Why I love Douglas R. Hofstadter [part 1 of many]

[beelikej]

As you may know I'm reading Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern at the moment and I'm loving it more each day. I want to share the awesome, so I will be posting a couple of exerpts from this book in the next couple of days (weeks? I wish I could read faster, but there is much going back and forth and relishing thoughts in between:).

Comments are encouraged!

When I was younger, I used to believe that once something had been discovered, verified, and published, it was then part of Knowledge: definitive, accepted, and irrevocable. Only in unusual cases, so I thought, would opposing claims then continue to be published. To my surprise, however I found that the truth has to fight constantly for its life! That an idea has been discovered and printed in a "reputable journal" does not ensure that it wil become well known and accepted. In fact, usually it will have to be rephrased en reprinted many different times, often by many different people, before it has any chance of taking hold. This is upsetting to an idealist like me, someone more disposed to believe in the notion of a monolithic and absolute truth than in the notion of a pluralistic and relative truth (a notion championed by a certain school of anthropologists and socioligists, who un-self-consciously insist "all systems of belief are equally valid", seemingly without realizing that this dogma of relativism not only is just as narrow-minded as any other dogma, but moreover is unbelievably wishy-washy!). The idea that the truth has to fight for its life is a sad discovery. The idea that the truth will not out, unless it is given a lot of help, is pretty upsetting.

Taken from Section II, Chapter 5: Sense & Society: World Views in Collision

I have just finished the chapter on Number Numbness and am currently enjoying Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness. I will probably quote both tomorrow;) You have been warned!

Comments

[tanisafan.livejournal.com]

Ooo, that is an awesome excerpt.

I'm pretty fond of relative truth. I loved my first trips to the university library when I first started my studies, and finding out that for every theory, there's someone else who discredits it. It doesn't bother me that 'truth has to fight for its life' because to me, there no such thing as a definite truth anyway.

Caveat: Um, though I suppose exceptions need to be made for creationism, negationism and other unfounded crap. But as a historian, generally speaking, I love the thought that nothing is fixed in time, can always be rediscovered by using a different outlook.

[beelikej.livejournal.com]

Heh. You are actually close to agreeing with Hofstadter -and me-, because where he is talking about the issue of 'absolute' truth he is arguing against the 'unfounded crap', or more specifically against those matters that have been proven not to be scientifically true many times before. Especially for you, a follow up on the article above:

"... I happen to feel that much of parapsychology has been afforded too much credibility. I feel that ESP and so on are incompatible with science for very fundamental reasons. In other words, I feel that they are so unlikely to be the case that people who spend their time [still] investigating them really do not understand science well. And so I am impatient with them. Instead of welcoming them into scientific organizations, I would like to see them kicked out.
Now this doesn't mean that I feel that debating about the reasons I find ESP (etc.) incompatible with science at a very deep level is worthless. Quite to the contrary: coming to understand how to sift the true from the false is exceedingly subtle and important. But that doesn't mean that all pretenders to truth should be accorded respect.
It's a terribly complex issue. Non of us sees the full truth on it. [...]
There is a legitimate, indeed, very deep question, as to when that moment of 'obviousness', that moment of 'snapping' or 'clicking', comes about. Certainly I'd be the first to say that that's as deep a question as one can ask. But that's a question about the nature of truth, evidence, perception, categories, and so forth and so on. It's not a question about parapsychology... [etc.]

[...] But my point of view is that there is such a thing as being too open-minded. I am not open-minded about the earth being flat, about whether Hitler is alive today, about claims by people who have squared a circle, or to have proven special relativity wrong. I am also not open-minded with respect to the paranormal. And I think it is wrong to be open-minded with respect to these things, just as I think it is wrong to be open-minded about whether or not the Nazis killed six million Jews in World War II.
I am open-minded, to some extent, about questions of ape language, dolphin language, and so on. I haven't reached any final, firm conclusion there."

And in response to the puppy-eyes from earlier this afternoon: yes, I will post more excerpts from other parts and chapters:)