Hi Tweets,

Tom Love writes:

(snip)
>why isn't thinking that environmental change
>is simply a valueless, existential process *also* an imposition of meaning
>onto the bio-physical world, equivalent to your example of nostalgia for
>Turdus migratorius males giving territorial calls in May?

It's questions like this that make me wish I'd stayed in school. Well, here
goes.

The environment (or 'Nature', or 'Mother Nature', or 'Mom'--as in 'Aw Mom,
do I *have* to clean up my environment?') and/or environmental change isn't
a thing in and of itself, but gestalt of the ongoing everchanging cumulative
effect(s) on the world of many dynamic physical processes, all of which well
predate the human presence and consciousness on this planet and which have
left fossil records of one kind or another. Predate by how much? Well,
Arthur C. Clarke once gave the analogy of the history of the world being
expressed as the height of the Empire State Building and the length of time
humans have been here as the thickness of a postage stamp put atop Empire
State's radio-mast. As we weren't here then, how and where would 'value' and
'meaning' have been imposed, and by whom? If one accepts the fossil record
as valid and real, one would be forced to the conclusion that the arrival of
the concepts and applications of 'value' and 'meaning' as we're using them
in this discussion began about the same time as the emergence of human
consciousness and then to the further conclusion that either or both are
subjective human constructs existing independently of dynamic physical
processes and their effects.

Change which happens regardless of human presence or involvement (as an
example, the Cretaceous-ending Chixclub asteroid/comet-head strike in the
Yucatan implicated in the world-wide extinction of many large-bodied animal
genera) is beyond any human value imposition or anything we can recognise as
a human mapping of 'meaning' unless we invoke divine involvement. This would
put the issue beyond reasonable discussion into the arena of religious or
superstitious belief.

>I'm having growing difficulties with the supposed/implied neutrality or
>value-free nature of scientific discourse as opposed to other ways of
>knowing.

Why is this either/or for you? It might be for me, too, but the reasons
might be different. I guess at this point around the table the discussion
usually dives into 'define your terms'-mode; we're operating with an assumed
semantic consensus here which might not actually exist. "Other ways of
knowing" is a wide and embracing term where the term 'knowing' might as
easily be synonymous with 'feeling' as with 'thinking', and could mean
anything from the quaint byways of biblical creationism to full-court
mystical perceptions of immanence. One of the more useful questions to ask
is, what is your knowing *for*? What do you want or intend to do with it?
What's it to *you*? What are you trying to *prove*?

Nature is just nature, whether we're present or absent, and our perceptions
of it are not the thing any more than a snapshot of Aunt Winnie at the Grand
Canyon is actually either. However, the snapshot--if taken properly--can be
a reasonably *consistent* approximation of the reality of Aunt Winnie just
before she was asked to step back a little further.

But another way to formulate your point might be, roughly: is complete,
value-free objectivity possible to humans? No, achieving such an abstract
state is impossible simply because a) it is *abstract*, therefore an ideal
unattainable in the actual world and b) we are part of the process and
modify it by our presence. But the second is no reason for not trying to
achieve as much value-free objectivity as possible: to counteract any bias
that may be introduced, it is *also* possible to formulate logical and
mathematical filters to ensuring objectivity to the greatest practical
degree possible or making allowance for observer-bias in a number of ways.
To attempt to remove completely human subjectivity, with all its hungers and
ghosts, would involve the intellectual equivalent of catching up to an
ontological vanishing-point.

Our Canadian men's and women's hockey teams will both lose to youse guys
before that happens. '-)

Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)