Quora
Postmodernism is an intellectual dead end; it’s central premise seems to be derived from a saying of Nietzsche’s, “There are no facts; only interpretations”, which is thought to mean that each one of us views “reality” through our individual perspective. This is true to a degree, but as with so many aphorisms, there are limits to its validity;
Durkheim finds the origin of the idea of the sacred in the periodic clan gatherings designed to maintain the solidarity of the clan. These gatherings replaced normal periods of dispersed individualistic economic activities, and were characterized by moments of intensified emotion and "collective effervescence." When transported from profane to sacred existence at these gatherings, the clan sought an explanation for their altered and elevated state. The gathering of the clan is the real cause, but too complex for the primitive mind to comprehend. So the clansman looks about and sees the symbols of the clan surrounding him and assigns the cause for his altered state to these objects. He supposes that the mana flows from the graven image of the clan totem, rather than from the collectivity of the clan itself.
In four hundred years European civilization and its offshoots passed from a state of absolute assurance that their ways were the ways of God, while the ways of other peoples were curiosities, perversions, errors, or heresies, to a belief in the artificiality and constructedness of all values.
The final victim of European imperialism was Europe itself. As Terry Eagleton puts it: "it is hard to remain convinced that your way of doing things is the only possible one when you are busy trying to subjugate another society which conducts its affairs in a radically different but apparently effective way".
There are as many possible theories of art as there are ways of regarding art; the Greeks regarded it from the moral point of view not because the Greek artist thought in a different way from any other but because their thought was predominantly political, and art, like drainage, undoubtedly performs some function in the state.
Sayfa 119Kitabı okudu
If the writing of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato had not contained so much truth about the human condition, his name would have been forgotten centuries ago. But one of this famous stories- the cataclysmic destruction of the ancient civilization of Atlantis- is almost certainly false. So why is this story still repeated more than 2,3000 years after Plato's death? "It is a story captures the imagination," says James Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale, New York. " It is a great myth. It has a lot of elements that people love to fantasize about." Plato told the story of Atlantis around 360 B. C. The founders of Atlantis, he said, were half god and half human. They created a utopian civilization and became a great naval power. Their home was made up of centric islands seperated by wide moats and linked by a canal that penetrated to the center. The lush islands contained gold, silver, and other precious metals and supported an abudance of rare, exotic wildlife. There was a great capital city on the central island. There are many theories about where Atlantis was- in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Spain, even under the what is now Antarctica. "Pick a spot on the map, and someone has said that Atlantis was there," says Charles Orser, curator of history at the New York State Museum in Albany. "Every place you can imagine." Plato said Atlantis existed about 9,000 years before his own time, and that its story had been passed down by poets, priests, and others. But Plato's writings about Atlantis are the only known records of its existence.
"Radical technophiles like Moravec envision humanity moving to a higher state of being and attaining immortality by merging their minds with computers. Far more than theories of evolution, these techno-utopias represent neo-Cartesian assumptions that mind is substance and body is an accidental trait as well as secular manifestations of the Christian quest for immortality."
Steven Best, Minding the Animals: Ethology and the Obsolescence of Left Humanism
Bell’s arguments (Bell, 1964 and Bell, 1971) against local hidden variable theories proceed by means of inequalities; it is noted in (Koç, 1992) that in these arguments Bell does not consider the geometrical (or, algebraic) properties of the quantum mechanical correlation function (for a system of spin-1/2 particles in the singlet state). It is shown in (Koç, 1992) that, due to the geometry (or, algebraic properties) of the quantum mechanical correlation function, Bell’s arguments in (Bell, 1964 and Bell, 1971) are inconclusive. In addition to this, it is asserted in (Koç, forthcoming) that Wigner’s argument (Wigner, 1970) against local hidden variable theories is similarly inconclusive because of the geometrical (or, algebraic) properties of the quantum mechanical probability functions (for a system of spin-1/2 particles in the singlet state).
Bell, J. S. ‘‘On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox’’, Physics 1 (1964): 195.
Bell, J. S. ‘‘Introduction to the Hidden Variable Question’’ in B. d’Espagnat, ed., Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Academic Press, 1971.
Koç, Y., ‘‘The Local Expectation Value Function and Bell’s Inequalities’’, Il Nuovo Cimento 107B (1992): 961-971.
Koç, Y. , ‘‘Wigner’s Inequality, Quantum Mechanical Probability Functions and Hidden Variable Theories’’ forthcoming in Il Nuovo Cimento B.
Wigner, E. P., ‘‘On Hidden Variables and Quantum Mechanical Probabilities’’, Amer. J. Phys. 38 (1970): 1005-1009.
Hidden variables
But Bell’s theorem implies that any such theory requires “action at a distance”—a measurement at one location can instantly affect the state of the universe arbitrarily far away. This seems to be in violation of the spirit if not the letter of the theory of relativity, which says that objects and influences cannot propagate faster than the speed of light. The hidden-variable approach is still being actively pursued, but all known attempts along these lines are ungainly and hard to reconcile with modern theories such as the Standard Model of particle physics, not to mention speculative ideas about quantum gravity, as we’ll discuss later. Perhaps this is why Einstein, the pioneer of relativity, never found a satisfactory theory of his own.
