To the best of my recollection, I either dropped out of the only philosophy class I ever took in college or it was the only one I flunked out of with an “F”. I’m quite sure it was the latter. I have read a little since about Descartes but know very little about his writing or the details involved in his ideas. What I do recall is that he…
To the best of my recollection, I either dropped out of the only philosophy class I ever took in college or it was the only one I flunked out of with an “F”. I’m quite sure it was the latter. I have read a little since about Descartes but know very little about his writing or the details involved in his ideas. What I do recall is that he believed that all knowledge comes from god as he defined “him”.
So, while Descartes apparently believed that man can fix things using science, he must have also stood for the proposition that the god of his Christian religion was the puppeteer behind the curtain and the arbiter of all things. If I have that right, there isn’t so much a collision between salvationist religions, in which the Second Coming or “Judgment Day” or “end times” remove the righteous believers from the earth, and the view of man as his own savior through discovery or science, as there is a merging of those things.
In any case, those two “core cultural assumptions” identified are two of several which all feed significantly into the impending disaster. A third is “original sin”. A fourth is the “strict father” myth or metaphor (leading to patriarchy and various other evils). The fifth is that knowledge is disembodied, i.e., derived from an external omniscient authority, which for Descartes was his god in the sky guy.
The first four erroneous assumptions are, in my humble estimation, perpetuated principally by the fifth. The idea that knowledge emanates from and exists anywhere outside of the human mind is bonkers and dangerous. If mental telepathy is a real phenomenon, it does not transmit much in the way of knowledge.
Data, symbols, information, language, etc., fill books and other media. Those things are inert and lifeless until they are processed by a sentient human being (which processing should not ever be compared to computer processing). Cognition is the creation of knowledge, and when the person who engaged in thinking, organizing, acting, feeling, remembering, imagining, creating, etc., etc., dies, that exclusive and mostly private and personal knowledge no longer exists in the same form or architecture. Cognition occurs in the human body/mind and cognition equals knowledge, right or wrong, true or false.
Every day in nearly every school in the US, the fallacious conception of knowledge as delivered from external sources, i. e., authorities, teachers, experts, textbooks, media, etc., is being imprinted indelibly on the perceptions and thinking of millions of students. They have no clue about the fact that they have the ability, the need, and the obligation to utilize information from wherever they find it to create and recreate knowledge with which to change the world. Inestimable opportunities are lost. Confusion reigns. People with minimal legitimacy or capability are in positions of power and influence. And then, coercion is used via the attendance law to add insult to injury and to undermine confidence, initiative, and autonomy.
We have the empirical science to point the way. We could start by fixing these things. When will those who are in positions of leadership ever stop pretending that schools will fix themselves?
To the best of my recollection, I either dropped out of the only philosophy class I ever took in college or it was the only one I flunked out of with an “F”. I’m quite sure it was the latter. I have read a little since about Descartes but know very little about his writing or the details involved in his ideas. What I do recall is that he believed that all knowledge comes from god as he defined “him”.
So, while Descartes apparently believed that man can fix things using science, he must have also stood for the proposition that the god of his Christian religion was the puppeteer behind the curtain and the arbiter of all things. If I have that right, there isn’t so much a collision between salvationist religions, in which the Second Coming or “Judgment Day” or “end times” remove the righteous believers from the earth, and the view of man as his own savior through discovery or science, as there is a merging of those things.
In any case, those two “core cultural assumptions” identified are two of several which all feed significantly into the impending disaster. A third is “original sin”. A fourth is the “strict father” myth or metaphor (leading to patriarchy and various other evils). The fifth is that knowledge is disembodied, i.e., derived from an external omniscient authority, which for Descartes was his god in the sky guy.
The first four erroneous assumptions are, in my humble estimation, perpetuated principally by the fifth. The idea that knowledge emanates from and exists anywhere outside of the human mind is bonkers and dangerous. If mental telepathy is a real phenomenon, it does not transmit much in the way of knowledge.
Data, symbols, information, language, etc., fill books and other media. Those things are inert and lifeless until they are processed by a sentient human being (which processing should not ever be compared to computer processing). Cognition is the creation of knowledge, and when the person who engaged in thinking, organizing, acting, feeling, remembering, imagining, creating, etc., etc., dies, that exclusive and mostly private and personal knowledge no longer exists in the same form or architecture. Cognition occurs in the human body/mind and cognition equals knowledge, right or wrong, true or false.
Every day in nearly every school in the US, the fallacious conception of knowledge as delivered from external sources, i. e., authorities, teachers, experts, textbooks, media, etc., is being imprinted indelibly on the perceptions and thinking of millions of students. They have no clue about the fact that they have the ability, the need, and the obligation to utilize information from wherever they find it to create and recreate knowledge with which to change the world. Inestimable opportunities are lost. Confusion reigns. People with minimal legitimacy or capability are in positions of power and influence. And then, coercion is used via the attendance law to add insult to injury and to undermine confidence, initiative, and autonomy.
We have the empirical science to point the way. We could start by fixing these things. When will those who are in positions of leadership ever stop pretending that schools will fix themselves?