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coberst

<t>Modern Economics: Natural or Social Science? Economics is a natural science because natural science is about the study of objects rather than subjects. Labor, land, and money, the basic elements of economics, are all commodities of modern economics (objects of commerce), i.e. humans ar...

coberst

<t>Why do Social Theories Become Ideologies? An ideology is systematically biased by its assumptions and it constantly must protect its assumptions from erosion if it is to maintain the status of its ideology. For Marx the ideologist becomes a constant apologist for his ideology. An uncri...

coberst

<t>Greed is a Character Trait not an Emotion! Greed is a habit formed through constant repetition. It is an act of will. Emotion, also called instinct, is a product of natural selection. Only the human animal is greedy. What is character? Character is the network of habits that...

coberst

<t>How can I learn what are my illusions? In the dialogue â€œApologyâ€ Plato writes about Socrates while in the dungeon just before drinking the hemlock that the citizens of Athens condemned him to be executed. In the dungeon shortly before drinking from the hemlock cup Socrat...

coberst

<t>Bill Sikes;1317735 wrote: And yet progress in human evolution has very largely stopped over the last 50 years or so - and the brakes are still being applied. It could be, however, that science gives adaptation a huge and rather unpredictable kick in the next few years. The proces...

coberst

<t>The natural sciences brush aside that which cannot be "measured" with standard "scientific" methods. That technique works well for such matters as the natural sciences deal with. However, there are vitally important matters that cannot use such techniques and to ignore them is to endanger the hum...

coberst

<t>Natural Science â€œdon allow no meaning in hereâ€! Natural science clears the land before it builds its structures. NATURAL SCIENCE IS BULLDOZIER might be a useful linguistic metaphor for comprehending how the natural sciences function. The first thing that a Normal Science...

coberst

<t>Royd Fissure;1317223 wrote: I hadn't even thought of Habermas, will have to re-read with that in mind. I really only focused on the issue of dialectic because when I was scanning the uni library online I was looking for material to help me understand a particular interpretation of one of Vygotsky...

coberst

<t>Royd Fissure;1317055 wrote: Have you read Vygotsky or his interpreters on dialectical learning? Vera John-Steiner has written some really interesting stuff on it. I'm still trying to come to grips with it myself but it's fascinating. Sociocultural Approaches to Learning and Development...

coberst

<t>A person can walk the corridors of any big city hospital and observe the effectiveness of human rationality in action. One can also visit the UN building in NYC or read the morning papers and observe just how ineffective, frustrating and disappointing human rationality can be. Why does human reas...

coberst

<t>Does Natural Science Encourage a Narrow Mind? Paradigm directed science encourages the scientist to steadfastly adhere to carefully crafted narrow minded thinking. Because â€œnormal scienceâ€ has been so successful in achieving its narrow goals I claim that our whole society has becom...

coberst

<t>What is this disease to which I allude? There is a chain of cause and effect in many things and it is difficult to determine the sui generis of this chain of reaction. I shall just take the present obvious effect to define our (American) disease to be our uncritical faith in laissez-fa...

coberst

<t>Clodhopper;1316205 wrote: But knowledge is grist to the mill of understanding. Education is a constant balancing act between the two, and the varied natures of the subjects. Not sure how you got there from the oilspill though! To quote the post "Caring is necessary for...

coberst

<t>The Oil Spill is Only a Symptom The Gulf oil spill is a minor skin rash that is of great importance primarily because it signals us of the presence of a disease capable of destroying our civilization. The herd is stampeding toward the cliffs and there is an unsophisticated ...

coberst

<t>I think that symbols, like flags, appeal primarily to the emotions. Manipulation of the emotions is the primary means for manipulating the naive and manipulating the naive is necessary for power within a democracy such as we have in America. "Tea" is such a symbol and we can see how this symbol, ...

coberst

<t>Flag: Making the Abstract Concrete The flag is a symbol of an ideology; a symbol is an act, sound, or objects having cultural significance and the capacity to excite an emotional response. Ideology often reifies, i.e. making into an object an abstract idea, for the purpose of concretiz...

