Delusions can be characterized, roughly, as belief-like mental representations that manifest an unusual degree of disconnectedness from reality, and cover a range of phenomena. I have mentioned Capgras and Cotard delusions. More mundane examples might include cases that are closer to what would typically be called self-deceit—thinking of oneself as a great friend or a great beauty, when all evidence points to the contrary.
-- From the inside, I don't believe science objectivises anything, but scientists, just like everyone else, do a lot of objectivising. The lay-populist stuff on science as a value-free, utterly rational process is a nonsense. Of course, we write the stuff up as if we were rational robots. When scientists write on other topics (Fred Soddy on economics is good), they tend to write third-person polemic. We are taught these tricks of rhetoric by grammar teachers who know no better. I was once told we shouldn't do reification because this made people and social stuff into 'things'. At the time, I knew what commodity reification was from Lukacs, but when I asked what a thing was I was told 'like protons in science'. With nothing to learn, I reified the teacher as an idiot. Protons are only things in short-hand or labelling in context.
Gabby's example may be one of a deluded bunch of academics in Bremen. They have some kind of audience. Vanity press mostly. My own guess is they are trapped in an Idol of the Theatre - some scholastic liturgy. Academe has long been part of the means of suppression of people in general and the delusion for me is that they assume fine-tuning can fix the essential problem. The non-delusional state would be to open fair shares and education up to all, without ranking on such small components of life as maths, verbal and spatial reasoning and the ability to sit in classrooms and copy answers onto paper or screen.
Implicit in the Bremen reasoning are assumptions on elitism and that one must be schooled to be able to say anything with any authority or do research. The evidence for this outside science and craft skills is extremely poor. Indeed the vast content of academic outpour is drivel. There is always a self-justifying audience though, feigning peer-review. I take 'inner-light philosophies' to be much the same thing.
I am sure people trying to hang on to their land in Africa don't give a damn about who does African studies in Germany. And that Gabby almost said all of this in one line.
On Tuesday, February 10, 2015 at 12:40:10 PM UTC, archytas wrote:
On Tuesday, February 10, 2015 at 12:40:10 PM UTC, archytas wrote:
Potentially brilliant opportunities to study delusions with this lot Gabby. Do you hang about with them by any chance? I'd need an informant to explain their ritual dances on pin heads, and how they do this without cutting their feet. Ethnomethodologists are almost exclusively white, though there is the occasional Australian of the non-aboriginal variety.In fact, there seem to be no scientists doing or resisting scientific objectivication in this group, an interesting delusion in-itself. One imagines this group rather too dumb to look round at their first meeting on 'black culture from the inside' and utter a 'collective bugger' or even blame the company they got to print the invitation cards.Your point is excellent, though having read some of the links I am not sure 'NO' was shouted at anything. Eventually, they conclude their work should be done by an exclusive group with the right skin tones and expertise they have now been able to decide on, assuming the fantasy that academe is some kind of meritocracy, along with some essentialist notions on ethnicity. Pegida should have Pegidian scholars on this logic. There was once a German, Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, Jewish and 'also rans' version of science. I would rather shout 'NO' at that. The Bremener solution requires people to gain qualifications in order to speak authoritatively on others. I find people are usually pretty good at explaining what matters to them.The delusion of social scientists like this lot is they do any science at all. Anyway, I prefer the Gabby of my interpretation to some chortling gutmenscher.
On Tuesday, February 10, 2015 at 11:35:49 AM UTC, Gabby wrote:Here is something on deluded scientific objectification successfully being said NO to:http://www.bbs.uni-bremen.de/
Being white I could feel Gutmensch-like laughing about the typical white's stupid whitewashing of black's interests in the white man's industry, right?
