Hi Bo,
Thanks for your kind words, and I hope you'll bear with my circuitous
answer to your question below.
skutvik@online.no wrote:
>
> On 2 Mar 2002, at 21:29, Scott Roberts wrote:
>
>
> > In support of this opinion, there is the work
> > of those who have actually studied consciousness empirically for
> > millenia, namely Hindu and Buddhist philosopher/mystics, whose work
> > people like Chalmers or Dennett just ignore, since it doesn't fit in
> > with their presuppositions.
>
> Hear, hear! Now, Scott. I remember that you forwarded REASON
> as the "characteristic" of Intellect. I wonder if you have noticed my
> "crusade" to get Q-intellect reigned in under the general value of
> S/O (the ability to divide what is objective from what is subjective is
> REASON) stripped of its 'M' naturally ...just wonder if you have
> evaluated it?
> Bo.
>
I have noticed it, and read the SOLAQI web page put together by Dan
Glover, but have not yet completely assimilated it. Part of my problem
is that though I am much indebted to the MoQ for my thinking I am also
indebted to other sources, and there is some conflict, so I am trying to
work out whether this conflict is superficial or deeper.
The main problem I have is with the idea that each q-level *came into
existence
at some point in time* from the next lower level. This is clearly the
case if one assumes that Darwin was more or less right, but I do not do
so. To explain why, I have to back up a bit.
I was a student in Cognitive Science (a couple of decades ago) and
pondering the question of whether a computer could be conscious. I
didn't think so, but couldn't pin down why. Finally I realized that no
computer could be conscious because the smallest mental act (of
awareness, feeling, experience) required the grasping of a whole, but a
computer (being a spatio-temporal object) has every bit of it separated
in space and/or time from every other bit. (The same argument applies to
the brain, considered as a spatio-temporal object). In sum, for
consciousness to happen *requires* a non-spatio-temporal reality of some
sort. Another way to state it is that to be aware of time passing, we
have to be outside of time -- which is what mystics have been saying all
along.
Further developing this thought, I came to realize that our inability to
understand consciousness (what does it mean to be "outside of time"?)
was the same problem as our inability to
understand God (as the mystics would have it) or to understand Quality.
I had read ZMM shortly after it came out, so it had helped prepare me
for this. So here, I think, though in different terms, is the same as
what you
are saying: our intellect is S/O thinking, and with that we cannot
understand the source of S/O thinking. But we *can* understand -- and
this is the MoQ -- that subjects and objects are not primary, rather
they are created in each instance of our awareness, and Quality is the
driver of that creation. Is this a fair characterization?
Now there are all sorts of unanswered questions here, primarily, out of
what is our S/O thinking being created. The answer, I think, would
be something like the Logos in the neo-Platonic sense, and that is why I
suggested
REASON as the quality characteristic of the intellect level. But I meant
it in two senses, though at the time, only one was relevant. That sense
is that I see reason as the name of our choosing one bit of thinking
over another, thus it is DQ working at the intellectual level. But to
work it needs an SQ context, namely our current presuppositions and
logic.
The other sense is that -- just like Quality -- we cannot understand it
at the intellectual level. So, I believe that Reason is the same
non-thing
as Quality, just a different name when we are focused on intellect.
I'll stop here with this, to mention something else that is discussed in
the SOLAQI notes. Pirsig talks about the emergence of SO thinking by the
Greeks, but I think that is not quite accurate. What the Greeks
developed was subject/predicate thinking, that is, reality consisted of
things with their attributes. That is, the word "subject" meant to them
(and to the medievals who actually used the word subjectus) what we
today mean as object. SOM didn't really happen until about 400 years
ago. The reason for bringing this up is to recommend a book that
discusses this in detail, namely *Saving the Appearances: A
Study in Idolatry* by Owen Barfield. In it he describes the same thing
as Julian Jaynes did in *The Origin of Consciousness* (Barfield's book
was 15 or 20 years earlier), but without Jaynes' materialist
presuppositions. I could go on and on about Barfield (and I can't
resist: in another book *What Coleridge Thought* he discusses
Coleridge's concept of polarity, which is very much like DQ/SQ -- and
Coleridge also distinguished reason as something DQ-ish as compared to
an SQ-ish understanding -- in much the same way as his well-known
distinction between imagination and fancy). Anyway, one of Barfield's
points is that
without SO thinking, there is no "inorganic". The gods, that is, were
*experienced* in nature, not made up to "explain" nature. And thinking
was the voice of the gods, until SO -- gradually -- took over.
Thus, the development of the subject (in the modern sense) was
also the development of our experience of the inorganic *as* inorganic.
Which is why there was no experimental science until the 17th century.
Thus there is no inorganic level (as we currently think of it) until
there is an intellectual level. The key point is that our current stage
of consciousness (subject-object dualism) is just as temporary as the
"experiencing gods in nature" stage (what Barfield calls "original
participation"), and is just as "wrong" -- in some ways even more wrong.
Barfield also makes the point, as I believe you do in the SOLAQI, that
SOL is a necessary stage on the way to the next stage, which he calls
"final participation" and which mystics call the transcendence of
subject-object duality. Again, is this a fair characterization. So even
though we are more out of touch with Reality (Quality) than those in
"original participation" (as of course Pirsig is saying in Lila) we are
in a progression of some sort (and nevermind how all this looks from
outside of space and time :)
- Scott
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