lunes, 18 de julio de 2011

Revisiting faith from cyberspace


We are close to the time when the access to internet will be installed in our brain with no interface at sight. To some extent this is just a superficial step but it illustrates the relation between the virtual and the self. Indeed, we can revisit the notion of faith from the perspective of virtual reality. Faith could be understood as the ability of your brain to access that virtual reality created by mythology. And mythology can now be seen as something as real as the net. Religious battles can be compared to battles between social networks.

sábado, 16 de julio de 2011

Promiscuous positivism


There is not such a thing as symbolic causation. This is important because it poses a hard limitation on Freud's  theory of the psyche. Indeed, the domain of symbols, the realm of culture has its own effective phenomenology just as classical physics with regards to quantum mechanics. Perhaps back In Freud's time, symbolic causation seemed to be the right step to introduce positivism into psychology. But know we know better. The failure was not the use of causalism nor the use of symbolism but their combination. They belong to different realms. Together, both are diminished; symbols are reduced to predictable objects while causalism becomes rhetorics. It is true that the cognitive dualism limits the metaphysical (self)conception of the mind (the psyche and eventually the culture) but the kind of causation which is implied by the physical side of this dualism is not of a symbolic nature. Symbols only belong to the mind; the substantiality of physics know no symbols.