>The fact that others may share my critique

But no, they don't. I think it's a misunderstanding,
you must simply confuse him with someone else
whom you have also read.

They cannot share your critique because
Dawkins never stated or implied the statements
your critique is aimed at.

>When I appear to dismiss whole branches of science, I
>dismiss their authoritarian claim to
>\u201cknowledge\u201d, which is being manipulated and
>concocted mostly for specific aims.

All right, but do I invite you to accept their
autoritarian claims? I think not. Sciences
provide a language. One can refuse to speak this
or that language, say, on the grounds of a religious
taboo. That is understandable. But in the absence
of taboos, one might speak freely, and formulate.

>But, how to make sense of the rampant, meaningless pain of
>the majority of people in this world?

If you make a machine that can suffer pain, say, when
deprived of a certain ressource, arrange it so
that there is a shortage of ressources and plenty
of machines, and leave the process to self-organising,
then a lot of machines will suffer. If the machines
are allowed to evolve in such a way that would minimise
their suffering, even more of the machines will suffer.
And if there is pleasure, associated with some other
machine's suffering (for instance, to signal to the
machine that is winning that winning it does, indeed),
then your machines can even evolve sadistic features.

All the while pain and suffering will be just
a shortcut to quickly signal to a machine that
something is dangerously wrong. Under the conditions
of the shortage of the vital ressource, the quicker
one will survive better (or get better chances to
reproduce).

The evolution may help the situation allowing the
machines feel pain when some of the other machines
are suffering. That would be the empathy which
Dawkins described in his "Selfish Gene". And,
in some species, it may reach the extent of feeling
pain whenever they know that another is suffering.
But too much stress is fatal by the design.

>In my humble
>experience, all institutional answers seem to lie and to
>justify it.

Can it be that you just read them in this way?
The three passages above appeal to the fusion of
the game theory with evolutional psychology; one
can construct a scenario following the scetch and
demonstrate the ways evolution will take. But this
is by no means a justification -- it's a scenario
to show how it works. And, which is far more
important, to lay one's fingers on the key points
which should be reprogrammed in order to get rid
of meaningless suffering. The good thing about
evolution is that its programming constantly gets
revised, and that is part of the programming.

>Probably, I was driven by the selfish desire to have you
>near -- not as an illusion or perhaps against the
>backdrop of illusion. Since I can't go to the Mountain, I
>asked the Mountain to come to me.

That is where I am trying hard not to wish something
HORRIBLE to happen to both American continents,
to force you emigrate to Russia with the family.
(A climate change, perhaps?) And we could settle
in Irkutsk and get things started.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

> you must simply confuse him with someone else
whom you have also read.

What do you mean? That there are several Dawkins and Selfish Genes? Did I miss something? Or perhaps, could it be that you haven't noticed some of the political and social implications of his theory?

As for the rest, I have stated clearly my points on dogmas and structures and languages and institutions... If you don't agree to see the implications of “programming”, “engineering”, “language”, metaphors with nature and machines, the problem of metaphors in scientific thinking and engineering, etc., what can I say? I'm not enforcing my world view on anyone. I was simply responding to a question you asked in your poem (> Это ты говоришь?), thinking that perhaps you asked it, because you wanted to hear my side of things.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

>What do you mean? That there are several Dawkins and
>Selfish Genes?

No, but there are many authors. Like, "There is no God
but Man" that you cite as a scientific conclusion,
is in fact a statement made by a magician Aleister
Crowley, and, as you might guess, not entirely his
invention.

When I mentioned Dawkins, you replied, among other things:

Both, science and religion tell us that this scenario is
natural and inevitable and urge us to accept it, thereby
fulfilling its own prophesy. Compassion for the victim, in
this case, becomes overwritten with blame for the victim's
weakness and with the justification that it is for the
higher good (obviously of the parasite)

But the "Selfish Gene" happens to be to a large part
dedicated to origin of compassion, explaining why it
is natural and how it came to be an evolutionary winner
for social animals (not the winner, for it is quite
possible to live and reproduce being almost deprived
of compassion). Moreover, origin of compassion and its
justification in terms of evolution is the main motive
of this book: there is "pun intended" hidden in the
title. "The Selfish Gene of Altruism", it should
read.

You couldn't have missed it, you've got a good brain.
Either you had special filters inserted (that happens
to one with aversion to certain key words) or you have,
postfactum, in your distant memory, confused his work
with other essays by other authors that you have read
around the time.

>Or perhaps, could it
>be that you haven't noticed some of the political and
>social implications of his theory?

But certainly. I am sure I have missed A HUGE LOT of
the political and social implications of his theory.

This is how I know it: my sister sent me once an
interesting and finely written book by Robert Wright,
"A Moral Animal". From Dawkins' theory he sort of
derived that victorian values, at least in somewhat
softer and more liberal version, are good for the
society in terms of minimizing the sum of human
suffering. I happen to know that Dawkins, for one,
have never embraced victorian values -- but social
sciences are not precise, hence mutually exclusive
implications of any theory are numerous.

Minimizing the suffering as the aim of the evolutional
psychology is never disputed, though. But the ways to
achieve that goal occuring to various people are
beyond my imagination. I would have certainly missed
them if not directly confronted.

>If you don't agree to see the implications of
>"programming", "engineering", "language", metaphors
>with nature and machines, the problem of metaphors
>in scientific thinking and engineering, etc., what
>can I say?

