Real quick,
isn't the many <-->one division the same as intellectual <--> social?
maggie
On Friday, September 6, 2002, at 09:27 PM, Scott R wrote:
> 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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