Neoboho, are you perhaps thinking of what Jung called "unconscious collective archetypes"? (see my Campbell excerpt above; ex-plane-ing a conversation into just length and width makes it hardly recognizable--science, any explanatory system, distorts in the effort to discuss, there's no getting away from it)

There's a huge difference between dishes in a cupboard and a table laid for a holiday dinner.

How much embryology do you know? Large vertebrate brains don't finish growing for 5-6 years or so. You know those ridges on your head? The ones between the individual bones? They're wide open on most newborns. There's a big squishy spot at the crown of your head for a long time.

As the brain grows, in its unique socio-historical setting, the archetypes are woven of the stuff of our earliest experiences. So we have the denotation, our unique 1st Christmas or Hannukah or Rohatsu, where Uncle So-and-So played Father Time and Aunt Whatsername played Mother Nature or what have you, and the connotation: We are one in the spirit (all electric circuits must have a common ground, for our Borg brothers and sisters).

Posted at November 18, 2007 5:56 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design

An excerpt from my main guru, Joseph Campbell.
___________________________________

METAPHORS, THE LANGUAGE OF MYTH

The life of a mythology springs from and depends on the metaphoric vigor of its symbols. These deliver more than just an intellectual concept, for such is their inner character that they provide a sense of actual participa­tion in a realization of transcendence. The symbol, energized by metaphor, conveys, not just an idea of the infinite but some realization of the infinite. We must remember, however, that the metaphors of one historically con­ditioned period, and the symbols they innervate, may not speak to the per­sons who are living long after that historical moment and whose consciousness has been formed through altogether different experiences.

While times and conditions change drastically, the subject of historical conditioning throughout the centuries, that is the complex psychosomatic unity we call the human person, remains a constant. What Adolph Bastian described as "elementary ideas," and Jung referred to as "archetypes of the collective unconscious" are the biologically rooted motivating powers and connoted references for the mythologies that, cast in the metaphors of changing historical and cultural periods, remain themselves constant. [I'm not so sure about that; wouldn't we still be Neanderthal, or Cro-Magnon, or Homo Habilis?]

The metaphors perform their function of speaking to these deep levels of human beings when they arise freshly from the contemporary context of experience. And a new mythology is rapidly becoming a necessity both so­cially and spiritually as the metaphors of the past, such as the Virgin Birth and the Promised Land, misread consequently as facts, lose their vitality and become concretized. But that new mythology is already implicit among us, native to the mind waiting as the sleeping prince does for the kiss of his beloved, to be awakened by new metaphoric symbolization. These will be derived necessarily from contemporary life, thought, and experience and, as the special language that can of its own power touch the innermost layers of consciousness, provide a reinvigorated mythology to us.

Artists share the calling, according to their disciplines and crafts, to cast the new images of mythology. That is, they provide the contemporary metaphors that allow us to realize the transcendent, infinite, and abundant nature of being as it is. Their metaphors are the essential elements of the symbols that make manifest the radiance of the world just as it is, rather than arguing that it should be one way or the other. They reveal it as it is.

A mythology may be understood as an organization of metaphorical figures connotative of states of mind that are not finally of this or that lo­cation or historical period, even though the figures themselves seem on their surface to suggest such a concrete localization. The metaphorical lan­guages of both mythology and metaphysics are not denotative of actual worlds or gods, but rather connote levels and entities within the person touched by them. Metaphors only seem to describe the outer world of time and place. Their real universe is the spiritual realm of the inner life. The Kingdom of God is within you.

The problem, as we have noted many times, is that these metaphors, which concern that which cannot in any other way be told, are misread prosaically as referring to tangible facts and historical occurrences. The de­notation -—that is, the reference in time and space: a particular Virgin Birth, the End of the World—is taken as the message, and the connotation, the rich aura of the metaphor in which its spiritual significance may be de­tected, is ignored altogether. The result is that we are left with the particu­lar "ethnic" inflection of the metaphor, the historical vesture, rather than the living spiritual core.
Inevitably, therefore, the popular understanding is focused on the ritu­als and legends of the local system, and the sense of the symbols is reduced to the concrete goals of a particular political system of socialization. When the language of metaphor is misunderstood and its surface structures be­come brittle, it evokes merely the current time-and-place-bound order of things and its spiritual signal, if transmitted at all, becomes ever fainter.

