Comments on: Alan Moore on science, religion, and imagination

By: miasm

miasm — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:23:00 +0000

neither does interpretive dance but that’s another story.

By: mcburton

mcburton — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Moore should have said “heads” plural, for the world of ideas is really our social reality, it is the world of meaning that we mutually and collectively construct as part of our everyday lived experience. This is what social science is all about. Sociology was created by Emile Durkheim to investigate the world of ideas, the social reality:

‘The objective reality of social facts is sociology’s fundamental principle’ - Durkheim’s Aphorism.

By: Vincent Reynolds

Vincent Reynolds — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 03:09:00 +0000

Interesting, and very “Christian” reply, Soop. My wife, a recovering Catholic, reminded me of “Word made flesh”. It just always struck me as “man who has knowledge of God’s message”—I’m not really seeing the “meta-narrative” in the term.

BTW, I don’t smoke, and, sadly, I haven’t read any of Alan Moore’s fiction since his wonderful Swamp Thing run. Didn’t your Christ say something pertaining to judging?

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:31:00 +0000

The Suspended Man symbolizes the word made flesh for reasons which I will leave to Paul Foster Case to explain since they’re densely esoteric.

By: Lise chen

Lise chen — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:44:00 +0000

Whoa, where is it in the Tarot?

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:18:00 +0000

Mind your manners.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:15:00 +0000

…I have never heard them refer to Jesus as the “Word of God”.

It’s a basic tenet of many Christian philosophies. It’s even in the Tarot.

By: Soopermexican

Soopermexican — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:54:00 +0000

geometric shapes don’t suffer entropy.

By: Soopermexican

Soopermexican — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:49:00 +0000

Yup, you’re proving my point exactly. This is in scripture, and has been very profoundly expounded upon by some of the most intelligent people in Western Civilization. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote volumes on the significance of why Christ is the “Word”, in Greek, the Logos, and how this identity of His illuminates the human condition and perspective. Bt y wldn’t knw tht bcs y thnk t’s prfnd t drl vr Lst Grls nd ht th bng.

By: Vincent Reynolds

Vincent Reynolds — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:43:00 +0000

I’ve heard Christians refer to their Christ as the son of God, who delivered the word of God, but I have never heard them refer to Jesus as the “Word of God”. I’m thinking that all philosophical problems look like nails to someone who has thrown away every tool except his big, Christian hammer.

By: zebbart

zebbart — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:51:00 +0000

Alex Rosenberg has recently come out with a book describing and defending the implications of eliminative materialism – he happily takes on the label “scientism” – called “The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions.” Just today Ed Feser posted part 4 of his response, dealing specifically with the problems with reductionism/eliminativism. I found it very interesting and relevant to this post. http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/12/reading-rosenberg-part-v.html

By: atimoshenko

atimoshenko — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:32:00 +0000

I really cannot see any genuine dichotomy between “the material world” and “the world of ideas… inside our head”. We only experience and interact with the material world to the extent that effects changes in our heads (well, in our nervous system…), and what goes on in our heads is a product of the combination of current and past interactions with the material world (and those heads function according to material world ‘rules’ also). Our consciousness then emerges from this loop the same way snowflakes find their shape.

By: Soopermexican

Soopermexican — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:05:00 +0000

I love Alan Moore, but the dichotomy was solved long ago. If modern “humanists” would put down the bong pipe and their pretension, they’d see that Christianity identified these two spheres of reality, and Christ repaired the chasm between. It is no coincidence that He is so often referred to as the “Word” of God. He is the meta-narrative. Seek the truth, and you shall find it, but only if you do it in humility, not along the self-worshipping path that Alan Moore paves, no matter how well intentioned, or beautifully decorated it is….

By: miasm

miasm — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 08:39:00 +0000

A critical faculty for your critique of reality:
The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek.

By: miasm

miasm — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 08:08:00 +0000

noen. stick in the mud.
:3

By: Michael Gates

Michael Gates — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:15:00 +0000

Some of each.

By: hypnosifl

hypnosifl — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 05:20:00 +0000

Well, like what? When he claims that science grew out of “occult practices” for example, he isn’t claiming those occult ideas were actually correct (granted as a historical claim this is kind of dubious, but certainly you can find historians who think that early science was influenced in significant ways by occult ideas at the time, even if they weren’t the sole or most important influence).

By: noen

noen — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:50:00 +0000

Sounds like gibberish to me. So… I would guess you have a future in continental philosophy.

By: Ito Kagehisa

Ito Kagehisa — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:45:00 +0000

Shameful, or darkly amusing?

By: Ito Kagehisa

Ito Kagehisa — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:44:00 +0000

That sort of statement always reminds me of Jaques Derrida.

By: noen

noen — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:41:00 +0000

Deleuze is incoherent.

By: Trevcaru

Trevcaru — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:30:00 +0000

Im calling it a rip-off cause it sounds like a watered down misunderstanding of what Aldous Huxley wrote, “Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds – the given and the homemade, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols” and he then goes on to speak of the dangers of identification with symbolism (or as Alan puts it: ‘ideas’). Where as Alan is simply repeating the mantra of the glorification of thought that i hear so often.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:08:00 +0000

Philosophers sometimes build off the ideas of other philosophers. It’s not usually called a rip-off.

By: Trevcaru

Trevcaru — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 01:29:00 +0000

“My basic premise is that human beings are amphibious, in the etymological sense of ‘two lives’. We have one life in the solid material world that is most perfectly measured by science. Science is the most exquisite tool that we’ve developed for measuring that hard, physical, material world. Then there is the world of ideas which is inside our head.”

Lol, sounds like a rip-off/bastardization of Aldous Huxley’s foreward in J. Krishnamurti’s book ‘The First And Last Freedom’.

By: miasm

miasm — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:52:00 +0000

epistemologically, your perception is dependant on entropic processes, so will always be entrained within the process that generates it.
Making a priori assumptions about the existence of a meta-entropy transcending our vacuum seems a little presumptuous.
Kind of like a circle expecting the universe above flatland to be flat but, you know, MORE flat.

By: zebbart

zebbart — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:35:00 +0000

Cool, thanks.

By: zebbart

zebbart — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:33:00 +0000

Will do. What do you mean miasm?

By: miasm

miasm — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:13:00 +0000

…just don’t mistake the real (mind independent) world for something actually possessing the properties of dimensionality or momentum or anything.

By: HahTse

HahTse — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:52:00 +0000

Biology at it’s most basic is “just” organic chemistry.
Chemistry, in turn, is “just” the physics of the atomic shell (sorry, google translation).

By: Mitchell Glaser

Mitchell Glaser — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:38:00 +0000

Oh yes, there was a kerfluffle about the pseudo-science folks getting their fair representation at the visitors center. And indeed, you can buy a lovely coffee table book detailing how Noah’s Flood created the canyon three thousand years ago. It’s shameful, as Moore points out.