From: brian@quake.sylmar.ca.us (Brian K. Yoder)
Subject: Re: MINDWALK - An exercise in Passionate Thought
Organization: Quake Public Access
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 08:04:02 GMT

nomad23.demon.co.uk (Nick Wood) writes:
u.washington.edu>
hardy.u.washington.edu writes:

>"Let's put Mother Nature on the rack, that she might reveal her treasures"
>                                                                    Bacon

>Nice to see that you have so internalised the thoughts of your masters

Im a free thinker and so was Bacon.  At least I didn't have to learn what
the world is like from some crackpot who made a movie.  Just who do
you think these "masters" are?  The leftist teachers I had in school?
My religious parents?  My statist government "representatives"?

It sounds like you are a bit paranoid here by thinking that anyone who
disagrees with you is merely subject to brainwashing by evil "masters".
Grow up.

>that you consider them your own, so imprinted on your physical being that
>it legitimates your emotions.

What emotions are those?  And how did I get them?

>        Woe! Woe!
>        Thou hast it destroyed,
>        The beautiful world,

Destroyed?  Would you rather have lived here on Earth back before
it was destroyed?  Before vehicles, medicines, electricity, indoor
plumbing, abundant food, electronic entertainment?  Far from having 
been "destroyed" by civilization, it has been built out of valueless 
wilderness.

>        With powerful fist:

If you are going to change the world for the better, is not power
necessary?  Actually, modern civilization allows us to change the
world with gentle pushing of buttons and pulling levers, as opposed
to the ancient kind of world you desire where the most powerful fist
cant produce even a tiny percentage of what you can here and now.

>        In ruin 't is hurled,

Is the LA basin more ruined now than it was 300 years ago?  On the
contrary, it was next to valueless then, and now it's a wonderful place.

>        By the blow of a demigod shattered!
>        The scattered
>        Fragments into the void we carry,
>        Deploring
>        The beauty perished beyond restoring.  Goethe's Faust

iI guess if your ideas are too insane to promote openly, you have to
resort to poetry.  If memory serves, Nietzsche said "Behold the
poets, they muddy their waters to make them appear deep."

>And as emotion is beyond our capacity to express intelligently, 

I can express my emotions intelligently just fine.  I hate murderers,
tyrants, and thieves.  I can explain why I do too.  I love intelligent
capable beautiful people, and I can explain that too.

>as we
>are incapable of thought, but only of thinking - abstract symbol
>manipulation, 

Really!  Then you are saying that none of your statements have 
anything to say about the real world?  If so, please stop using up
net bandwidth and act consistently with your own ideas.  If you
really insist that you cannot think, then be honest about it.

By the way, your own argument includes within it the premise that
you are indeed able to think.  That means your statement is 
internally inconsistent...you are saying "This statement is not true.".

>lets behave just like those (Facists) whom we so
>                                                   HATE! HATE! HATE!

Do you have any reasons for hating fascists?  Or is this just
an inexplicable fact?  Just what do you think a fascist is?
Just what do you not like about them?

>>these gentlemen are theorizing about something in the world, and
>>are thus subject to logical analysis and real critique.

>Thus it was that we in the west, lost our sense of the sacred, 

Would you care to define what it means to be sacred and why anything
ought to be considered sacred?  Or is this just an eruption of your
emotional irrational mind?

>a denial
>of our own subjective experience. Capra is only an expression of this
>sense of loss - this 'finer sense' - intuition does not negate reason but
>is its source, and also source for all truely creative science.

Reason speaks on ALL issues.  This mushy thinking that intuition is 
somehow a valid means of knowledge is completely incomaptible with
reason.  Reason is a jealous god.

>Now some more enlightened scientists, 

I would say "benighted", and they are NOT scientists since they have 
given up on science and pursued something else.

>are coming to a greater conscious
>realisation of this "Whoeness and the implicate order" 

What does this platitude mean?  I know...do you?

>and are beginning
>to develop theories/methodologies that will     point the way to more
>coherent ideas in all fields.

Coherent with what?  Your irrational intuitions?  Your emotional whims?
Your political ideology?

>This restoration of the objective value of subjectivity has consequences,

So, what IS that value?  I maintain that the only way to know reality is by
objective analysis, not by whim-ridden subjectivity.

>one of which is the growing awareness of the totally irrational 

But YOU are the one condemning rationality.

>way we
>manage (or mismanage) the ecosphere

Are you actually saying that life in the late 20th century is not the best it has

ever been?  Of course there is room for improvement.  One of the
best ones is to root out pseudoscientific political ideologies such as 
yours, Hitlers, and Marx's.

> - the position of brain (and body)
>dead technicians in our political/economic/military power structures will
>become increasingly intolerable.

What's so intolerable about the western/capitalist/industrialist/scientific
world?  There are plenty of atrocities going on elsewhere, but thing are
really great here.  You sound like a little kid who since he can't 
instantly be given  everything he wantswithout expending any
effort. Grow up.

--Brian