Date: Sun, 9 Apr 1995 18:39:53 -0400
From: Brad4d6-AT-aol.com
Subject: Re: human body transformation (re: science fiction)


hopkins-AT-twinearth.wustl.edu (Patrick Hopkins) responded to my posting: 

>>I would like to see Mr. Spock (i.e., his real-life fellow
>>travelers) engage with Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", Husserl's "Crisis"
>>texts, Broch, Canetti, Musil....  But, in all fairness, this is not simply
a
>>problem of science *fiction* but also of many scientists in their
>>credentialled paid employment, who are naively busy looking for place of
>>consciousness in the brain while being oblivious that all such endeavor
takes
>>place within the horizon of the place of the brain in consciousness -- or,
to
>>return to my first point: the discourse in which science's objectivities
have
>>their existence.
>
>Well, here I think we have a fundamental disagreement.  I, for one, think 
>science fiction is eminently more useful than most of Heidegger and most of
Kant. 
>When I plan my philosophy dream course, it is inevitably "Philosophy through
>Science Fiction" rather than "Survey of Continental Philosophy".

I specifically did not include *Heidegger* in my proposed reading list for
Mr. Spock.  I think there's a lot in Heidegger that Mr. Spock could benefit
from, but Heidegger is, in my opinion, too much "material" for a "Survey of
Continental Philosophy" in an unproductive (i.e., postmodernist) sense.
 Habermas, si; Heiddegger, no.

I took a course in which we read a book of science fiction stories: "Tales of
the Marvelous Machine: 35 Stories of Computing", R. Taylor and B. Green, eds.
(Creative Computing Press, 1980).  Profound topics; thin descriptions.

>Part of this
>is because the things I find really interesting have little (academically)
to
>do with existential depth and a whole lot more to do with power and its 
>excercise.  Part of this has to do with my experience that reading Heidegger

>and Kant is only slightly less painful than having my corneas removed
without
>the benefit of anesthesia.

Power and its exercise?  I'll gladly add Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"
to Mr. Spock's reading list (along with Canetti's "Crowds and Power").  I can
appreciate your (Dr. Hopkins) finding Kant unpleasant -- I've been postponing
"The Critique of Judgment" for decades, myself, out of (unfounded?) fear it
would be "a drag".  But, then, *Mr. Spock* is supposed to be more rational
than that.  If mere earthling J. Robert Oppenheimer could read (all of) Das
Kapital in German in the time it took for a trans-continental train trip,
surely Mr. Spock could digest Kant in a few star-dates.

>many philosophical critiques of 
>science are hopelessly mired in faux-poetic metaphysical doctrines that
prevent
>seeing the important implications of such research.

The philosophical critique of science to which I adhere is the one which
interpretively examines scientific theories as praxes in the human Lifeworld
rather than attempting to reduce the human Lifeworld to a sub-space of the
physic(s)al universe.  I once took a course from Norwood Hanson ("Patterns of
Discovery", etc.).  He was about as faux-poetic metaphysical as a bulldog
(OK, he was a professor at Yale...).  One example of *his* "spaciness": He
said he once experienced sense data -- when his eyeball came out of its
socket after the plane he was piloting crashed.  Hanson. Husserl. Habermas.
K.O. Apel. Thomas Kuhn. Stephen Toulmin. Jerome Ravetz....

>if neuroscience in right
>about some version of reductive materialism or eliminative materialism, then
>the consequences are far more wide-reaching than any reading of
Merleau-Ponty's
>admonitions or any worries over the Being of Beingness's Being.

I don't think we need to await the findings of "manyana" neuroscience to have
to face its potential consequences.  That someday was already yesterday.
 Will neuroscience ever be able to do anything other than *refine* the
effects of such off the shelf technologies as: (1) a bullet through the head,
(2) LSD, Thorazine, etc., (3) the "brain washing" methodologies of the North
Koreans, various "cults", and probably our own CIA....  The Mission
Impossible episode where a bureaucrat was kidnapped and placed in a railroad
car in a warehouse, simulating a night train trip across the "continent",
sems to me to exhaust the philosophical potential of "virtual reality"
(Descartes was already there with his evil epistemological demon...)....  And
Kafka (in "The Trial") posed the epistemological issue of (to adduce your
highly apposite adjectives:) reductive / eliminative scientism in probably
the fewest possible words: "You don't have to accept everything as true, only
as necessary".  As the kind of flip-side to Alan Turing's speculation that if
a computer ever thinks "we shan't know how it does it", I would say that if
neuroscience ever gets a hold on consciousness we shan't be-there
(Heidegger's Dasein!) to know it.  It's not that science fiction doesn't
*address* these issues, any more than nerds are not subject to sexual arousal
(the girl on p. 148 of Taylor & Green eds. has nice b--bs, e.g.) -- it's that
it *trivializes* them, and exactly how it does this is something I think
might repay being explored -- hermeneutically -- further.

Anent "materialism", Heidegger may indeed "know" these people better than
they know themselves.  He proposes that the essence of materialism is not the
assertion that everything is matter, but that everything appears as the
material of labor (raw material) (see "Basic Writings", rev. ed.,
Harper-Collins, 1993, p. 243).  My favorite science fiction fantasy is a
neoroscientist poking electrodes into his own brain (at least this has the
decency of not messing with anybody else's head), and I suspect there may be
a few neuroscientists who have enough *integrity* (the road to hell is paved
with...) to do this, instead of using their *power* to manipulate other
people.

>Good science fiction (which Star Trek is not) deals with the social
>and material impact of technology in intelligent and incisive ways.  Good
>philosophy should do this too, but often doesn't.

OK.  I've offered my "best shots".  I'll "boil it down" to one short essay:
Husserl's Vienna Lecture of 1935 (Appendix A of "The Crisis of European
Sciences...", Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970, or in "Phenomenology and the
Crisis of Philosophy" (Harper Torchbooks, 1965)).  Or maybe Arnold Gehlen's
"Man in the Age of Technology" (Columbia Univ. Press, 1980).  What's *one*
(preferably brief, but, if that's not possible, then longer -- I'll not do a
Socrates on you like S. did to Protagoras) text you would propose to me to
possibly alter my opinion of science fiction?

Brad McCormick


     --- from list technology-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

     ------------------