From: jessec@yang.earlham.edu
Subject: Modelling the universe: the possibility of error and deception.
Date: 14 Nov 91 15:33:44 EST
Message-ID: <1991Nov14.153344.13983@yang.earlham.edu>


Just a few thoughts from a wishy washy humanist here.

   Modelling the universe.  Wasn't it Laurie Anderson who, on her first 
glimpse of virtual reality, exclaimed, "There's no dirt in here"?

   I remember some things that Alvin Toffler said about computer models in
*Powershift*, which would be causes for despair, I think.  Given the
incredible complexity of current scientific problems, computer models are
indispensible, but they consitute another, deeper removal of the
scientific process from inspection by non-scientists.  Assumptions can be
written deeply into models, and they drastically affect the outcomes.  The
result is that politicians can use computer models to effect their own
ends, regardless of their true proximity to reality.  Trees cause smog.
Chop a tree and save the world, son.

   This isn't necessarily so new.  I am fascinated by the degree to which
all of our own philosophical models of the universe are shaped by our own
psychological needs and wishes and fears.  Nevertheless, the invisibility
of computer models combined with their gleam of scientific authority make
me distrustful.  Who programmed this thing, what were their controlling
interests, and what purpose...? Maybe Marxist theory would be the thing to
critique future scientific work by...

   I'm also reminded of what Milan Kundera said in *The Unbearable
Lightness of Being* (my god-- the most perfect novel ever written) about
*kitsch*.  This concept was extremely important to the philosophical
threads running through the book.  *Kitsch* is essentially a vision of an
ideal world (like that portrayed in the Socialist Realist paintings the
character Sabina so despised, with lots of noble peasants happily toiling
for the glorious Motherland)-- one with no shit, and no excitement, and
hence no conflicts over the acceptability of Creation.  Every ideology, he
says, has generated its own kitsch: communism, capitalism, feminism,
liberalism, Nazism, all have created a smooth-running model of a world
without "dirt".

   Yeah, I guess all of this hooks back into the big postmodern dilemna,
half of which is due to the scientific realizations that time and space
aren't those nice straightforward things they seem to be, and that a
butterfly's wings can affect world weather patterns.  What can you trust?
What Logic other than the grayest of Fuzzy describes the world anymore?

   Enough babbling, then.  Just a bit more fat to chew.

   Later,

      --Jesse Cohn.




   "One text must subvert [the meaning of] another text until there's only
background music like reggae."

                              --Kathy Acker
                                quoted by Paul DiFillipo