[lbo-talk] Atheism

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Tue Dec 30 10:22:21 PST 2003


For what it is worth, Engels and Lenin , who are arch-materialists, don't exactly put a limit on what humans are capable of understanding, dismiss unknowability in principle (nothing is unknowable in principle), Kant's unknowable thing-in-itself, but also hold to the idea that the universe and knowledge are infinite and human minds finite. Thus, we ( humanity sharing knowledge socially) are in the dialectic of absolute and relative truth, learning more and more, sort of ;like an asymptotic curve approaching a line, we approach but don't reach absolute truth.

Human minds could be a small infinity inside a larger infinity. In knowledge , we try to set up an isomorphism, one-to-one correspondence, between our little, social "mind" infinity and the larger infinity.

Or maybe it's just we don't want to limit what the rank-and-file can "understand" in principle, or make anybody dependent upon priests, geniuses and knowledge specialists _ in principle_.

Chris Doss wrote:

The problem with asserting that the mind is capable of understanding things without limit is that it leads to various varieties of idealism (if you are a fan of idealism this is not a problem of course). It was what differentiates Hegel from Kant at bottom, the idea that you can jump behind appearances and get at the "ground" -- which Hegel was only able to justify by arguing that consciousness and reality are at bottom the same thing.

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Just so.

I believe it was Simone Weil who wrote that *a man who's proud of his intelligence is like a prisoner who boasts of the roominess and pleasant accomodations of his cell.*

An under-appreciation of the fact that there likely is a limit to humanity's ability to understand things leads, as you say to *various varieties of idealism*.

Note, as a recent example on these very virtual pages the statements in support of the inevitability of machine cognition (AI) which poured forth from various LBO-sters.

The underlying assumption is that we are surely clever enough to, sooner or later, possess a thorough understanding of our own minds which will, in turn, allow us to create a machine mirror on ever more sophisticated devices which we will surely build.

Supporting the weight of this cathedral of idealism is a boundless faith in the human ability to *understand things without limit.*

No doubt, we are clever monkeys what with our flying machines and language and stone melting bombs and so on. It does not follow however that we are blessed with a depth and breadth of cleverness equal to the complexity of all things.

DRM

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