Wim,
Wim Nusselder wrote:
> Dear Scott,
>
> You wrote 5/9 22:59 +0000 about a big gaping hole in the MoQ, but it is not
> clear to me what that hole is according to you.
> What do you mean with 'Pirsig ignoring the many/one problem'?
> Maybe Pirsig ignored consciousness, but is that a problem? Maybe we don't
> need it?
I think we need it, but that may be that it was in trying to imagine how
a computer could be conscious, I realized that it logically could not,
because every event in a computer is separated spatially and/or
temporally from every event, so there is no way that two or more or a
million events could be grasped as a whole. For the same reason, a
brain, considered as a spatio-temporal object could not be conscious
either. From this I realized that the basic problem was SOM, the belief
that reality consists of subjects being aware of objects (or its
materialist and Berkeleyan idealist variants). My answer to the question
of consciousness is that it is backwards: that consciousness must be
presupposed, and everything else explained as products of consciousness.
It isn't that big a leap from this to the MOQ, to explain everything
else in terms of Quality, but only if the two are considered alternate
names. If we don't do that, then we still have to explain where
consciousness comes from.
> You know I tend to consider consciousness to be -formulated loosely- the
> difference between social and intellectual patterns of values.
I could see self-consciousness to be the difference between social and
intellectual patterns, but not consciousness itself (this may be a
definitional problem -- I use the word consciousness to include animal
consciousness at a minimum).
A better way
> for me to explain phenomena usually associated with consciousness, its
> content or the lack of it is to describe intellectual patterns of values as
> patterns of motivations for human activity and to describe social patterns
> of values as patterns of behavior that can be acquired and trained.
>
> I was intrigued by the idea you derive from Plato/Kuhlewind that 'ideas
> think through me'.
> Could we say
> - that intellectual patterns of values motivate our actions through us,
> - that social patterns of values guide (not determine) part of our behavior,
> - that biological patterns of values guide another ('hard-wired') part of
> our behavior and
> - that inorganic patterns of values guide the rest of our behavior as mass
> and energy possessing entities?
I think this makes sense. Steiner (in "The Philosophy of Freedom")
differentiates between what he calls (in translation from German)
"driving forces" and "motives", where the latter are intellectual
patterns and the former emotional/social, and that it is only when our
actions are a result of motives that we are free. However, if I have
interpreted him correctly, it takes a "pure" intellectual pattern to
qualify as a motive, which is rare.
>
> What makes you say that 'the ego is basically a social construct' rather
> than a construct of intellectual patterns of values (as I would say)? I'd
> say that social patterns of values only create differentiation of roles, but
> don't break the identification of humans with the group they are part of.
I see the ego as being created in reaction to "the other", mainly other
persons. Maine de Barre (if I remember correctly) called the ego a set
of resistances, which is to say, the ego only exists in relation to the
non-ego, as fear of the other, or as desire of the other, or as thinking
*about* the other (rather than a transcendent "thinking as identity*).
There is also the mimetic theory of Rene Girard (which I have only read
about, not directly), that we acquire our desires in imitation of
others' desires.
>
> I am wondering what you want with the Kuhlewindian/Barfieldian/Steinerian
> distinction between change in consciousness from 'outside' and from
> 'inside'? That distinction becomes totally meaningless to me if I try to
> translate it to my concept of consciousness as the difference between
> intellectual and social patterns of values. I find it hard to square you
> making this distinction with your earlier objections against Gary's
> internal/external (metaphysical) distinction.
The characterization "outside/inside" is the SOT way of putting it, the
only one available to us. By "outside" is just meant that humanity
evolved to the current stage through whatever means (I, following K/B/S,
say those means were basically spiritual, a materialist would say, they
were adaptations to the environment), while "inside" means we -- since
we are now self-conscious and aware of the changeability of our
consciousness, are now responsible for subsequent change.
My disagreement with Gary is that he takes matter/energy as fundamental,
and is looking to explain consciousness in terms of matter (neural
processes), something I consider impossible. To me, the belief in
independently existing matter/energy is a belief that only can exist in
our current, transitory stage of consciousness. I don't deny that in
this current stage our experience comes in the pattern inside/outside.
> Maybe you are referring to another type of consciousness that is more than
> or beyond being the difference between intellectual and social patterns of
> values because it reaches 'up' to DQ? Maybe DQ doesn't so much operate
> 'through us'/through 'ego' (as static patterns of values do), but rather
> 'becomes our identity' if we concentrate on 'immediate experience'?
I think I am (see above). Also, I think the ego has the result of
filtering out DQ (see my post to John B). DQ is there, or we wouldn't be
experiencing anything (recall my post a while back that all experience
is (non-)characterized with the logic of contradictory identity of the
DQ/sq polarity, but that production is subconscious, and all we are
conscious of is the resulting sq.)
I would also quibble that we cannot "concentrate on immediate
experience". We can only let go, and so rediscover that the true "I"
that the ego masks is DQ.
- Scott
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