coberst

<t>Individuality: Creation versus Adaptation Creation/Adaptationâ€”Meaning/Biologyâ€”creation is to adaptation as meaning is to biology. Our species is a great experiment by Mother Natureâ€”can a species of animals with self-consciousness survive quick extinction? We...

coberst

<t>Psychoanalysis is Quantum Mechanics I use the metaphor Psychoanalysis is Quantum Mechanics as a linguistic means to convey to you my comprehension of PSA (psychoanalysis) is somewhat based upon my comprehension of QM (quantum mechanics). This is not to say that I know a lot about eithe...

coberst

<t>Socrates says â€œknow thyselfâ€: I say which self? I donâ€™t know what happened to me. I was beside my self with worry. My pet dog Fido uses his imagination to create image schemas to help him to comprehend and move about in his world. I use my imagination in mu...

coberst

<t>DrLeftover I agree with your statement â€œThe difference is that while we also communicate those thoughts, we can also think in abstract terms, and communicate those as well.â€ Therein lay the difference in kind between the human animal and all other animals. We can think abstractly a...

coberst

<t>Evolution has not prepared us for this Humans are animals with self-consciousness. This self-consciousness may show it self to some small degree in other animals but this capacity for self-consciousness makes our species different in kind from other animals and this difference makes al...

coberst

<t>Wiki says: â€œPoetic justice is a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct." To call this situation poetic justice is not to say that it is justice th...

coberst

The United States with 5% of the global population, which consumes 25% of the global production of petroleum, becomes tarred with petroleum; that is poetic justice!

coberst

<t>spot;1312525 wrote: The American People are the victims of events in their own country, not the perpetrators. The American people are too naive to comprehend the problem and too frightened of reality to accept their responsibility. The basic problem began w...

coberst

<t>Bill Sikes;1312464 wrote: a) That's a horribly complicated statement, and: b) If I read it rightly, those words are wrong. Do a Google of poetic justice and then rewrite my statement so as to make my statement clearer and less complicated. I would appreciate your help....

coberst

<t>spot;1312462 wrote: American People. Poetic justice should only overtake the perpetrators, not their victims, and the People are surely the latter. In a democracy such as we have in the United States the people are sovereign and thus responsible for the situation that exists. The...

coberst

<t>Crude Poetic Justice? Wikipedia informs me that â€œpoetic justiceâ€ is a notion that fictional literature takes on as a cultural demand whereby literary outcomes must support moral standards by justifying in the end the virtuous behavior of the good guy and punishing the bad behavior ...

coberst

<t>Twinkies & Chipsâ€”Sound Bites & Bumper Stickers A steady diet of Twinkies and chips will give us a fat gut while a steady diet of sound bites and bumper stickers will give us a fat head. Political parties and television commercials often depend upon well-crafted sou...

coberst

<t>TruthBringer;1307768 wrote: Man need not interfere with the balance of nature. To do so could result in disturbing that balance, which would lead to the creation of new problems which could be far worse than the problem of overpopulation. We are meaning creating creatures. Humans...

coberst

<t>Art and Wit are Subversive of Civilization; in a â€˜Playful Wayâ€™ The repressions of modern life have lost for us the â€œprimary pleasures of which the censorship disapprovesâ€. Art and wit liberates repressed instinct; both rid us of our inhibitions and open the unconscious for insp...

coberst

<t>Dialogue/Cooperation as Debate/Conflict Dialogue is to cooperation as debate is to conflict. Dialogue utilizes communication to facilitate harmony with the other while debate utilizes argumentation power to facilitate victory over the other. Internet discussion forums advan...

coberst

<t>albertpollard;1307029 wrote: A changeless society, a traditional society, is characterized by the lack of alternatives. I would say a changeless or traditional society does not LACK alternatives, it simply sees itself as having no need to change. â€œIt is the way it is, it is good this...

coberst

<t>LarsMac;1306985 wrote: Sometimes I think I live on a different planet than you do. After this one, I am certain of it. No offense intended. Therein we can see a lesson. I think that one very important difference that an intellectual life might ha...

