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Police and Professor: who had moral high ground?

Can both simultaneously occupy the moral high ground?

The NYTimes published a news article that ignited “a national discussion about race and law enforcement unfolded after the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard’s prominent scholar of African-American history. Professor Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct July 16 at his home in Cambridge, Mass., as the police investigated a report of a possible break-in there. The charge was later dropped, and the Cambridge Police Department said the incident was “regrettable and unfortunate.” President Obama said the police officer had acted stupidly.

Are experiences, meaning, and comprehension pertinent to the facts?

Did the police officer and the professor “see” the same thing?

The police officer saw himself once again going into a dangerous situation in order to preserve law and order; in this dangerous situation he saw a potentially dangerous black man giving him a hard time just like so many others have done.

The well respected university professor saw a police officer harassing him because he is a black man; just as many police officers constantly harass him and all black men because almost all Irish police officers harbor racial hatred for all African Americans.

I claim that both the policeman and the professor had made moral decisions of the highest meaning. Both made decisions affecting the interrelationships of the community in its widest variables.

The Scientific Method seeks to bracket [fence out] meaningfulness. The scientific method hates bias and bias is one form of meaning. Bias causes the individual to often distort “truth”. In the lab bias is the enemy, i.e. meaning is the enemy.

Religion seeks to bracket the word “morality”, i.e. to create a fence protecting the “word” from outside influence. Religion seeks to bracket human critical thought. I was raised as a Catholic and went to Catholic schools and was taught by nuns. I learned quickly that to “entertain” impure thoughts (thoughts about sex) or questions about my religion were sinful and had to be confessed to a priest in the confessional.

What is meaning?

Meaning is not a thing: meaning is a creatures’ association with an object.

Meaning and epistemology (what can we know and how can we know it) go together like a “horse and carriage”. Epistemology is about comprehension and comprehension is about meaning.

Comprehension can be usefully thought of as being hierarchical and formed like a pyramid. At the base is awareness followed by consciousness. Awareness is the beginning of comprehension; it begins with preconceptual and unconscious happenings in our brain. Consciousness adds to awareness the focus of our attention on this object that results from awareness. We are aware of much and we are conscious of little. When I walk in the woods I am aware of much and become quickly terrified by the consciousness of a shape that makes me think bear.

Knowing follows consciousness on this pyramid. Knowing is followed by understanding. Understanding is at the pinnacle of the pyramid of comprehension.

Meaning follows comprehension side by side. Meaning begins with awareness and grows with consciousness and knowing. At the pinnacle of the pyramid is the creation of new meaning through the process of our understanding, which organizes into a gestalt that which is known. The understanding at the pinnacle of comprehension is that rare moment of eureka when all becomes clear after a great struggle to understand a complex matter. Understanding is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where our knowledge are the pieces of the puzzle.

Thank you for posting of interesting subject of discussion and philosophical insight / introduction into it. I wrote a post on my blog about this event, because we can demontrate many connections to AWT principles of observable reality formation here.

• At first, we can demonstrate an emergent character of our reality, i.e. the formation of serious situation, which resulted from high number of small (if not predictable) mistakes of all people involved. We simply have too many people under stress here, which results in poorly conditioned thinking (a quantum fluctuations or mutations) - so that the subsequent condensation of crisis was nearly undeniable.
• At second, we can demonstrate a duality of insintric and exsintric observational perspective, which are able to describe the same situation in quite different, if not reciprocal way. This corresponds the situation of energy spreading through vacuum foam, where energy propagates in at least two independent ways, which results in quantum uncertainty, supersymmetry and other phenomena (I can explain these physical analogies later, if someone will be interested).
• At third we can demonstrate a formation of new quality and reality level in confrontation of two mutually dual perspectives, which can be expressed in following diagram illustrating the collision of pair space-time branes.
  

It's not difficult to interpret this sentence in Aether Wave Theory (AWT). In this theory observable reality is composed of density fluctuations of another pieces of reality in nested recursive way like fluctuations forming during condensation of dense supercritical fluid.



It means, human experience is cumulative and it has an emergent character: when critical amount of comprehension is reached, it condenses into new level of human understanding (theory or meaning). But such process is completely reciprocal: when number of theories increases, it helps to produce a new level of human experience in the same way.

So it may not be so easy to distinguish between these two aspects of cognitive gnoseology whenever number of information increases, because our contemporary reality consist of high number of observations and interpretations of reality at the same moment (is for example photon really an tangible object of observable reality - or rather sorta interpretation of it?)

And so on... I hope, AWT becomes a powerful tool of mutual reconciliation of philosophy and science.

I cannot see that this incident could be taken in any way other than blatant racism. Dressing it up with cute diagrams and discussion of meaning does not alter the fact that the initial assumption made was that a black man would not, actually I'll change that to could not, be the owner of a nice house in a nice neighbourhood. And that in a country that has now elected a half-African president (whose initial reaction was the same as mine).

The whole episode was dreadful.

Fact? How did you get into such racist assumption? Can you prove it?

Probably not. It's undoubtedly impossible to prove the assumptions of others, I was annoyed at the reduction of this awful story to the level of an interesting puzzle on the back of a match box that allowed me to type what you have rightly pointed out was a baseless (apart from the fracas) assumption. I'll change the words to --- 'that the initial assumption may have been along the line that the black'-----etc. And in mitigation of my lack of proof may I point out that there are whole belief systems are based on the totally unprovable.

It's still a no less appalling thing to happen.

Nope, my dear - it's just you, who wants to see it as racist story and who is making a racist story from that accident.

Because reality was a much more earth-bounded and it had anything to do with racism. But people want the flame and show - not "the picture on the back of a match box", because they're bored.