People who derive their sense of reality from theory or/and external observation, but who fail to make of themslves their means of knowing. The lens by which they envision life merely bits of externally observed information somehow strung together into some ill-formed general theory mistakenly imagined to be the rational conclusion of the observed information, and all life is filtered through this theoretical lens....life through a glass very darkly. Nothing is ever risked in their external pursuit of truth, and naturally nothing of any substance is found. They stand immersed in an epic landscape and argue about the map.
Because they are neither hot nor cold but lukewarm- if that- Life has no choice but to spit them out of its mouth.
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Interesting theory.
Where would we be without interesting theories? My theory about interesting theories is they exist as they do because they have adapted to the environment in such a way as to ensure their survival.
What a nihilist you are, Andrew. Surely it is not the case that theories adapt to the environment to ensure their survival (in the way I think you are suggesting they do) but rather ensure their survival by how accurately they describe the environment as it is, as it was or how it will be. That is their raison d'etre. Survival doesn't come in to it, as such.
You've set me pondering, Neil. Though I wasn't really being serious with that survival bit- more a darwinist parody- but your response is interesting anyway. The thing about a theory is that it seems to be an abstract hypothesis that may not necessarily accurately describe truth at all. Burroughs did have the idea of language being a virus, which used people as its means of existence. As a kind of immediate superficial response, that seems to me to be an unhealthy idea, but it's a theory which definitely has survived this long but which certainly conflicts with other theories.
A theory may just exist because it expresses a will to ignorance of the person who believes it, or because of the mind's capacity for delusion, just as it may exist because it is close to truth.
The idea of trying to interpret all life in pure survival terms seems to me a very haphazard lowest common denominator lens to view life with. Everything ends up being explained in terms of something else, with no basis of knowning the theory to be true.
You also end up with the most extraordinarily advanced mind-body processes being explained as the means of survival of animals that are infinitely less consciously intelligent than their own minds and bodies. So who's doing the intelligence work in evolving their selves? The bacteria, amoebas or whatever who are even less consciously intelligent?
I'm not sure I see an awful lot of point in a theory to neatly encompass life, but we'd need something endlessly more profound in its comprehension than the traditional childish Darwinist reductionist kind of one, again the obvious product of a conscious intelligence infinitely less intelligent than its unconscious mind & body. Though if people insist on identifying themselves exclusively with their own intellects, then that's the kind of simplifications that arise.
I don't understand what you mean by unconscious intelligence.
By unconscious intelligence the kind of mental activities like sight, memory, respiration, dreaming, the kind of innate linguistic capacity, etc rather than ther conscious mind that is writing this, or deciding to go to work, but itself using processes of which it is the grateful beneficiary rather than the conscious master, such as walking. The sophistication & utter mystery of vision is itself an order of genius vastly beyond that of the works of genius of our greatest thinkers and artists. I spose a way to put it is that our minds which produce the capacity for rational intelligence are naturally far deeper than the rational intelligence they produce.
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