Subject:     	 Re: Q. on Penrose arg: why new *physics*?
From:         	"Phil Roberts, Jr." 
Date:         	1997/08/08
Message:	33eb565

JRStern wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 07 Aug 1997 15:39:12 -0400, "Phil Roberts, Jr."
>  wrote:
> >5. The reason Evel Knievel jumped across the Snake River canyon is because
> >was was trying to maximize his sense of self worth made deficient by
> >an increase in valuative objectivity within the species above and
> >beyond what is optimal for prudent behavior (Phil Roberts, Jr.).
> >
> >I think 5 is the obvious winner.  Obviously you're not buying it.
> >Explain please.
> 
> I think that there are explanations which exhaust the irrefutable data
> without committing to any of the metaphysical issues you describe.

I'm always amused at how mechanistic materialists always think everyone 
else is dabbling in metaphysics.

>  He
> jumped for the bux, he gets bux this way because of a hundred earlier
> occurrences in life, some of which may well have been like one of your
> 1-5. 

It was for practical reasons?  In other words, Lorentz, myself, Thorndike,
Freud, the sociobiologists, etc. are all pretty much been wasting their time
worrying about something which, for you at least, seems like a perfectly
reasonable way to perpetuate DNA (in terms of the physical cost benefit
equations).    

This of course leaves me just
dying with curiousity as to just exactly what an organism would have to
do before it got around to getting your attention, unless, of course,
you are proposing we should adopt evolutionary theory as an unfalsifiable
dogma.  Is that what you are proposing?

> Without being able to prove it false, I sure don't like #5,
> which (if I understand it) suggests he did it primarily for the danger
> because society shaped him thus, not for immediate reward.  Is
> self-worth supposed to be identical to net financial worth?  I hope
> not, but that can be read into #5.
> 

Actually, just about everything humans are doing can be read into 5.  
Otherwise we would behave more like, let us say, lions, another 
social species, who between lying in the grass, eating food and 
screwing their mates, are pretty much free to just lie around 
and gaze into the horizon.  I sort of envy them, at times, don't
you?

> And with that, I will absent myself from further participation in this
> thread at this time.
>

Bummer!  Exit stage left in your boxer shorts, eh?

-- 

               Phil Roberts, Jr.

Feelings of Worthlessness from the Perspective 
     of So-Called Cognitive Science
  http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5476