michael@spar.UUCP (Not Bill Joy) (03/31/86)
In article <2196@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.ARPA writes: >> postulate a Cosmic Observer who has been there since the beginning of >> time, to assure the existence of everything during those periods of our >> not-looking. > >You mean, the Cosmic Observer was sleeping nicely >until all those philosophers babbling nonsense >woke it up, at which time it retroactively created >the state of the universe, INCLUDING the babbling >philosophers? Seems rather unlikely it would make >the same mistake twice. > >P.S. Please keep this out of net.sci,net.physics, >and other technical newsgroups, and in return I'll >quit posting responses back into the silly groups. I consciously removed "net.physics" from the list of newsgroups in my response to Matthew Wiener's original article. Whether I should have also removed "net.sci" is not totally clear, since that group has partly served as a forum for matters whose scientific status is in question, such as the debate on parapsychology. One point which seems totally beyond your bitterly shrivelled mind, Mr. Gwyn, is that those "defenders of scientific purity" who believe in an absolutely existing objective universe have made almost precisely the same ontological commitments as those who believe in a Spinozan Deity. If it is the consensus that either Matthew's original or my followup did not belong in net.sci, I will refrain from posting similar topics to that newsgroup in the future. Your flame, however, means less than nothing to me, Mr. Gwyn. Shove it.. -michael In the 16th & 17th centuries there was a fair competition between ancient western science and philosophy and the new scientific philosophy; there was never any fair competition between this entire complex of ideas and the myths, religions, procedures of of nonwestern societies. These myths, these religions, these procedures have disappeared or deteriorated not because science was better, but because the apostles of science were the more determined conquerors, because they materially suppressed the bearers of alternative cultures. There was colonization and suppression of the views of the tribes and nations colonized. These views were first replaced, first, by the religion of brotherly love, and then by the religion of science. -Paul Feyerabend