It has puzzled me greatly that the emphasis in the professional exegesis of the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology has been on the denota­tive rather than on the connotative meaning of the metaphoric imagery that is its active language. The Virgin Birth, as I have mentioned, has been presented as an historical fact, fashioned into a concrete article of faith over which theologians have argued for hundreds of years, often with grave and disruptive consequences. Practically every mythology in the world has used this "elementary" or co-natural idea of a virgin birth to refer to a spiritual rather than an historical reality. The same, as I have suggested, is true of the metaphor of the Promised Land, which in its denotation plots nothing but a piece of earthly geography to be taken by force. Its connotation—that is, its real meaning—however, is of a spiritual place in the heart that can only be entered by contemplation.

(Campbell, J. (2001). Thou Art That: Transforming religious metaphor. pp. 6-7, emphasis added. Novato, CA: New World Library.)

Posted at November 18, 2007 4:46 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design

As much as I like your signature, I must say, HEY STAR FLEET! You're badly misconstruing me. We are born as utterly dependent infants, are nurtured, and require intense support before we can live on our own. As you point out, life is indeed a cycle.

This is a good example of a limitation of this medium. The same type of thinking we use to see these words and read them also is used to dissect and analyze. So we tear each other to shreds over misperceived divisions.

I'm a certified nursing assistant. I've seen things the Boy Scouts never prepared me for. And that's on a daily basis, even before going to breakfast.

If you would read what I have written without shredding it as you read, STAR FLEET, you might find that I've been preaching the gospel of Zen here all week. Evidently to little effect.

KNOCK-KNOCK
(who's there?)
COSMOS!
(cosmos who?)
KNOW! COSMOS YOU!

So there, STAR FLEET ;-)

Posted at November 18, 2007 4:18 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design

Naturalism is the assumption that the methods of the natural sciences are all we need; if it can't be studied by the natural method, it is presumed not to be real.

I agree with the view that Self-correction, as an astute commenter pointed out, is the cardinal virtue for modern science, in direct contrast to upholding unwillingness to change as a virtue, as our opponents do.

In that spirit, I hope we can see that the overtly mechanistic character of our modern science, the same one that led to the industrial and computer and space age revolutions, played a crucial role in Western Europe's conquest of the world between mid-1400s to the turn of the 20th century. The machines with which we did it, now that we've reproduced them exponentially for generations, and the way we use them (how many jet engines are burning fuel right now? ships, whose bus-sized engines burn 24/7/365? trains? SUVs?) are responsible for global warming.

The Right is using Intelligent Design as its stalking horse for getting its theology into the classroom more overtly than it's already present (as the background of the cultural at large; no school district will let you out on Buddha's birthday). Naturalism used to be all about proving god's exitence, then it demoted god to a blind watchmaker before finally hiding him in the basement.

We still talk about the universe as if it were a manufactured device. I ask you, what is a tree made of? A table, yes, a table is made of wood. But a tree IS wood, it grows from within, it isn't made.

We have a god hiding in our science.

The Spanish held a trial, can't remember much off-hand, and concluded that enslaving the Indians was otay as long as you were doing it for their benefit as defined by "Christianizing the heathen." Columbus was after gold and slaves, not on some Sunday school charity drive.

The railroad and the rifled barrel were used to slaughter the buffalo explicitly in order to deprive the tribes of the Plains of not just food, but their mythical partners in a dance older than science.

Religion in the schools is already there, in the anachronistic, mechanistic, Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian science we assert as the antidote to religion in the schools, the same science that has brought us the ability to kill everyone on earth several times over, in more than one way, all by remote control.

The science I think we all hold dear, speaking as a guy who watched Star Trek on NBC back in the day, Apollo mission launches on TVs rolled into classrooms, and Neil Armstrong descend the ladder and not sink out of site in the lunar dust, I have high hopes for that science, even though I'm not so sure it can even exist.

The one we're under the spell of now is killing us.

(PS Howard: Debates often begin with definitions ;-) )

Posted at November 17, 2007 10:27 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design

BAAHAHAHAA! That's funny stuff. Hey, people ask Bill Cosby to answer for "Black America," why can't one white guy speak for the entire Left?

