From: ml (mbtlehn@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon Sep 27 2004 - 20:10:05 BST
Hello Scott and DMB:
[Scott:] I came to philosophy as a student of computer and cognitive
science, and was confronted by the question of whether or not a computer
could be conscious. I didn't think it could be, but couldn't specify why.
People can do things, like identify a pattern from a bunch of particulars.
They turn photons into color and air vibrations into sound. How? Most of
all, people are aware of things, and can reflect on them. Why can't a
computer?
mel:
A computer's pathways are as deterministic as plumbing,
it processes bits like a sewer system processes grunts.
It's a tool, a glorified socket set, purely physical - no culture
Associational self-modification, dependent and in synthesis
is purely post-biological at this time in our experience.
dmb says:
Why can't a computer reflect upon things? Only a materialist could ask this
question, right? MOQers know that between mind and matter, there is society
and biology. That's why we can't go from sand to mind.
mel:
Good.
Surely by now it should have occurred to us that the monopolar views
materialist/idealist/whateverist miss the boat by looking at the thing
itself. Instead we should realize that the relationship between the
"things" is where the meaning resides, where the dynamic plays.
It's like the difference between the block of marble and the sculpture.
The emptied space defines relationships, forms, mythos...
Physical gives birth to chemical, but biological arises in the folding
of chemical and the creation of dynamic topologies that can
sustain multiple use, multiple meaning, redirection of matter in the
dance of entropy to store more information and potential.
The social is the creation of more hugely empty spaces around
which the biological is arranged, the women behind the veil or
the skirt, the eunuch, the man as king or peasant, are all empty
spaces, places where others may not be.
Then intellect, in place of unseparated knowledge, empties further
to make an Archimedean plane with imaginary places to put
imaginary levers to move imaginary worlds. The puppet's strings,
the models of systems, the labels of phenomena and proposals
for ontology in infinite empty space, unreal, but filled with more
information. Dense with ever more associational possibilities.
The dynamic is where we leap ahead of intellect to tease at the
unraveling edge of the manifesting, the formless.
<clip-paste>
{Scott:] On their beauty, absolutely. Even as a student of mathematics I
have experienced that beauty. But "responded to DQ" does not quite fit the
experience. The beauty is inseparable from the pure intellectuality (if
that is a word) of the moment. It is humdrum intellect momentarily being
Intellect. That's why calling DQ "pre-intellectual" is such a bad move. The
quality and the intellectuality are one and the same.
mel:
DQ in full can ONLY be pre-intellectual. In the present, Perception
is only open to largely unmediated experience prior to the separation
of intellect and knowledge, which are of the past. There lies only the
memory of the Dynamic or the processed model of the dynamic, not
the dynamic itself.
Pirsig's choice of "quality" as a term for the apprehensible attributes
of the present cusp of being may be arguable, but whatever term you prefer
must express the "pretellectual" rather than what is past.
Otherwise you are speaking of something no longer real.
Beauty, as you say is intellectual, but it is a judgement of something
that is now past, something not on the present cusp of being.
Language is not made to communicate experience of NOW, but
rather to process abstractions of the past...that is the point
of what Zen's view of the mind as an addictive disease is in
ordinary consciousness. If you reduce Pirsig's message to
philosophical terminology, you remove the insight it contains
and create another competing philosophy or a dogma, but it
is empty, then and useless.
Look at the structure of what he sets up as oposed to the
assumptions of the SOM and then step forward to surf on
the present cusp of being. It is not an exercise in thinking
from that point on, it is doing, being.
thanks--mel
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