(May 10, 2013 at 9:59 am)ChadWooters Wrote: You seem to accept the idea that mental processes are solely physical in nature and thus reducible in principle, if not in practice. And you advocate allowing each area of knowledge to stand on its own. This seems reasonable since progress has been made in each. No one disputes the success of the scientific revolution.
I see them as entirely different in kind but also mutually dependent. Yes, material and biological processes support the brains/chakras/what-have-you which give physical support for minds/souls/etc. Likewise, without minds to make sense of it, 'knowledge' is reduced to bits of text on paper or online. Even if we thought that "facts" were independent of an observer, belief -and with it knowledge- are not independent in the same way. The part of the universe which cares about outcomes and judges the truth value of claims is a pretty special subset of what exists .. at least to those of us who partake in that.
(May 10, 2013 at 9:59 am)ChadWooters Wrote: Academic post-modern thought has become entirely self-referential and left us with extreme cultural relativism. Meanwhile scientism give no quarter to libertarian free will or human dignity. It seems to me that if balance is to be found, it must come from a theoretical framework that encompasses and links both types of knowledge..
I think the important balance to be struck is internal, between our capacity for deductive reasoning and our intuitive, mostly unconscious mind. In some ways I react to your projects here and on the last thread as an attempt to establish a theory of everything which is rule-governed and logical. That, as I see it, would be a total win for the conscious mind, leaving our conception of the rest of our mind's capacity to be defined by the victor - rather than on its own terms.