Posted at November 17, 2007 8:17 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design

Naturalism in philosophy, a theory that relates scientific method to philosophy by affirming that all beings and events in the universe (whatever their inherent character may be) are natural. Consequently, all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation. Although naturalism denies the existence of truly supernatural realities, it makes allowance for the supernatural, provided that knowledge of it can be had indirectly—that is, that natural objects be influenced by the so-called supernatural entities in a detectable way.

Naturalism presumes that nature is in principle completely knowable. There is in nature a regularity, unity, and wholeness that implies objective laws, without which the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be absurd. Man's endless search for concrete proofs of his beliefs is seen as a confirmation of naturalistic methodology. Naturalists point out that even when one scientific theory is abandoned in favour of another, man does not despair of knowing nature, nor does he repudiate the “natural method” in his search for truth. Theories change; methodology does not.

While naturalism has often been equated with materialism, it is much broader in scope. Materialism is indeed naturalistic, but the converse is not necessarily true. Strictly speaking, naturalism has no ontological preference; i.e., no bias toward any particular set of categories of reality: dualism and monism, atheism and theism, idealism and materialism are all per se compatible with it. So long as all of reality is natural, no other limitations are imposed. Naturalists have in fact expressed a wide variety of views, even to the point of developing a theistic naturalism.

"naturalism." Encyclopædia Britannica from Standard Edition. (2007).
______________________

LEVELING INSTEAD OF DIFFERENTIATING

The historical-ideological context of a given timespan always being confusing, the early psychologists may have had little awareness of and less inclination toward alternatives to what
Thines calls the "natural-versus- nonnatural antinomy" (in the 16th-18th century sense of "natural," i. e., amenable to sense observation) and the "natural-versus-mythical antinomy" (Freud's dilemma) with which they were faced.

Academic psychologists opted for the former position with the result that, as their work developed, consciousness became increasingly reduced to underlying physiology--which amounts to a leveling of phenomena that clearly belong to different cognitive strata. This homologizing was easily accomplished because the operation has all the earmarks of being legitimate.

Indeed, one can always restrict one's conceptualization of a phenomenon to selected
aspects--in preference to dealing with its totality. In other words one can always state less about a phenomenon than is actually
there without violating its nature--so long as one makes clear that one is abstracting from the phenomena. Without suitable clarification, such a reduction amounts to engaging in a long
discredited Cartesian dualism in which, for example, animals could be reduced to machines pure and simple. It also amounts to ignoring the "more" of the phenomenon (not to be confused with the "more" posited by vitalism)--a "more" which is admittedly hard to capture systematically but is precisely what constitutes the specificity or identity of the phenomenon (it should be noted that even physics, psychology's celebrated methodological model, respects phenomenal differences, e. g., different approaches are devised for dealing with mechanics, fluids, electricity).

Instead of leveling the phenomena, psychology ought to have differentiated them, emphasizing their specificity rather than their commonality with physical reality. Aiming for factual and rigorous knowledge is praiseworthy, but this aim cannot be meaningfully achieved if it requires disregarding the phenomena as they present themselves, empirically. What the researcher owes allegiance to, first and foremost, is the integrity of the phenomena--not his necessarily tentative and possibly erroneous methodology.

Kinget, G. M. (1979). Objective psychology: a case of epistemological sleight-of-hand. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 11(1), 83-96.
___________________

I come down on the side of allegiance to the phenomena, not the methodology.

Posted at November 17, 2007 8:13 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design

My idea of mythology is silly, eh? So what's yours? Any idea where I came up with my 4-item definition? No comment, just "silly."

Long before a marsupial finishes gestating, it climbs up it mother's belly, attaches itself to a nipple which then swells, connecting the fetus to the mother at the nipple. The fetus then completes its gestation there.

If you got a problem with that, take it up with a zoologist.

I don't have it at my fingertips, but I'm taking the quote from a talk given by Joseph Campbell. Myths fulfill for humans an analogous function as that provided by a marsupial's pouch, i.e., developmental. We require a decade or two before we can survive without intense support. So we grow up in the "womb with a view" of nursery rhymes, make believe, games, etc., by which we acquire our socialization.

If you're not joking, I give up.

