Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 483.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 07:24:26 +0000
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: science
In Humanist 13.478, Willard McCarty mentions that we might have friends
among the philosophers, historians and sociologists of science and
indicates his hope that humanities will be studied via a philosophy or
sociology or history of the humanities now that research in the humanities
is externalised via the computer.
It is my conjecture that love, friendship, hope, kindness, responsibility,
knowledge are eternal, and so there probably will be some day an
interdisciplinary study of humanities, science, philosophy, sociology and
anthropology, history. I think that the universe distinguishes between
positive events which benefit it and its subsystems and negative events
which detract from these, and I have elsewhere called this the
Nonnegativity/Positivity and Asymmetric System conjectures and argued that
they follow from LBP. Nothing benefits the universe more, I think, than
great literature, music, art, and the emotions that I have mentioned. They
touch the heart of the universe as much as the heart of humanity. The
closest that we can come in academia to this is the interdisciplinary
study, to cross the boundaries of ourselves and others out of hope,
responsibility, friendship, kindness, love, knowledge. We keep our minds
open in this endeavor, changing our own ideas as much as we change
others. We create, discover, invent, intuit, synthesize, analyze, think
and feel more than within our narrow boundaries or even the narrow
boundaries of our departments and of publishing versus perishing. We will
discover that in science and philosophy, in sociology and anthropology and
history, the same factors are at work and are central. In a sense, only
the details differ. The computer can help us immensely to cross these
boundaries, but we must explore ourselves as well because the computer has
never felt the emotions and the motivations and, if Professor Sir Roger
Penrose is correct, never will.
As for myself, I must give at least half the credit for anything that I
have discovered to the interdisciplinary dialogue which I have had for over
30 years with my wife, Dr. Marleen Josie Doctorow, a clinical psychologist
and partisan of Shakespeare. But that is a story for another time.
Yours truly and sincerely,
Osher Doctorow
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