On Fri, 6 Aug 1999 08:29:46 PDT ken <kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca>
writes:
>
>Come on guys. Evolution doesn't need shit from god. If Lacan
>thinks so, he is out of his tree. Or in a more academic tone,
>could you please explain how god is required as a
>prerequisite to evolution?
>
>Chuck Grimes
>
>In the evolutionary porcess God goes unnamed throughout, he
>(always he) is literally omnipresent. An evolution that insists
>on deducing from continuous process the ascending
>movement which reaches the summit of consciousness and
>thought necessarily implies that consciousness and that
>thought were there at the beginning. It is only from the view of
>an absolute beginning, which marks the origin of the
>signifying chain as a distinct order and which isolates in their
>own specific dimension the memorable and the remembered,
>that we do not find Being always implied in being,
Sounds to me that you and Lacan are confusing with Darwin with Hegel but Darwin's theory of evoluion through natural selection is a non-teleological theory.
>the
>implication that is at the core of evolutionist thought (Lacan
>talked about this in the 50's - I suspect that some
>evolutionists have shifted from a teleological model) (like
>Gould's contingency plan).
Darwinism as such has always been non-teleological. Of course Darwinians may well differ as Gould and Dawkins on the relative importance of contingency in evolution but neither of them view evolution as a teleological process. And Gould is most insistent that there is no necessity behind the evolution of conscious organisms on this planet.
Jim Farmelant
> Creation ex nihilo is the only place
>one finds production as an original domain. Consciousness
>pulls itself out of the swamp by pulling on its bootstraps. It
>wasn't the scientists who "disproved" the existence of God, it
>was the theologians. The most profound materialist
>understanding of God, which brings about the death of God
>(not the invisibility of God) is to be found in Schelling's Ages
>of the World. In the beginning... which was not *the*
>beginning, but a beginning that must be presupposes because
>there is a gap separating ground from existence. Ground is
>always a retroactive process. In effect, Geist must have been
>outside of itself in order to start the entire process of creation.
> The origin here lie in the creation of something from nothing.
>And this is precisely what subjectivity is. A numerical matrix
>so complex that it literally becomes self-aware (self created
>out of an abyss).
>
>Rob, as for Chomsky on Lacan, well, what can I say. If you
>ditch the Freudian unconsciousness you have hell of a lot of
>explaining to do. Chomsky, a good Kantian, argues that
>language is hardwired. Well, that may be so. But it doesn't
>mean anything until set in motion within a contingent context.
>It could equally be argued that the word, the internalization of
>the speech of the other which "fits" this hardwired grammar,
>kills / replaces the existing program by replacing it with
>another. And even if this isn't the case, there really isn't much
>of a contradiction here between hardwired and contingent. I'm
>tempted to say that hardwiring stretched to the limit leads to
>determinism...
>
>Painfully abstract,
>ken
>
>
___________________________________________________________________ Get the Internet just the way you want it. Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month! Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.