed, too.

Where was I?
Alienation through the asking of questions. I don’t see that at all.

You think, therefore you exist, and everything else is just ‘stuff’. You’re walking down the street; everyone else is just background. You lose your way; stop and ask directions from a pretty girl. She sets you right, asks whether you’re new in town. You ask her name… One morning, you wake up and discover that you’re married to her and have three kids. At some point (one hopes!) she ceased to be background and became real. Not as real as you, maybe, but more than ‘stuff’.
Questions – in fact, communication of any kind – tends to connect people, rather than alienate them. Each of those three hypothetical babies knew that it was alive (not so much because it thinks, as because it’s hungry) when everything else was ‘stuff’ and you were just another background object. Until you held it and talked to it: then you became real to it and it became a person to you. Why, 18 months later, should he be alienated from you, just because he is able to communicate more complex ideas than “Pick me up!”?

I do see that, when a child begins to ‘question’ the parent’s authority, the distance between them increases. In this case, however, there isn’t really a question. “Daddy, can you chase the monsters out from under my bed?” and “May I have another cookie?” are questions regarding authority, but they do not alienate parent from child – rather the opposite. “How come you always order me around?”, while technically a question, does not seek an answer; is not motivated by curiosity and would more correctly be phrased: “I don’t want your authority”. Both parties’ awareness of this fact is what alienates them. In fact, if they had not already become close through communication, alienation couldn’t happen; if they did not understand each other’s speech and nouances, the exchange would be meaningless and thus, emotionally neutral.

That was a bit long-winded, but there is a parallel.
Humans used to feel connected to the Earth in much the same way that children are connected to parents. They used to communicate with Nature. Asking questions motivated by simple curiosity did not alienate humans from Nature. A person can sit beside a river, observing the water, the grasses, the frogs, and learn a great a deal about natural laws, without losing connection with them – rather the opposite. It is only when that person says “Why should I obey the laws of nature?” that the question is not a question anymore, but a rejection.

Of course, that person was not really able to flout the authority of nature: his feet still itched; he still snored; he still had to eat once in a while. But he discovered a cute trick. “Ah well, that’s just my body. My mind is something else, lives somewhere else, outside all this and way above it”. Insert nose-thumbing smilie. (Insert another, bigger, nature-coloured one, right after the guy drowns in the flood and nobody can remember his name.)

Which brings me to Descartes.
He thought, which proved to him that he existed. (His tailor, his confessor and his dog had never doubted it.) He also proved the existence of God in the same manner. Dr. Conway is probably convinced that Dr. Conway exists, yet Dr. Conway is equally convinced that God does not. Here we have two great minds at variance on a fundamental question. They can’t both be right about both assertions. They can both be right about the first one, and their demonstrations are equally compelling, so I’ll accept as probable (if not conclusively proven) that Descartes and Dr. Conway both exist (though not at the same time.) About the second assertion, their demonstrations are also equally compelling, but they cannot both be right (at the same time).
Therefore: a) God exists; b) God does not exist; c) God existed in 1637, but does not exist in 2002; d) God exists for some people, but not for others; e) the method of proof is flawed or f) 42.
If both Descartes’ and Dr. Conway’s thoughts are valid in spite of this variance, then so are yours, mine and Grasshopper’s (at the same time). I picked a) through f) as the correct answers. I can prove that they’re all correct by imagining all of them (not at the same time).

The whole exercise is, of course, silly, since we all knew, all along, that all of us exist (except maybe God). So why did Descartes go through the silly exercise? Because he had an axe to grind - interest to serve. Which was: turning everything else into “stuff”. In a 'Christian' environment, this wasn’t hard. He wouldn’t have tried it among the Kalahari Bushmen. They already knew that everything else also exists for its own sake and has its own soul. The Christians already knew that everything else exists for them and nothing else has a soul. Because God had told them so. And Descartes proved that God exists, so it worked out fine.

In that way, Descartes was a predecessor of Nietsche, Foucault, and Derrida, all of whom deride science and objective knowledge.

