Just googled the name of a cool synthwave song and then this comes up.

This is literally just pseudo-religious drivel made up by a bunch of weird jackoffs in academia applying value judgements to human behaviour using totally subjective, arbitrary points of reference like "socially acceptable", "civilization", and "normal".

All fine and valid if it was a subset of philosophy, but the fact that people take this seriously as a hard science is mind boggling. Postmodern neoliberalism is one hell of a drug.

  • sagarmatha [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    to believe in the machine as something other than an odd form of stochastism? Absolutely

    • mark213686123 [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      what?

      I believe in bikes I've seen one and I know that a bike is just an ideal form which I compare a collection of tubes, pipes and wheels to but it's also a very useful one to construct something that lets me go places faster than walking

      • sagarmatha [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        well bikes are still simple enough, though already to believe in the bike as a bike rather than oddparts fortunately attached is a belief in both a higher force and human grace. Now talking about the internet, the space station, or even the old machines typesetting through molten lead, is indeed far enough to be a theology

        • mark213686123 [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          they're just useful metaphors and I think you might have read too much navel gazing philosophy have you considered touching grass

          • sagarmatha [none/use name]
            ·
            3 years ago

            sure, but do the people designing them/studying them view them as simple metaphors, no, which is why they can in the same breath decry dialectical materialism for orthodoxy and embrace a form of theology, sure it got a bit better (cf kuhn, possibly popper) but it's still the same shit as we were doing back then of trying to read the world through animal entrails, we just got better at it predicting reality, psychology ain't different it just branched out later. I do regularly touch grass, it's that red brown colour and stiff feel, no?

            • mark213686123 [none/use name]
              ·
              3 years ago

              if they do any programming at a serious level they likely have been exposed to the concept of the concept of objects being just a useful metaphor yes. Or really any computer sceince as the fact that what we think of as a machine is a metaphor for the more nuts and bolts aspect is relevant to understanding the different levels of abstraction we work at.

              physicists know that classical physics is a useful metaphor at the right scale for the more complicated quantum interactions that are happening under the bonnet. scientism isn't the same thing as science. With science being merely a ruthlessly practical methodology that has really no philosphical message to impart at all albeit being intensely useful to learning about and understanding material reality