Why, explain to me what is the problem, of'course.
Avoiding (whenever possible) arguments of the sort
"Einstein was a professor, and all the professions
make people lie, that is why I don't believe his
statement that light can be focused by gravity".

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

> Why, explain to me what is the problem, of'course.
Avoiding (whenever possible) arguments of the sort
"Einstein was a professor, and all the professions
make people lie, that is why I don't believe his
statement that light can be focused by gravity".


It seems that you're confusing me with someone else. What you say and seem to assume about me, does not correspond to my reality or to what I say. In other words, you project your own structures on me, reading me within the prescribed by your paradigms box and ascribing to me your own understandings and misunderstandings of Dawkins, and now Crowley (whom I never mentioned), etc. and reducing my analysis to dogmatic utterings (see your peculiar paragraph on Einstein above, among other examples).

I have said it on several occasions before and shall reiterate again, namely, that I never dismissed the value of human experience and endeavour, including scientific thinking, among other expressions. But as opposed to the binary reasoning so prevalent in both scientific and religious argumentation in general and scientific and religious accusations against each other in particular, I am interested in ALL human and non-human experiences outside the institutional framework. Your paragraph on Einstein above, as well as your reliance on Dawkins' metaphors, illustrate the dogmatic limits of scientific reasoning and call for caution in the conclusions reached and their implications for humans and beasts.

In Robert Anthon Wilson's words, this is the problem of all people (evangelists, scientists, buddhists, bakers, jews, muslims, cleaners, pro-life activists, physics students, anthropologists, etc...) most of whom cannot escape their tunnels of reality. In the words of Arshavski and Ukhtomski, this is the tactic of replacement of one's interlocutor with one's own limitations and knowledge and is the problem of the lack of compassion and respect for the opponent and her dominanta – a lack that leads to the impossibility of understanding the other, to closed circles and in some cases even to aggression.

As with regards to what I think of Dawkins' hypothesis on compassion, I have already written on institutional compassion in my paper on Objects, Love, and Objectifications. I don't want to re-write the same thing here.

With regards to institutions (you seem to prefer the word structures), I have written more on that in most other works, but particularly in my essay on Modernism and Education.

Problems of science and scientific thinking occupied a big chunk of my preliminary exam – most of which (apart from the 50 page proposal and of course the oral defence) are on the website.

My theoretical chapter of my doctoral thesis analyses the paradigms of human knowledge and problems of structured metaphors and language. As soon as I'm done with my dissertation, it will be available for the public.

Furthermore, I offer a list in my recommended reading section and there is always the bibliography at the end of my essays. By no means these lists are exhaustive, but I'll be updating them along the way.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

>In other words, you project your own structures on me,
>reading me within the prescribed by your paradigms box

Sure, it's my favourite occupation.

>now Crowley (whom I never mentioned)

No, you only quoted him:

>Actually, I'm familiar with both of these sources. The
>dogma that there is no God but Man, is still a dogma to me
>because it is completely anthropocentric and hence is
>limited and hence dubious to my humble mind.

"There is no God but Man" -- it's from Crowley's
most sacred magician's gospel, Liber Oz.

Regardless of my projecting of my own structures
and other faults, this dogma does not bear any
relation to evolutional psychology. They happen
to regard God as a mind parasite, which is comletely
different from their view of Man.

>I have said it on several occasions before and shall
>reiterate again, namely, that I never dismissed the value
>of human experience and endeavour, including scientific
>thinking, among other expressions.

Well, you may dissmiss it or respect it, but
simple questions are best suited by simple answers.
If a statement is true or false, it is not true or
false by virtue of being uttered by some institualized
scientist. Everyone can be right or wrong; to judge
it, one should consider a statement itself, not any
labels attached to it. It is not difficult, we are
talking about simple things, mostly.

Needless to say, the quality of being institualized
is not inherent to a person. Today one is a marginal,
prosecuted by authorities and despised by consensus,
tomorrow a recognised maitre of his discipline.

>in some cases even to aggression.

Right! I've been talking, a few years ago,
to some person who seemed to take Bourdieu
seriously. Guess what, he became extremely
aggressive and started calling me names,
evoking alleged perculiar habits of my female
relatives. All the while he kept listing his
academic credentials, dunno why.

At that time I could still happily reply to
him that I, for my part, didn't even
possess a diploma of high education.

(A while later he changed his mind, for some
reason, to a point of inviting me to write an
essay on Bourdieu for his editorial project.
I did my best. The essay was not serious.
But the funniest thing about it was that the
extraordinarily stupid high-brow journal for
which the Bourdieu project was made, demanded
to exclude the reference to A. Dougin from my
text, for PC reasons. Dougin was a marginal
by that time, and Bourdieu -- the very essence
of commonplace, mainstream and establishment.
Now one cannot ruin an academic project by
evoking either name.)

>My theoretical chapter of my doctoral thesis analyses the
>paradigms of human knowledge and problems of structured
>metaphors and language. As soon as I'm done with my
>dissertation, it will be available for the public.

Well, if this is a joke intended to demonstrate
that you do understand the concept of intimidating
behavior of an alpha-graded social animal, it is
appreciated.

If not, then obviously it is not my place to continue
discussion with someone so advanced on the subject
of human knowledge.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

<<
"Einstein was a professor, and all the professions
make people lie, that is why I don't believe his
statement that light can be focused by gravity"
>>

I don't have to go that far;) I can just say "some professors say that light can be focused by gravity but I don't believe it".

(Reply to this) (Parent)