Hello everyone
Kenneth Van Oost wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Dan Glover <DGlover@centurytel.net>
>
> > Now it seems to me both questions are basically asking the same thing.
> > If we say something is "real" then it is really part of reality. A
> > person dying of thirst in the desert or freezing to death in the cold
> > may experience vivid hallucinations and end up committing some very
> > bizarre acts that hold no value in our agreed upon reality. And value is
> > considered synonymous with Quality in the MOQ. Pirsig calls it the
> > Metaphysics of Value early on in Lila. So how do we know value (Quality)
> > is (equals) real (reality)? "By the harmony it produces." The dude
> > swallowing sand in the desert may believe it is the nectar of the Gods
> > he is drinking down but unless he receives some help very soon his
> > harmonious life will end. There is no harmony in such acts.
>
> << Dan and all,
>
> I know I have no reason bursting in like that but I will do it anyway.
> What follows may be a bold statement...
> Dan you wrote, there is no harmony is such acts, and that is very true, at
> least
> not right away.
> But, like I see it, there is a BENEFIT, and you said it, the poor fellow may
> experience vivid hallucinations and end up committing all sorts of very
> strange acts that hold no Value in our agreed upon reality.
>
> But there is Value and Quality, no doubt about that, though !
> But not in the Reality where we agreed upon, at least not at first sight.
> If the poor bastard dies alone and we will never find his body in the great
> desert, nobody will ever know what his last thoughts were.
> We can only speculate and just in doing that we create Value and Quality,
> that is what Chris Lofting used to say...(literally) BEHIND the scene. There
> is a
> whole different world, consisting out of memory,sense of meaning, what/
> where, a good deal of symbolism, metaphors,...in other words, the world
> of the memes.
> And those are working independent from our agreed upon Reality, they become
> part of our Reality at the same moment we think about them.
Hi Kenneth
I've been reading your posts and others concerning memetic theory with
much interest but confess I have little to add to what's been said as I
really am not qualified. However, I would suggest memetics might be
better served by considering the philosophy of the MOQ. From what I've
read there seems a tendency for memeticists to either assign the value
of memes to the brain in some as yet unidentified way or make the claim,
as you seem to be doing here, that memes exist entirely independent of
the brain but act upon us when we become aware of them.
The MOQ would seem to state memes (as social and/or intellectual
patterns of value) are almost completely independent of biological
patterns yet they share a history of evolutionary processes. This would
seem to suggest researchers will not find a "meme" control center in our
brains yet certainly some part of our brain does deal with memes. So
both schools of thought are right on this question. Memes do exist in
the brain yet memes are almost independent of the brain too, as a result
of Dynamic evolutionary processes.
>
> The BENEFIT, works two ways, your way in supposingly knowing ( you
> create Value and Quality this way) what the poor fellow thought at the
> moment he died ( you know more this way, it brings out the best) and
> secondly in
> the way of the spreading of the memes (info), again there is Value and
> Quality created, that is in other persons their minds.
> Those memes propagate and become part of our Reality, which is then in
> fact more accurate, in fact enriched with more (patterns of) Value and
> Quality.
>
> In the case of the HARMONY, there is some, like I said at least not right
> away.
> HARMONY, again in my opinion, can only come from different things, at
> least two, being in balance.
> In the scene of the man dying of thirst, what in itself can be considered as
> a negative process, HARMONY and therefor Value and Quality is only
> achieved by creating a WHOLE, that is putting together a negative pro-
> cess and a positive one.
>
> There is basically nothing positive at dying in a desert ( so negative)
> unless
> you will accept that the information outcome ( what we will ' know ' more)
> of such a process is the second aspect ( here positive) needed to create a
> WHOLE and therefor HARMONY.
>
> But if we can consider this as Quality like Pirsig suggested I don 't know,
> that is up to you to consider.
> Let me know...
Well, it would seem as the body shuts down due to extreme conditions we
have a tendency to perceive what we really wish to perceive instead of
what it is we are really perceiving. Certainly there is harmony in that,
and when we die perhaps we go back to some kind of "wholeness" from
which everything springs, and there is harmony in that too. And the
harmony of the biological patterns of value goes on, perhaps, as we are
born anew, but the harmony of the social and intellectual patterns of
value people used to call us is no longer real. There is a hole where we
used to be. Perhaps that is what drives us (males more so that females)
to create monuments to our intellect? But that is a whole 'nother can
o'worms.
Now it would seem to me there would be different sets of memes --
looking at the situation from the MOQ prospective -- including those
that deal with biological/social conflicts and those that deal with
social/intellectual conflicts. These meme sets would have very little in
common and in fact would actively oppose each other.
>
> For more about Chris Lofting see www.eisa.net.au/~lofting/plate.html
I browsed the paper quickly but the time is not there for me to really
get into it right now. Thank you for the url and for your comments.
Dan
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