You say my def. is silly without saying why or offering your own. You call that discussion?
______________
My response was to challenge your view of mythology, which I think is silly. Just to underscore this fluff, it is well known today that Homo sapiens sapiens arrived on the earth already fully socialized - there never was a time when that creature we call "Human" was not socialized. And it is pretty brazen to claim that creatures who had not acquired language produced mythology. It doesn't make any sense at all.
___________
WTF? You lost me. Are you seriously suggesting that there never is a time when we are not socialized? So a human is born fully socialized? You can't be serious.

Not even Decartes, who believed in innate ideas, believed we arrive on earth fully socialized. Tell me you're kidding, right?

Posted at November 17, 2007 8:01 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design

Same to ya.

As for confusing science and religion, that's what I'm saying! But I can't tell what you mean by religion, can you clarify?

I see it like this: We're under the rule of people who believe they and they alone are children of the creator and tyrant of the universe; the rest of us are "creatures" at best or just plain things. Outside of their group, they believe, is only sin and damnation. They therefore make war, rape, plunder, and enslave with righteous fury.

That's a better explanation of the last 500 years than "we're the beacon of Light, the hope of mankind, we just fall off the Peace wagon once in a while." It's an obvious explaining away of undeniably primate behavior. When one group of apes takes over another, the males rape the females and kill the children. Humans make glorious explanations for doing exactly what every other ape does.

Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian Science has played a crucial role in the enslavement and colonization of damn near the whole world. Technology itself is not the culprit: using an alphabet is already using technology.

It's the mechanistic conception of the cosmos that I object to. It's odd that, long ago, the Church claimed a monopoly on Truth, then came Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes, Voltaire, and many others, and we won for ourselves the right to trust our senses and experience. But Western Science is a recognizable child of Christendom. Our ideas of what we are and how the cosmos works have lead to mechanism and rationalism.

These two ideologies are now championed as science by "liberals," though it seems tragically mistaken to me. Anyone who questions the mechanistic assumption of Descartes is a heretic. Anyone who suggests Science doesn't know everything is a blasphemer.

I think we agree. The roles played by Science and Religion, once opposed, have converged, to the detriment of both.

Posted at November 16, 2007 6:48 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design

That's an excellent point, I agree. Do you not agree that science has often been used as if it were absolutely exclusive of religious truth?

My argument is this. Our brains make ratios. We are therefore rational beings. But that's not all we are.

Science reduces humans to mechanisms. It does. I think it's quite human to reject being thought of as a machine. Are you a machine? Aren't WE alive, and THINGS are, if not dead, at least lifeless?

The American religious right has a very specific history. That history goes all the way back to ancient Sumer. That mythological family believes in life as holy war between Good and Evil, Light and Dark, Truth and Lie .

American science, having grown up in this same mythological context, features the assumptions of those who create it.

Western science and the Abrahamic religions aren't all that different. Western science began as an effort to "prove" their God "true." It took a long time before a scientist could leave God out of a paper without censure.

Now science fulfills for many of us the same functions that religion fulfills for the religious right.

In political arguments, we all know that the Left is identified with Science, and the Right with Religion. As the silliness on this thread shows, if people see something they construe as criticizing Science, right away they tag you as a Religionist. The opposite holds true, too.

Us Good and Scientific/ Them Bad and Religionistic.

The assertion, by both sides, that 'Our truth is the only true truth," is the crux of the Science/Religion dynamic. We on the Left do indeed use Science as a religion.

People here are using the Cartesian mechanistic assumption, and Bacon's denial of subjectivity and intelligence to non-humans upon which it's based, among others, without even knowing it. Worse, spurious diatribes are made defending unexamined assumptions.

What do we expect? We're being dumbed down on purpose. Imagine if we had spent a trillion dollars on rebuilding every school and library in the country instead of sowing seeds of death.

Posted at November 16, 2007 6:03 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design

I see. When you block-quoted my reply to Elvis, you took personally what I said to Elvis, at least your questions suggest so. That's when I got twisted: I mistook you for the person to whom I was speaking.

Glad we got that straightened out.

Nothing to say about the "canard" of, shall we call it, PSYCHOLOGY? Or, if you prefer a more exotic term, let's call it Buddhism, how's that?

You call that discussion? I call it hit and run with a keyboard. BAAHAAAHAA! ;-)

Posted at November 16, 2007 5:31 PM in response to Conservatism's Unintelligent Design