Let us talk about the elephant.

Post Reply New Topic

I am talking about the elephant in the room, which is in fact the elephant the blind men are researching, which [if you don't know that try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant ] is in brief, our reluctance or inability to specify [forget agree on] what we are discussing.

Several of the atheists keep shooting straw bogeyman Christians without inquiring what any Christian believes. Awesomely Glorious might say something similar about some of the theists. Liberals speak out against the atrocities committed by the Pickelhaube clad Conservative on their posters, Conservatives assume every selfstyled Liberal is the Borg. Most of the Philosophers show no sign of loving Wisdom.

I have allowed it to be known I am a Christian. I have said quite a lot of other stuff on what I do and do not understand about life, the universe and everything. And what comes back is "What you are REALLY saying is" attached to some thing that some aspect of the popular imagination "knows" - in Awesomely Glorious' sense of "is convinced" - Christians say.

No. If you got the chance to hear what Christians have often said of me - well, if you incline toward straw with no bricks you would not hear it anyway.

---------------

Anyway. Let me just throw you one of my personal primes.

The elephant is real. And it is an elephant, not a spear or rope or wall. It is an elephant and even comparimng notes the blindmen will not comprehend the whole of its elephantness.

Some of my colleagues would tell you there is no elephant. All there is is THIS blind man's construct, and THAT blind man's construct, and the existence of a real thing for them to perceive is as meaningless as Schroedinger's cat.

My colleagues are entitled to their view. Everybody has the right to be wrong, the only penalty for buying into stupidity is the fine mess it gets you into.

-------------

Please do not TELL me what this means. Try asking me, maybe.

Nope. Telling is more fun.

Problems with the elephant are that the elephant usually has very significant projections onto it, so the theology and morality of this "elephant" often end up changing even though no new facts are being gathered. The problem with projections is that even though some are inevitable, projections tend to undermine the very basis of our knowledge.

Even further, the set of perceptions about the elephant contradict, and no human being shows themselves in a position where they have a meaningful ability to know. Thus meaning, we either have to question every theology and be agnostic on the form of the elephant. OR we have to reject the elephant on its face incoherence.

Finally, elephant detection abilities are are generally found as unreliable. A lot of them tend to correspond more to physical change than anything else, which undermines the validity of our elephant inferences. (After all, a non-physical object cannot be detected from a set of determinist physical changes, if only because the changes do not change in response to non-physical objects) As well, a lot of the same kinds of abilities go wrong with such frequency, they become difficult to test, such as a the hordes of people who detect an elephant at work when nothing really is the issue upon a second glance.

I think you may be projecting. Are you taking the elephant to be God?

That is a different elephant - a Mumak if you will - and not really accessible enough to getr beyons speculation.

The elephant IN the room [ignoring the Urproboscidean outside] is the here-now space-time reality of the materialist scientist, the Ding an sich Truth of the philosopher.

It hadn't actually occured to me anyone would want to step outside. If it had, I would have worded that interpretation out better.

I am not projecting as that's the standard invocation of the elephant. No non-religious example fits into the problem at all, either. I mean, you can say "oh, liberals say X about conservatives", but the problem is that most of these other domains are amenable to specific facts. We're not blind here, we're running around trying to map a forest. Some people get lost, but for the most part, there is no reason why we can't map the entire thing out. The set of facts will have to add up to a total reality, so apparent contradictions are REAL contradictions. (The elephant analogy is actually meant to explain away APPARENT contradictions)

I think your broader application is wrong.

So these blind men walk into a room and one says, "I smell an elephant" and the others wonder what this elephant might be. Having never seen or really smelled or sensed an elephant one stumbles against a lamp and discovers an elephant requires electric power. Another knocks against the sofa and declares the elephant is stuffed with soft foam rubber. A third accidentally turns on the radio and discovers the elephant wants people to buy breakfast food. There is no denying the reality of these elephant parts but there is long argument as to how they fit together. They are sure the elephant is real since they have doubtlessly sensed its component parts but they really never do understand how they fit together. They declare it a miracle and a mystery.

And there we have a fundamental divide.

Awesomely glorious joins my brother [not a dig, it is what it is] in the half-full glass [my brother's analysis] postulate that the forest CAN be mapped.

I am - even if you and my brother are not - vision challenged. Literally and figuratively and in the common sense as well as the strict sense. My glass is half-empty, and my forest cannot be mapped any more than Schroedinger can stroke his cat.

It is not as simple, though some days I wish it were, as me asserting a reality you define out. I think your perceived reality is actually not that dissimilar to mine, and much as it might serve me to straw man you into a paper tiger we agree we do not currently know the whole forest.

If you for a moment put yourself into a world where the forest is not mappable beyond a fuzzy approximation, you will see that the elephant DOES apply to more than religion, even if you have only encountered it there up to now.. I will say that science is groping at the elephant, and making progress now we can share notes, but the elephant is changed from what it was and is changing even as we explore it.

