From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Mon May 02 2005 - 14:47:10 BST
Platt, blimey ...
May I say, when you leave out the politics and religion and talk about
MoQ (as you did here) I completely agree with you, almost. Spooky,
truly weird, but weirdly true.
I especially love this sentence
"Even the most refined and abstruse moral reasoning is rooted in the
slime and grit of the earth's natural history."
Who's Vitzthum, where's the quote from ?
Ian
(Pour me a brandy, dear, a large one.)
On 5/2/05, Platt Holden <pholden@sc.rr.com> wrote:
> Hi Ham,
>
> > As I see it, you're all trying to define your personal metaphysical
> > perspective in terms of the MoQ which is ambiguous on the issue of ultimate
> > reality. The very use of Quality as the primary reality makes the
> > ontology ambiguous. Quality, like Goodness, Beauty and Truth, is a
> > valuistic judgment of something experienced; any attempt to rationalize it
> > as non-SOM is based on the premise that Quality exists independently of
> > conscious sensibility. It is that premise by which Mr. Pirsig has
> > purportedly eliminated Cartesian dualism. One may accept the concept of a
> > universal Quality on "faith", but it doesn't pass muster as a credible
> > thesis.
>
> You have misinterpreted Pirsig's premise. He doesn't say Quality exists
> independently of conscious sensibility. He says Quality is experience,
> meaning that valuistic judgment are intrinsic to experience, i.e. values
> are not something separate from conscious sensibility as you suggest.
>
> At least one materialist, Richard C. Vitzthum agrees with Pirsig: He said:
>
> "Furthermore, the reductionist equates moral discrimination with sense
> discrimination. That is, the ability to sense a difference between heart
> and cold, light and dark, acid and alkaline is indistinguishable from the
> ability to decide whether this thing or place or experience is better or
> worse than that thing, place of experience. Physical sensing and moral
> judgment have from the start been simultaneous and identical processes,
> and even the most refined and abstruse moral reasoning is rooted in the
> slime and grit of the earth's natural history."
>
> So for me and some others, Pirsig's thesis is highly credible, or, to use
> his vernacular, "a high quality intellectual pattern."
>
> Best,
> Platt
>
>
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