Tal Cohen's Bookshelf: A Collection of Personal Opinions about Books
(In reply to Beepoh's message posted on Friday, 13 June 2008 at 17:22 GMT)


(anonymous) writes in reply to Beepoh:
Totally unsatisfying!
Oh god. Who cares whether any practical application comes of this thinking? For me its enough to understand what I am in a new way without it being used for some technological purpose.

Amateur philosopher is right... Its people like you who have this relentless need for everything to be useful and manipulable even in the very short term that have brought Western society and more to the point, the entire planet, to the horrific state that its currently in.

We need a departure from this type of rabidly scientific/technological worldview
[372] Posted on Thursday, 02 April 2009 at 10:47 GMT [Reply to this] [Permalink]


Adam A. Ford writes in reply to (anonymous):
Totally unsatisfying!
How can you say that we need to depart from the ''rabidly scientific/technological worldview'' when you are sitting around reading forums and replying to them via the wonderful technological medium of the internet? (If you are a luddite, you're not a very committed one)
Please specify what your alternate worldview is? And does it include science/technology at all?

I care whether there will be practical applications coming from this thinking (that is understanding the human mind,its application to AI etc).
At what point of humanity's development of science and technology do you think we should have stopped at? Plow shears? Clocks? Telescopes? Trains? The germ theory? Industrialization? Computers?
I think that around 10,000 years ago people cared about ways to grow crops more quickly and easily, and later on to know what time it is, to get from one place to another more quickly, to have less infant mortality.

It is not the need to find usefulness in everything that you describe as ''bringing the entire plannet to the horrific state that it is currently in''. Science and Technology, or peoples appreciation/persual of it does not ''cause'' _badness_. It is really just human minds -> perhaps greed and lazyness. Which is also why I believe we need a unbiased and rigorous scientific/technological approach to understanding how things work, and IMO, especially ourselves and how the mind works - and yes, I think that science and technology have a key role in this.

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Douglas Hofstadter said ''If there are creatures more moral... than we are, wouldn't we want them to have the future...wouldn't it be better if the altruistic beings just survived and we didn't?''
- http://crazymotion.net/douglas-hofstadter-a-living-p...
[378] Posted on Thursday, 16 April 2009 at 2:33 GMT [Reply to this] [Permalink]

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