Q: Hi Robert. I have a question. Can an Ego ever be mature? This relates to something you have said, that you have met very few adults in your life. Could you elaborate on this please, and thanks.
These are difficult concepts, but we do not have tools to make them easier. It is reality and Robert has a gift for expressing it in a transparent way.
Terrific. How much more relaxed our world would feel if humans were less sure of ourselves (and less reliant on obdurate statements about what we are told we 'know' from cultural authorities).
A minor cavil:
> There is no such thing as objectivity
Literally true. But it's literally true also of far more concrete concepts like 'chair' (a bit of a classic in Eleanor Rosch's psychological research on categorisation). We can however use both 'chair' and 'objective' without problems. They just happen to be more like graduated concept-clouds than mathematical sets.
There is relatively objective journalism, which is very different in both its techniques and final product from agitprop. And we have a three century old intellectual tradition of empirical knowledge (science) which gets closer to 'objective' truth about matters within its rightful domain than anything historically prior to it.
What distinguishes these relative forms of objectivity in my opinion from the general morass of subjectivity is their social aspect - that they insist on agreed-on institutionalised procedures that have been discovered to tend towards results more objective than an unassisted human individual can achieve.
These are difficult concepts, but we do not have tools to make them easier. It is reality and Robert has a gift for expressing it in a transparent way.
Terrific. How much more relaxed our world would feel if humans were less sure of ourselves (and less reliant on obdurate statements about what we are told we 'know' from cultural authorities).
A minor cavil:
> There is no such thing as objectivity
Literally true. But it's literally true also of far more concrete concepts like 'chair' (a bit of a classic in Eleanor Rosch's psychological research on categorisation). We can however use both 'chair' and 'objective' without problems. They just happen to be more like graduated concept-clouds than mathematical sets.
There is relatively objective journalism, which is very different in both its techniques and final product from agitprop. And we have a three century old intellectual tradition of empirical knowledge (science) which gets closer to 'objective' truth about matters within its rightful domain than anything historically prior to it.
What distinguishes these relative forms of objectivity in my opinion from the general morass of subjectivity is their social aspect - that they insist on agreed-on institutionalised procedures that have been discovered to tend towards results more objective than an unassisted human individual can achieve.
Helpful and encouraging. Thank you...