Er, wouldn't normally do this, but sane understanding of my book Aliens; Why They Are Here has been as rare as hen's teeth. Judge, then, of my delight on receiving the following from Simon Oakes. I have slightly shortened it.
"I have just read your latest book and enjoyed it very much. It was a brave approach for someone in your position.....It is the reasons behind the need for such bravery that interest me. Essentially, in my view it is because the Cartesian split between the objective and the subjective ... which, at a conceptual level, has underpinned, not only science, but the whole of Western civilisation for the last 350 or so years - is now under pressure.... In the last 4 years I have read as much as I could get my hands on about the philosophical implications of Quantum Mechanics. But I think the profoundest thoughts about this I have read came from Werner Heisenberg who said QM represented a breakdown in the existing conceptual structure underlying science i.e. the Cartesian approach. ...he was, I think, saying was that the most succesful scientific theory of all time demonstrates that the approach that keeps what we call the "subjective" out of the equation no longer works..... Bringing back the "subjective" into reality is scary - which I think goes to the heart of what your book was about. Its scary because ... I think it undermines the appearance (illusion!?) that through science and technology we can somehow control our world. This need to maintain the illusion of control, I think, is at the root of the hold materialism has on us. In this regard, I find it interesting that even philosophers who take mind and conciousness seriously - such as Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn & John Searle - still think that what we think of as mind and meaning somehow still ultimately supervenes on what we currently think of as the physical. That the physical still... has the last word. But this is just an implausable metaphysical act of faith! Once we fully collapse the subject/object split and meld the former with the latter, the genie is out of the bottle. Hence all the neurosis and denial your book so interestingly covered."
Go, Simon
Sunday, April 23, 2006
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Yes. But that's only the start of it. The issue is what do we mean when we speak of "real" in this sense? My text on this is Wallace Stevens' poem The Snow Man - or it could be the whole of Stevens' oeuvre which is about this and tis alone. Snow Man below:
ReplyDeleteThe Snow Man
WALLACE STEVENS
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Just ordered your book!
ReplyDeleteFor my very own reasons, after close to half a century of serious studies, I do not call "It" Alien, but "Symbiont". Yes we do have a symbiotic relationship,disguised at times as a "predator-prey" combat.Of course it is easier to joke about the entire matter, "little green men",etc. I call that the embarassed "Simian Syndrome". We laugh and proceed to eat our bananas, or follow the no see, no hear, no talk "Thing"
Look at all religions, ancient history, esoteric traditions,etc and THINK!
MLZ
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