Hello all,
The hot stove metaphor reminds me of the classic cause-effect relationship
schemata Pirsig reviews in "Lila" while he is making friends with several
philosophic platypi. He writes,
To say that "A causes B" or to say that "B values precondition A" is
to say the same thing.
As you've noted, the subject object dichotemy is quite useful for many tasks
but lousy for certain other tasks. If I talk about my car it is great to
have subjectivity, and when I want to get to the store it's a great object
to have. But when I want to describe a social pattern, say that impacts the
environment, the moq paradigm works wonders. Rather than stating, "high CO2
emissions cause global warming" one might now state, "Global warming values
the precondition of high CO2 emissions." If I get hung up in the
subject-object / cause-effect dichotomies I am forced to attempt to prove
that high CO2 emissions are causing global warming. That may be a tougher
premise to substantiate than the premise that "global warming values the
precondition of high CO2 emissions." The latter suggests a tendancy towards
a low quality situation while the former leaves us with a hung jury until
somebody comes up with some "proof" that global warming is real, all the
meanwhile we continue with the CO2 emissions. I think the moq perspective is
quite useful here to help guide current activities based on expected value
judgments. We don't need to await the hung jury.
Platt noted Pirsig's quote, "Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot
stove that directly causes the oaths." To apply this to the global warming
situation requires some digging (at least it appears so to me). My pre-moq
mind is trying to find cause-effect links from global warming to low quality
human situations (like the pre-cognitive experience of being wipped around
by a tornado, which was caused by the extra energe at sea, which came from
the global warming, which came from .... connected to the knee bone, knee
bone connected to the .... sorry, I had to do it). With moq, we might more
easily convince people that it is low quality to be wipped around by a
tornado. They'll believe that. (If not we could all go to Hershey Park!) To
convince humans that "being wipped around in a tornado values the
precondition of high CO2 emissions" will take some work. It's the
precognitive experience of being wipped around by the tornado that manifests
environmental oaths. I suspect this manner of description will have better
efficacy than the notion that global warming is the reason for environmental
oaths.
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