Patrick, Bo, Platt and all:
> DMB:
> Again, this ignorance of the "social level's role" is the failure that
> I want to discuss. That's why I started the thread in the first place.
Patrick:
You mean the Failure of the Enlightenment, not this thread, I assume.
DMB:
That's right. Not sure how the thread names got mixed up. But its fixed now.
Patrick:
I think it's an interesting notion that moral has everything to do with
the social level.
DMB:
Actually this is one of the most interesting issues. Traditional morality is
a social level thing. The ten commandments and all that. The purpose of
which is to keep biological forces under control, things like sex and
violence, who owns which things. And its this level of morality that was
relegated to oblivion by the products of enlightenment thinkers. But the
interesting thing about the MOQ is that each level has its own particular
kind of morality, with one level's kind being better than the next. This is
what seems to elude Platt. (Still waiting for evidence to the contrary from
Platt.) And as Bodvar points out very well, the whole social level has been
lost insofar as SOM tends to lump it in with intellect. The Age of Reason
sees social values as little more than a bunch of bad ideas, superstitions
and irrationalities, but as a product of the mind all the same. That's why
making distinctions between the third and fourth levels is so key to
grasping the MOQ. Its something the modern mind doesn't do very well yet.
Patrick:
In a Newtonian, Cartesian world, which I take as impliciting the
worldview of the Enlightenment, we are individuals who have no place in
the bigger scheme of things. We are our only judges, and we create our
own values. Add with that our sexual, violent and other feelings that
are the products of Darwinian evolution; that is, totally accidentally
created with no further meaning.
DMB:
I think that's right. The Newtonian God, if you will, is like a machinist
who has left the scene. So we're left in an empty machine to fend for
ourselves and all moral systems are just arbitrary non-sense. And instincts
can't be wrong because they're "natural". That's the cause of the disaster
and the moral nightmare that Pirsig complains about.
Patrick:
Okay, let's assume we're not newtonian robots, but quantum beings. What
does that imply?
DMB:
This strikes me as an interesting issue, but I don't know if I trust any
kind of physics, no matter how sophisticated, to address this particular
problem.
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