Re: <nettime> Forget who owns the truth. Just talk about the weather.

[Christian Swertz via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear Joseph,

thank you for your interesting argument. As I have mentioned, I work as 
a professor in a university. I'm thus surrounded by some people who 
consider themselves as rational beings. Most of them are interested in 
spirituality, religion, and stuff like that, while they do not consider 
themself as spiritual or religious, and I did not meet any colleagues 
who define themself as being on a spiritual quest. I thus have some 
evidence that makes me doubt your claims.

My argument in this case is as before: The religious idea of truth and 
the scientific idea of truth are two different things. They are both 
called truth - but that's the same word for two different things (a 
homonymy). The consequence is simple: If a person says something true 
about religion as a scientist, that's a scientific truth, not a 
religious truth. And if a religious person says something true about 
science as a religious person, that's not scientific truth, but 
religious truth. And neither religions nor sciences are art. 
Additionally, religion and science are not politics, which is connected 
to a third idea of truth. What happens quite often is that scientific 
arguments are picked up in politics to justify the execution of power. 
It's sometimes difficult to distinguish these things, but asking who 
says what through which channel with what effect already helps a bit: If 
politicians argue with data, that's politics, not science. Same for 
journalists - in journalism, "truth" is defined by attention rate, not 
but "research method".

Beside the problem of "truth", you referred to some other points I would 
like to comment on:

A second point is "the apparent meaningless of our existential 
condition". Again, I would doubt the "our" - for me at least that's not 
true. I can not see an apparent meaningless of myself. The meaning of my 
existence is cultural and biological transmission. It's thus apparent 
meaningful, has an essence and is not mysterious. I do not claim that 
this makes sense for anybody else, but I do claim that the "our" is wrong.

A third point is that describing people as indigenous people who 
believed in a cosmos and coexisted with nature might be considered as a 
western description that contributes to western discussions (this one 
seems to be one). If I remember the stories told by David Graeber in 
"The Dawn of Everything" correctly, other western descriptions are also 
possible, as well as descriptions by people who do not identify as 
western. On the other hand, the idea to live in peace with nature is 
quite familiar in western cultures (and in sciences), including 
corresponding theories of peace and nature. And there are theories of 
the cosmos as well.

A fourth point is the interesting idea to use spirituality as a metaphor 
for unattainable knowingness, since with considering spirituality and 
unattainable knowingness as a words with meaning, it's necessary to 
assume that you know what unattainable knowingness is. That was my 
question in the first place: How do you resolve this problem? Same with 
the cosmos: You need to know what the cosmos is and what it wants in 
order to reconcile with the cosmos. But what if I do not want to live in 
your cosmos? Or actually do not live in your cosmos? In my cosmos, for 
instance, transcendence is a word for the difference of symbols and 
their physical presence. We are thus not simply automats for sure (the 
term has been well definied by Turing and certainly does not include 
human beings) and consciousness is certainly not an operating system, 
since opcodes and assembler commands are matched 1:1 - no difference 
between symbols and physical presence, and thus no consciousness. I do 
not follow data religion and do not beliefe in the information god.

And since you said that science rips things appart: If you take a look 
at theories of wholeness and structure, you will see that this is not 
true for every scientific theories. What scientists do not tell you is 
eternal truth. The consequence is: You have to take part in the decision 
of what is considered as truth. As I said: There is no truth unless you 
make it.

But despite these discussion, we can probably agree that it is a good 
idea not to use any vehicles with fuel powered engines (and so on ... ).

--
Liebe Grüße,

Christian Swertz
https://www.swertz.at

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