From: steiny@steiny.com (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: alt.california
Subject: Re: relocation
Date: 21 Nov 92 05:56:13 GMT
Organization: Don Steiny Software

mike@inti.lbl.gov (Michael Helm) writes (quoting me):

>>	A "political spectrum" is just catagories some people choose 
>>(I don't think you have a choice yet), to use.   The catagories are not
>>the stuff.   Catagories can be useful to organize, communicate, and 
                          ^^^ ^^ [note]
>>predict, but they can also fail at their task.   Since they are simply
>>observations about the world and not the world itself we can use them or
>>discard them at will.

>>	But why bother?    If you call Reagan a fascist, or you call Reagan
>>a socialist, what have you done?   Nothing.   You are just being a trained
>>pigeon. 

>I'm having a certain amount of cognitive dissonance here; I cannot
>reconcile these 2 paragraphs.  On the one hand, you say categories
>are useful to organize & communicate &c. I heartily agree; if I didn't
 ^^^ [note]
>have any shorthand for some things, I'd never get anywhere.  
>say, if you call N category M, you haven't accomplished anything.
>Which is it?  Or how do you stitch this together?  I don't get it.

	You misread what I wrote.  I said "can be."  In this case they
are not.  I have been writing that calling Bush a fascist is not
useful.  A previous article had put great weight in the importance 
of placing people and events on a "poltical spectrum."  It used as
an argument that political spectrums were important because they were 
taught in basic political science classes.  I [and others] pointed
out that if you study more advance political science such things
become less important.  I sketched out one of the issues.

>Incidentally, what is a "trained pigeon"?  One can see a pigeon,
>I guess, but how do you see "trained"?  I expect you agree these words
>have no meaning.

	Of course the have no "meaning" how could they?   Why would the
ability to see a pigeon give the word any more meaning than something
you couldn't see?    My hope would be that by using the words I could
cause you to conjure up an image of a trained pigeon, and even better
that you would recall reading of the experiments done by B. F. Skinner.   

Aldous Huxley said something about language that I think is very
beautiful and apppropriate . . .

    " ... The suggestion is that the function of the brain and
    nervous system and sense organs is mainly *eliminative* and
    not productive.  Each person at each moment is capable of
    remembering everything that is happening everywere in the
    universe.  The function of the brain and nervous system is to
    protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of
    largely irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we
    should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and
    leaving only that very small and special selection which is
    likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory ,
    each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.  But in so far as
    we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.  To
    make biological survival possible Mind at Large has to be
    funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous
    system.  What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle
    of the kind of consciousness whic will help us to stay alive
    on the surface of this particular planet.  To formulate and
    express the contents of this reduced awareness, many has
    invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and
    implicit philosophies which we call languages.  Every
    individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the
    linguistic tradition into which he has been born -- the
    beneficiary inasmuch as language  gives access to the
    accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim
    is so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced
    awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense
    of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for
    data, his words for actual things.[1]

____________________
[1] Aldous Huxley *The Doors of Perception*,  Harper  Colophon  books.
1954. pps 22-23.

-don
-- 
Don Steiny
Don Steiny Software
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
(408) 425-0382