• essays

  • Unicorns in the night sky

    Of politics and pit-men

    Happy Trails!

    Watering the neurons

    Zombie memory

    Denting Dennett

    World don't matter!

    Cretin Hop!

    Copernican erotics

    Wittgenstein experiments

    Wallbanging in thought

    LPoE

    Quasars demand Rogaine

    Monkeys on meth

    Happy Valentines day!

    Steamrollin' the Ice Age

    When logic dies

    Berkeley's got E.D.

    The zombie satires

    A Louisville Slugger

    Wittgenstein devolves

    An inedible vegetable

    Less than savages

    Radioactive weddings

    Dueling zombies

    Into the lens

    Darwinian insecticide

    The Worst Arguments

    Jerry's joking Mr. Feynman

    Wishing in the cornfield

    Nuptializing quarks

    Less than Z zero

    Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

    Like a taboo

    Pentodes of the mind

    Out rogering Rogers

    Turing's got a Honey

    Malice in Blunderland

    Experimental tails

    Reefer gravity

    The book of moron

    Moorean rain

home

Wishing in the cornfield

Joe wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_a_Good_Life_(The_Twilight_Zone)

In the classic Twilight Zone episode - perhaps the most surreal offering in TV history, Anthony, a kid from a rural Ohio community, dominates its day-to-day activities. "Reality" depends on his wishing events to occur. With his mind alone, Anthony creates violent TV shows, makes it snow in summer, permanently shuts off the electricity, engineers 3 headed gophers, etc. At a birthday party, a neighbor gets boozed-up, exhorting the adults to kill Anthony for the disruptions he caused to the community. To punish his neighbor, Anthony turns him into a jack-in-the-box. In siloutte, the man's head bobs-up and down on a spring. Horrified, Anthony's father begs him to: "Please wish it into the cornfield, son! Wish it into the cornfield, please!". The "cornfield" is non-existence (the void) - where the man-in-the-box - eerily - goes.

Now, I begin to understand Khuno's, Jerry's, Norton's and JoshingThySelf's science-hate as a minor symptom of a major metaphysical disease. In this cult, the existence of a mind-independent reality is exactly what has been "wished into the cornfield". Redefining what science deals with (the real) elicits very Anthony-like consequences.

By declaring that 400 years worth of Physics is rubbish, Jerry has achieved an exalted position. Once he decreed that the constants of Physics: "c", "G", "h", etc. were variables, the constants of Physics were sent into the "cornfield". Now, only inconstants prevade the universe.

Khuno, Norton and JoshingThySelf decided - peremptorily - that insects have no mate preferences, despite that insects have been shown in experiments for over 140 years to have them, so the 400+ million year evolutionary history - in which preferences for ornaments directed evolution in insect species - silently went into the "cornfield", winking-out of reality.

The type-specimen of this occult mind-rot is as follows:

Khuno wrote:

And the final insult is your block headed insistance that any term a biologist uses is defacto a biologist's term. Now preference is a biologist's term according to you. They aren't using helpful metaphorical devices to relate the mating behavior of scorpionflies to you.

Khuno might have been mature enough, stating this up front: "I exclude the possibility of recognizing that mate preferences have been observed on the part of non-human organisms in scientific research. I refuse to yield to empirical evidence (i.e. reality).". This decision would have saved him a lot of energy in jiggering-up the redefinition of the bio-term "preference". He shifted the goal-posts so far out-of-range that nothing observable about the behaviors of non-human organisms could satisfy his artificially constricted redefinition of a biological mate preference to a human-level of cognitive complexity.

Declaring sexual (or natural) selection terms to be "metaphorical devices" is a botched metaphysical commitment. Biology ceased to be an empirical concern for Khuno from the moment he reworked SS terms into drivel - much as the resurrection of Christ is not an empirical concern to Christian Fundamentalists. He confuses the reasons in his mind with the causes playing-out in the world. If mate preferences can be redefined to not appear in non-human organisms, then mate preferences can also be redefined to not appear in humans. He would have - after this re-definition then - have arrived at the same conclusion that mate preferences are not to be had - even by humans. However, science offers an extremely sparse menu: Either you accept it or you reject it.

Here's an SS experiment, conducted by a scientific wizard by the name of Scott Sakaluk. He physically isolated nuptial gifts from males of a gift-giving cricket species, then - during mating trials, he fed them to females of a non-gift giving cricket species. These females showed strong mate preferences towards the gifts. However, the females of the males' own gift-giving cricket species lack a preference for the gift - as they've built-up "resistances" to the attractive sex trait via a "counter-adaptation". From what I understand from the posters here - since insect (female) preferences for insect (male) nuptial gifts do not exist, Sakaluk's brilliant experiment never occurred. Below, I suspect what may have happened -

Rob L Norton, Jerry and JoshingThySelf, chanting in unison: "Please, wish it into the cornfield, Khuno! Wish it into the cornfield, please!"