Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 10:23:05 -0700
From: "Wilkerson, Richard" <rcwilk-AT-dreamgate.com>
Subject: Re: your opinion


Hi Brad,

  Thanks for your comments and links!

>And, just as we are learning that the growth of scientific knowledge
>is in a synergistic feedback loop with the development of technical
>instruments (nobody without a cyclotron could inhabit a universe
>with subatomic particles in it, and there is no "physical
>universe" without uniform printed editions of books!), so also do we need to
>appreciate that all facts are value judgments and all feelings
>make factual assertions about the world.

  Good example. I keep thinking that by the time we actually get a real 
star trek holo-deck, we will be so much more sophisticated than anything 
that has been imagined on the show. (I already have said before that they 
had to end the series as the Net is missing from Trek series, making it now 
seem kind of "retro" like we view Flash Gordon movies. )


>Technical workers (who include everybody from sysadmins to
>neurosurgeons...) need to
>see the ethical dimensions of their work, and, especially, PhDs
>need to become what they are nominally certified to be:
>Lovers of wisdom with especial competence to teach and to
>heal in the disciplinary area in which their degree was bestowed.

There was a book by John Riker once called the Art of Ethical Thinking., I 
think, where he posited a way that a selfish person, if they pushed 
selfishness to the maximum limit, would become ethical by having to develop 
all the empathic and universalizing traits required.   If we do 
get  philo-techs, perhaps they will reach that point, or already have.

  -Richard



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