Anyway, mathematics (by itself) does no harm. Thinking about your own thinking does no harm. Telling people who like to cut up live animals that dogs are just complex machines is a whole nother ballgame.

It is not science, or even Science which alienates humans from the world and one another and God (whatever); it is exception: the assumption that man is different in kind from all other life-forms; the presumption of specialness; the arrogation of power over everything else.

[ June 04, 2002: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

quote:

---

jeff house/Descartes: We are sure that we exist, for otherwise the thinking of that thought would be impossible.

---

[ June 04, 2002: Message edited by: Zatamon ]

quote:

---

It is not science, or even Science which alienates humans from the world and one another and God (whatever); it is exception: the assumption that man is different in kind from all other life-forms; the presumption of specialness;

---

And Nonesuch says:

If God is all-powerful, He could deceive us into believing that He exists and that we don't. But why should he want to?

Descartes would respond: "Did you say, he could deceive US?" In other words, if we are thinking we don't exist, we are still thinking. And that thinking being exists. A non-existent being cannot think, he would argue.

quote:

---

It was science, in fact, that DEMONSTRATED that man is part of nature, and no different in kind from other forms of life. You know, Darwin and all that. Bacteria, yeast, plants, fish...we're all relatives.

---

Let it sound pedantic, but I don't know what it would mean to say either that we're different in kind from other animals, or that we're not different in kind. (The meaning of "kind" isn't obvious). I'd want to look at specifics.

Obviously we're similar to other animals in some fairly obvious ways, and quite different in others. One obvious difference is that no other animal has so extended its abilities by means of technology (i.e., conscious calculation) as to be able to live practically anywhere. Our initial ecological niche was the African savannah; but we expanded out of there perhaps 200,000 years ago. You might say that evolution fitted us to move beyond our original evolutionary position.

And no other animal has created such a detailed description of itself, its surroundings, its society and its knowledge, let alone one that can be communicated, in principle, to practically every member of its species.

I don't draw from this a conclusion of human superiority; but certainly human values -- including respect for other forms of life, humility in the face of the unknown, and restraint in the extension of human powers -- are the ones I care about the most, because they're the only ones I can know about with reasonable certainty.

[ June 04, 2002: Message edited by: 'lance ]

quote:

---

Descartes would respond: "Did you say, he could deceive US?" In other words, if we are thinking we don't exist, we are still thinking. And that thinking being exists. A non-existent being cannot think, he would argue.

---

True, but there are some who refute that Descartes even argued that far successfully.

Sure, he started his project by doubting everything, and then realized that the only thing he could know for sure that he was doubting - and that even if he doubted that he was doubting, he was still doubting. The conclusion being that "'I am, I exist' is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind."

The argument against that is, even his most basic premise, "I think" may be going too far. All he can really, REALLY know for sure is that thinking is going on, not that there is an "I" to do the thinking. So just because there is thinking going on does not mean that there is necessarily a "me" to do the thinking. Therefore, "I think" is presuming that there an "I" involved, making the conclusion "I am" simply analytical.

quote:

---

Humans were not considered to be part of nature

---

By whom? I already said that the European Christians of that time (and i should have said, the upper crust thereof, because the peasants were not necessarily convinced, even post-Inquisition) did not consider themselves part of nature. They were, however, not the only humans on the planet.
There were, and are, people who know that all living things are related, without ever having needed science to DEMONSTRATE it, just as they know that water is wet.

The distinction is between difference of kind (wholly other - as a rock and an eagle) and difference of degree (bigger, smarter, faster, stronger - as a dog and a hippopotamus).

CERTAINTY is an elusive critter, but one with very sharp teeth. Beware the man who has captured and tamed it.
I don't give a sweet hozanna what Descartes actually thought or why he wrote it down. My problem is with his bastards. They're messing up the world for me and my relatives. Here is the last bit of the post from which Mandos quoted at the top of this thread:

quote:

---

The deification of Man was slightly premature. It's caused a lot of accidents already. The next accident may be fatal.

---

[ June 04, 2002: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

quote:

---

nonesuch: CERTAINTY is an elusive critter, but one with very sharp teeth. Beware the man who has captured and tamed it.

---