lördag 26 december 2009

Science applied to Ahura Mazda and Asha

Dear Daniel and Dino

Dino is 100% right. We hit this issue right somewhere between The Great Pragmatists and what Lacan and Bataille would describe as "The Disturbance of The Real", those instances in our lives when we run into walls of the unknown so hard and concretely (whether that wall is "real" or just "imagined") that this forces us to change, or "adjust", our worldview, our fantasy of how the world works. Slavoj Zizek has written about how 9/11 was one of these "collective experiences of The Real" which "disturbed" and forced "The Western Collective Imagination" to change drastically (liberal democracy had not at all won the conquest for world power etc). All of this is perfectly compatible with Zarathushtra's teachings and his combination of phenomenological relativism and ethical absolutism (thoughts, words and actions are identical). Please also observe (as Dino would agree) that there is no definite cosmological principle according to which everything happens. We know for a fact that the world is fundamentally indeterministic (the uncertainty principle in physics) which also means that there is a "free choice" involved here which fascinated Zarathushtra as it opened up the possibility for his ethics of action.

Ushta
Alexander

2009/12/26 Special Kain

Dear Daniel

You're correct, we're dealing with representations, that is: theories and simplified models. There are also «cultural biases» involved (please see social constructivism). But such theories and simplified models aren't photographs, they don't «mirror» the real world, so representation A isn't closer to reality or «truer» than representation B. They're both tools that enable us to make new experiences and enrich our existence (please see instrumentalism, John Dewey and Richard Rorty). Such theories have to be empirically tested and evaluated in terms of functionality and intersubjective agreement.
But that's not all there is. There's also Jacques Lacan's «The Real», and also disturbingly absurd and transgressive experiences that Georges Bataille had tried to describe and explain before Lacan succeeded in doing so.

Ushta,
Dino

--- daniel.samani@ymail.com schrieb am Sa, 26.12.2009:


Von: daniel.samani@ymail.com
Betreff: [Ushta] Science applied to Ormazd and Asha
An: Ushta@yahoogroups.com
Datum: Samstag, 26. Dezember 2009, 19:05

Earnest, Dino

Touché, this is how I have come to understand the mechanisms behind creation. What you call Ahura Mazda? As being an student of cognitive neuroscience when I hear Asha and Druj, I can't stop thinking of representations. With the understanding that this could be the student of cognition in me speaking. What the idea suggest is that there are something between mind and the outside world. That is called representations. This means that we don't see world as is. We see world trough representations in our brain. Then having constructive and truthful representations I find relate to Asha, and the opposite namely destructive and untrue to be Druj.

I don't however see the connection between memetics and Asha. The theory of memes to copy without purpose or any meaning. To Asha that I have understood to be "first of all, 'true statement'. A 'true statement', because it is true, corresponds to an objective, material reality. This reality embraces all of existence. Recognized in it is a great cosmic principle since all things happen according to it." (Duchesne-Guillemin , 1963, p. 47)

Now to relate this to the representations, to me Asha simply put is when one sees the truth of what is. When ones representations do not cloud what is.

Regards,

Daniel Samani

--- In Ushta@yahoogroups. com, Special Kain wrote:
>
> Dear Ardeshir, Parviz and Alexander
>
> Perhaps we'd better look at Asha as «the evolutionary algorithm»? This algorithm combines cosmological, physical, biological and memetic evolution as the principle behind the process of reality and applies to Ahura and Mazda.
>
> My two cents,
> Dino // not that much into Daniel Dennett's extremist ultra-naturalism, but finds this idea quite persuasive

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