On 5 May 2002 at 14:24, enoonan wrote:
> BO
> "This answers the Quality Event question. DYNAMIC focus shifts
> between the static levels and constantly creates the world by one
> moment sensing existence from biology, the next feeling it (emotions)
> from society and then reasoning about it from intellect."
> How can we know emotions precede thought in the quality event?
Hi Erin
Infinitely interesting these things. You do know my so-called
"expression" list?
Interaction - Sensation - Emotion - Reason
I don't want to sound glib, but this addition to the MOQ pleases me
much because it opens a new way to understanding the MOQ; one that
avoids the mindish fallacy which is such a temptation. i.e: that by the
social value Q-development suddenly turns mental. (NB! It does in a
sense, by turning "abstract", but that's a far cry from SOM's load of the
term ..but wait).
>From this sequence it follows that emotions precede thought, but wait a
little with that too.
> (i know this is about a behavior and emotion but it MAY apply-)
> Independently advanced by Carl G. Lange in 1885 and by William James
> in 1884, it holds that an emotion is the experience of an appropriate
> physical response to external stimuli.
Neither Lang nor James were "moqists" and regarded things from the
mind/matter point of view and from there there is the external-objective
stimulus and an internal-subjective response ('external' isn't necessarily
from outside the body, but from the intestines as well. You know what I
mean)
You say (that they say): "An emotion is the experience of an
appropriate physical response to external stimuli", but as there (to
them) was no SOCIAL reality between the BIOLOGICAL and
INTELLECTUAL ones - and intellect (to them) was the "mind" where
everything is experienced - they came to the said conclusion. Which
still reigns and presents us with the impossible choice of animals either
mute beasts that have all our feelings (emotions), but no way of
expressing them, or that they are mechanical automatons hardly worth
caring about.
This last about animals because I have been involved in a newspaper
debate about "Animal Rights" :-).
The MOQ says that there is no internal/external (mind/matter) divide,
rather THE LEVEL IS EXPERIENCE .. OF THAT LEVEL'S VALUE!
In contrast to this
> an emotion is the experience of an appropriate
> physical response to external stimuli.
SENSATION is the biological experience, while EMOTION is the social
experience. (according to my expression list at least)
An aside.
There has been talk about inorganic experience, but people tend to
visualize an atom WITH consciousness, but this is not the MOQ idea at
all. For now I'll drop the inorganic level and return to the biological one.
All living things sense, that goes for the simplest organisms without
developed sense organs to mammals with their unbelievable complex
nerve system, but it is not complexity itself which makes the primates
"emotional", rather the social dimension.
> Sadness and anger don't make us
> cry and strike, rather they are the feeling of doing so.
That was a strange sentence. You see sadness as the feeling of crying
and anger the feeling of striking!? Hmmm I'm afraid that the SOM
strikes (!) again with its internal (subjective) feeling of external
(objective) phenomena. I would say that it is emotions that start the
tears and blows (the social level influences the biological level). Even
Intellect can enter this "chain reaction" by smothering emotions and
thus prevent biological blows ....or pulling of triggers.
I have gone through the development many times (using Peirce's sign
metaphysics because it is the closest anyone has come to the MOQ)
and entering (my) story at the bio/socio stage. .....There came a time
when EXISTENCE (I use that term as not to become hung up in
particular species) became able to "read" the signs of the body. To take
just one example, that bared fangs meant "I can bite", but that the
actual bite weren't carried out yet evoked an emotional response in the
antagonist. This is a long way from the pure sensation of lower
organisms that has to be bitten to "feel" and it went on for hundred of
thousands of years (in the service of the parent level), but at some point
this ABSTRACT quality of existence took on a dominance that meant
that a new value level was established - The Social. Millennia later and
by the introduction of spoken language, the refinement reached a stage
that became the spring-board for the next development - Intellect. But
that's another story.
> Typical of a
> note of 'phenomenogical materialism' in James, like his substitution
> of the 'I breathe', as the accompaniment of all consciousness, for the
> 'I think'.
James has been praised as some "John the Baptist" of Pirsig. Maybe,
but I have problems finding his quality approach, his contemporary
Charles Peirce is much more of a forerunner
IMO as always.
Bo
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