Re: Larry Klaes on "Illusions"

Robert Owen (rowen@technologist.com)
Wed, 06 Oct 1999 14:50:07 -0400

From: Larry Klaes <lklaes@bbn.com>

Larry,

I wish I had time to explore with you the epistemology of your quotation. At any rate, it expresses my viewpoint succinctly, and we need, on all Lists and Newsgroups, MORE of this genre--there is so much naiveté out there, so little appreciation of the relativistic nature of human perception and the extent to which we rely on egocentric fictions. A good dose of, e.g. Hume and Kant might shake some of the otherwise most sophisticated members out of their culturally conditioned "dogmatic slumbers"!

"As with so many things in astronomy, the motionless Earth
that we normally perceive - relying on our tiny, limited, human frames of reference - is an illusion concealing something far grander."

There is an enormous difference between Science and
"scientism" -- your quotation might help a bit to enhance
the awareness of this dichotomy.

Thank you.

Bob



Robert M. Owen
Director
The Orion Institute
57 W. Morgan Street
Brevard, NC 28712-3659 USA