> >Wilson who? When you say 'humanistic', just what do you
> >mean? Philosophy? History? Biology? Our sciences
> >will move away from a human-centric focus in time.
>
> E. O. Wilson- from 'Consilience', beginning of chapter 6 AFAIK, but my
> copy is in much prettier hands right now.
>
> Yes, philosophy, sociology, and non-biologically based studies of the
> human condition. It's not that we need to move _away_ from a
> human-centric focus, it's that the _focus_ itself was never lensed
> properly. We need to move into the cell-level stuff that new imaging and
> perceptual studies have opened up for us, to start looking from the
> bottom up rather than the top down. Coming onto this present shore was
> one thing, but most 'liberal arts' sciences are still dipping their toes
> in the waves as far as the mind is concerned. It's bloody time to move in
> and explore the land.
>
> The meme itself, if we want it to be found, will not be found through
> statistical arrays of cultural differences, any more than any gene has
> ever been found through statistical arrays of toenail length. Go inward,
> young men....
>
> Wilson also says quite clearly that a large number of recalcitrant
> know-nothings has a morbid fear of laboratory studies, and the corpulant
> obsequiousness to imagine a fact has arisen from conjecture....
>
> "The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they
> have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact."
> -John Tyndall
>
> We've done the thought- the ships are now quite useless on the shore.
> Move on.
>
> *****************
> Wade T. Smith
> morbius@channel1.com | "There ain't nothin' you
> wade_smith@harvard.edu | shouldn't do to a god."
> ******* http://www.channel1.com/users/morbius/ *******
Phenomenologically, It is from the natural perceptual foundation of
the concrete pariculars as apprehended in their relationships to
their circumscribing gestalts that we of necessity must begin (the
middle). From there, we may technologically transmute our perceptual
scale into both micros and cosmos. We must take care, however, that
each perceptual mediative link in our chain does indeed connect the
perceiver and the perceived in a direct and isomorphically
proportional manner, so that the degree of alteration of the read
symbol seamlessly relates to the amount of change in the referent
being investigated.