Am Dienstag, 10. Februar 2015 schrieb archytas :I'm not quite so absurdist as Chris in his story above on truth, though I've had plenty of exasperations on it. Koro and kuru might be interesting. The first is a delusory affliction, sometimes in mass hysteria, that genital organs (the penis or female nipples) are disappearing into the body, the second a real disease that emerges from former cannibal practices (it has a long incubation period - the cannibalism is supposed to have stopped in 1960). One of the 'cures' for koro is to get someone else to hang onto the actually non-receding bit. So you see Chris, there is some truth. If you think you have koro, no point in calling me. Kuru is incurable, so the truth there is it ain't good to eat people.--Human susceptibility to delusion seems plain enough. Quite a few students over the years have deluded themselves into thinking my story about koro isn't true. Amazingly, on reference to Wikipedia, they believe it. This, of course, is part of a longer strategy to get them to understand what 'credibility' is - like the credibility of someone teaching from management textbooks as though they are true. Managers, in these books, have responsibility to create reality for others. If this is true, we can at least ask why they choose to inflict such a lousy one.I guess most of us can spot that the guy chopping at his second head, believing it is me, yet putting himself in hospital, is deluded. Gabby might be tempted to applaud, but I'm pretty sure she would try to take the axe away, if she had the chance. This sort of delusion seems easy to spot, even though we don't have direct access to the deluded mind. Yet if we can spot delusions such as this and the action of ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the ant deluding fungus (known as the zombie fungus) - should be not think on our susceptibility to delusions we are not spotting? The deluded ants do not make a pretty picture in death - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_ unilateralis Tony's sculptures (are we there yet on the next batch, I ask as progress chaser on the production line?) have an illusory aspect - but any delusion created does seem facilitatory. This great link he put up the other day gets closer to the kind of delusion that bugs me - Que Sera - Wax Tailor - and I can easily imagine doing something like this on economics as the que sera sera bit. You can imagine a burned-out village in the Congo and dead bodies, with a talk-over by some ghastly PR from Glencore on 'maximising profit opportunities', Greek kids going hungry as Christine Lagarde does standard IMF austerity-speak 5 years after the 'cure' has failed. Groups of teenagers with their neat mobile phones in quasi-orgasmic rituals around them, cut with some poor sod trying to dig his child out of a landslide in the tin resource chain. Various politicians with jawbs-groaf promises against a burning world. The delusion is presumably that we can keep on as we are - but how it has come about and is spreading look intractable. Musak might be a cut up version of Monty Python's 'Bright Side of Life'.Delusions deny evidence (in the Nico Bento case there is a fascinating example of a supposedly 'sane' British court not believing their eyes and instead an 'expert' telling them what they were seeing in CCTV footage was illusory - though much more scary is the real experts were excluded), but this is actually fairly standard human reasoning. We fit evidence in a world-view. CSI is a great example - there are more clues in one episode than I had in a career.The insanesteam economists have finally admitted they don't do science, but still claim they act like objective scientists - frankly a total delusion. Yet they still hold sway. Of course, I still know how to pretend to be a Christian.And there are big questions on whether one's own objectivity is merely another delusion. Evidence seems to be the answer, yet evidence systems turn out to be rhetorical, often with conflicting root metaphors and hidden drives. Remember, most people fail school - so what faith should we have in the general capacity for argument? It's tough - but what is our own delusion as a discussion group?
On Monday, February 9, 2015 at 8:24:27 PM UTC, Allan Heretic wrote:Ah delusion, norm & money.. Oddly say a science program today.
Money is a commonly agreed upon delusion with agreed upon rules. Alter the rules the system crashes.. :-P
Left me wondering at what is going happen because of the continued manipulation of the rules of money .. Greed is a strange delusion.
It was a fasinating.
Then moved on to different realities.. :-D
تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Évitez; assassiner, le viol et l'esclavage des autres
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others
-----Original Message-----
From: archytas <nwterry@gmail.com>
To: minds-eye@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, 09 Feb 2015 8:35 PM
Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Re: DelusionsBrilliant Chris. 'Truth is an arete', I once read. I looked up 'arete' in a French dictionary (the first e had a circumflex accent) finding the useful word 'fish-hook'. I tried Greek and realised it meant 'value'. Having read 100,000 words to discover this, the idea academics knew anything about this stuff disappeared.--There is no crown. Gabby stole the jewels in some campaign to raise Allan to common dust, apparently.
On Monday, February 9, 2015 at 6:48:45 PM UTC, Chris Jenkins wrote:It's times like this I'm quite glad I shook off the ModGod mantle. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 7:30 AM, Gabby <gabbydott@gmail.com> wrote:Oh come on, Allan! I am still waiting for your excuse back in the religion thread! Don't avoid your responsibility there! And you better don't expect any responsibility talking from the ModGods here...
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