Why, oh why, don't I live in MA?

[katekat]

I really really really really really want to go to this:

Reader-Con

REALLY.

But, instead, I'll be returning from LA and getting ready for my Japanese I final. Yay. I think.

Comments

[gray-ghost.livejournal.com]

All of them look like interesting talks, but my first reaction to Einstein and Modernity was a gigantic and puzzled WTF?!

There's no question that relativity and quantum mechanics formed significant parts of the modernist world view. We have actually seen an argument that the inability to accept inherent quantum randomness in physics on the part of Einstein and others was the scientific equivalent of not being able to read Joyce, listen to Stravinsky, or look at Picasso. Special relativity became a ubiquitous metaphor for moral relativism, in contradiction to its actual philosophical implications. A discussion of the real implications of 20th-century physics breakthroughs and the way they have been appropriated or misappropriated as metaphors for our times.

Okay...just the last part (realitivy became a ubiquitous metaphor for moral relativism)

As far as I understand moral relativism, it is the idea that moral stances or positions do not reflect or define universal truths about human nature. If people are using relativity as a metaphor for moral relativism, then they are totally wrong. Because in special relativity, the predominant concern is isolating those physical properties of a system which remain invariant under Lorentzian transformations (changing the reference frame you are currently in). So there is stuff which remains constant from one reference frame to another. And in general, trying to extend theories in science to metaphors about human nature is a really REALLY bad idea. Anything that can cloak itself in the robes of science is going to gain a certain respectability it otherwise might not have had, because of the place science has in our world now. Even the creationists have stopped quoting the Bible, and are trying to dress up their religious ideas as alternative 'scientific' theories involving an intelligent creator behind everything. And look at the horrors that have been wrought from the belief by some people in social darwinism which sprung from total ignorance about Darwin's theory of evolution. There is no injustice in the world. If people are poor and starving to death, it is simply because they are not equipped to survive in this world. Nature is cruel and weeds out the weak....but in the end it creates a better world. Darwin says so. And of course the Bill Gates/Andrew Carnegie types are at the top of this food chain, and so we should all bow down and worship them.

[(Anonymous)]

So when are you ACTUALLY coming to LA? You never answered my email, dearie.

- Miranda