coberst

<t>Traditional Thinking If it did not happen yesterday it cannot happen tomorrowâ€”it has always been this way therefore it can be no other. This might be regarded as the traditional mode of thought. It is the mode of thinking taught to us by our educational institutions. Such thinking re...

coberst

<t>Lon;1306480 wrote: What would a typical day be like in the life of a true intellectual? From waking to bedtime. It would be interesting to get your opinion and how that day might vary from the non intellectual. I would say that an individual seeking to develop an intellectual lif...

coberst

<t>albertpollard;1306421 wrote: I see your point however unless one is independently wealthy one must concern themselves with the role of creater/consumer. No longer is there a society where one has a rich patron to support you while you concentrate on intellectual endevors. That being said you can ...

coberst

<t>Does an Intellectual Life Endanger Peace of Mind? Few individuals discover and display a talent, a personal resonance that can truly excite public appreciation. Those who do display such a resonance are truly rewarded. However, I am not particularly interested in those few but I am int...

coberst

<t>Personal heroism by means of individualism is a task requiring courage and self-confidence. Courage and self-confidence are characteristics of few sapiens, young or old. It is a path less traveled because it imposes terrifying burdens; these burdens display themselves by isolation from the common...

coberst

<t>AussiePam;1304629 wrote: I expect it's absolutely normal (not enlightened, not intellectual) for older people once in a while to consider old age as some kind of burden on family, society, etc... and then find a reason why somehow getting rid of this burden should not justifiably apply to them pe...

coberst

<t>Lon;1304618 wrote: What you say is of course true-------oligarchy exists through out our society and we see it in not only corporate America but in Religious and Military America. But my preference is for this kind of structure (it's not that severe in my view) as opposed to having all things run...

coberst

<t>Would IT have happened had Greenspan studied SGCS? Allan Greenspan is the former director of the Federal Reserve; â€œITâ€ is the giant financial boondoggle that almost sent the globe into another Great Depression. Greenspan admitted that the â€œmodelâ€ he was trusting was ...

coberst

Ahso

Thanks for taking up the baton.

coberst

<t>Lon;1304464 wrote: I don't think it's the intellectualism that most people seem to dislike, but the arrogance of many intellectuals. I would appreciate an example of how Corporate America keeps us dumb----IBM, Microsoft, Monsanto for example. Hasn't the government done a fai...

coberst

<t>Imagination and Ideology sent april 19 When I read page 12 of â€œIdeology and Discourseâ€ I became convinced that the metaphor â€˜Ideology is Paradigmâ€™ might be a good learning tool. I quote â€œideologies may have a schema-like nature, that is, consist of a number of conventional ca...

coberst

<t>Lon Thanks for posting your ideas. First, I will say that our (American) culture is very anti-intellectual and therein, I think, lays the rub. We are anti-intellectual because those who control public policy (Corporate America) keep us like dumb bovine because it...

coberst

<t>The Cost of Stayin Alive! I once asked a professor of philosophy â€œwhat is philosophy about?â€ he responded â€œphilosophy is a radically critical self-consciousnessâ€. It took me thirty years to understand this statement. I shall take a â€œradically critical self-consciou...

coberst

<t>Human Cognition is an Embodied Activity We have all grown up to consider thought to be primarily a matter of language and propositions. We have not generally been taught this notion explicitly but have acquired it through social osmosis (picked it up without conscious effort because it...

coberst

<t>We all do look inward and unfortunately one of the first things we see is that we are mortal. This becomes so anxiety producing that almost everything that we do is a result of humanity's first inward glance. First humans created soul, then gods, then God, then religion in our search for life eve...

coberst

<t>Objectivity is Our Shared Subjectivity Fingerprint and now DNA analysis are what I would call the epitome of objective truth. I say this because these two human characteristics are defining evidence upon which we judge a person guilty and thereby subject to the death penalty. <br/...

coberst

<t>Industrial Revolution: The Tipping point? We live in two very different worlds; a world of technical and technological order and clarity, and a world of personal and social disorder and confusion. We are increasingly able to solve problems in one domain and increasingly endangered by o...

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