I will tell you this, as a longtime linguist and observer of attempted communication: three people talking about ANYTHING is the blind men exploring the elephant.

^^^ What does 'real' (as in real elephant / universe) mean here?

The problem is that science isn't infinitely interpretable. There are a few valid interpretations, and they are called theories. However, the elephant, where one party only feels the trunk, the other the tusk, doesn't really fit. Science usually avoids such strong disagreements by being clearer.


Except it isn't. A person says something. Another person tries to grapple with what they perceive was said, and the grappling goes on until meaning is transferred. The blind men fail to transfer meaning though, and they do this because there is an UTTER lack of shared context.

Or we could have a strong foundation in apophatic theology and realize all our conceptualizations of the elephant are inherently limited. There's plenty of Christian theologies and relgious tradtions that are quite aware that we don't have actual data about God's essential nature. Nevertheless, religious lagnuage about God is valid inasmuch as it points us toward an experience of God beyond conceptualization- God is often best encountered in wordless silent contemplation after all our reasoning has brought us to the point that we know only what we do not know. It is here that issues of Aristotle's dialectic reasoning (the basis of the scientific method) do not matter- seeming contradictions in religion become irrelevnt because the contradictions, or paradox rather, are ultimately resolved into a complimentary unity without conflict. And its only by encountering these paradoxes within a living religious traditon we can really come to understand this unity to an increasing degree.

Now, wheather organized religion is something worthy of pursuit is another issue altogether, and I'd be the first to say organized religion has often made a mess of things, esp. in regards to how we approach religiou authority, and authoriity in general. But God's existence and/or relevence and validity to a given individual need not be constrained by the limitations of Ariistotilian logic, and its certainly possible to have relatively non-authoritarian approaches to religion and God- Quakers are a good example of this (even though Quakerism has issues of its own socologically, since its a religion dependent on mysticism for vibrancy, yet not everyone has mystical inclinations).

I take it as a prime that there IS a reality [this is an old problem in Linguistics and probably sits swept under the carpet in every science] to explore, that our task is to find as much as we can OF that reality.

Certain others in my field and, there is some evidence, in certain others, will maintain thsat what we find is [or is for practical purposes] reality and that Schrodinger's cat has no REAL status as live or dead until we find it.

Where do you stand on the cat? You tend to talk as if you are one who says the cat is neither alive nor dead OR both alive and dead, not one who says the cat is one or the other but ewe don't yet know. But I do not read you clearly enough to be sure.

Awesome:

I wonder how much is orientation and how much experience. The elephant of the scientific community, the parts I have looked at tend to be compartmentalized and subcompartmentalized, the geomancers do not share insights with the haruspices and those g on the third floor don't even talk the same language as us. You find SOME crossfertilization - I was getting insights into language out of history, geography, biology, psychology, anthropology, literature. But there is a lot less than you might think. Two people in the same field adhering to different theoretical schooils may not read the same journals or go to the same conferences.

And people conversing? If you actually converse mainly with people who negotiate toward shared meaning and communication, man, how I envy you. Rare in my experience. Most just say theitr piece without listening to yours.

But remember, the blind men CAN communicate and work toward a broader sense of the elephant. The tusk guy is not limited to one touch on the tusk - if he is any kind of blind man at all he will feel around and msay get to the ear. And they can talk, in fact in the story they DO talk, and COULD work toward synthesis.

Still, they will not come out at the elephas per se.

Daredelus1138 - I may pursue you anon, some points of interest there.

One the Quaker point. How likely was George Fox as a mystic - ant yet...

Not pursuing NOW because I DID start this not intending here to reprise some of the religious disputations.

But it isn't as if fields are usually allowed to go at complete opposites either. Cross-fertilization may not be as common as hoped, but usually at some point most fields will allow information in from other fields. Even economics, the most stiff-necked of the social sciences, has been opening up to this.

Even further though, fields saying the exact opposite is a bit harder.


Well, even if they don't in practice, they aren't blind men seeking the truth. It's a willful rejection, NOT an epistemic limiter. In my free time, I usually do communicate with people who negotiate towards shared meaning, at least when I am talking to others in person.


You know that now we're stretching the allegory. The idea is that they are limited to their ear or whatever have you. Now, you're right, we can apply reason to them and say, well, maybe they can do this... but that's not really what the story is about.

This is strange, I had a similar line of thought the other day, in reference to this very story.

A lot of people like to talk about the elephant without even touching it first.

THAT is all too true.

A LOT of hearsay about oliphaunts.

sorry for my abnormally long absence from my home, im sure you all missed me and my wittiness greatly lol jkjkjk

my problem is, as with the arguments me and my Uncle have with my grandma, is that MOST religious people when they "debate", if you can call that debating, they tend to make no sense and often times contradict themselves then saying its acceptable because they have "faith" and somehow because this scapegoat called "faith" that means that no matter how much they are wrong or how much they contradict themselves that it makes it ok all of a sudden because of the omnipresence of this so called "faith"