From: hampday@earthlink.net
Date: Mon Jun 13 2005 - 07:32:12 BST
Paul --
> Yes, I believe material evolution occurred independently of and prior
> to our beliefs.
I assume you're none the worse for having finally said it.
> The analogy of the uniqueness of one's beliefs to DNA was supposed to
> point out that almost all of our beliefs are inherited (culturally as
> opposed to genetically, obviously) but also that, as the <1% of DNA is to
> our physical make-up, because of idiosyncrasy the sum total of one's
beliefs
> are still unique.
Forgive me if I consider the "inheritance of beliefs" preposterous --
whether or not there's a collective conscience.
Ham, previously:
> "Collective consciousness", by the way, is a postmodern twist on Carl
> Jung's theory of consciousness which distinguished the "collective
> unconscious" from the subconscious realm of mental activity common
> to all human beings. This concept became a key element in Freud's
> development of psycho-analysis and popularized the notion that
> unconscious motives control behavior...
Paul:
> Which dictionary did you snip that from? :-)
I had recalled "Collective Consciousness" as a Jungian term from Psychology
101, but a Google search revealed that it was actually the "Collective
Unconscious". Jung was as much a philosopher as a psychiatrist, as this
paragraph from "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", which does talk about
consciousness, demonstrates. You'll be interested to see how he describes
its beginning in the "senseless biological turmoil" to finally appear in
"the level of warm-blooded vertebrates". (Sound familiar?)
"If the Creator were conscious of Himself, He would not need conscious
creatures; nor is it probable that the extremely indirect methods of
creation, which squander millions of years upon the development of countless
species and creatures, are the outcome of purposeful intention. Natural
history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over
hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured. The
biological and political history of man is an elaborate repetition of the
same thing. But the history of the mind offers a different picture. Here
the miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes -- the second cosmogony
[ed. note: what Teilhard de Chardin called the origin of the "noosphere,"
the layer of "mind"]. The importance of consciousness is so great that one
cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere
within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that
the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of
warm-blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain -- found as if
by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and
groped for out of some dark urge. [p. 339]"
That excerpt was snipped from http://www.friesian.com/jung.htm which you may
want to review in full. Jung was an interesting figure in the history of
modern psychiatry -- in many ways more intellectual than his successor
Freud. Here's another Jung quote that might have been a primer for Bob
Pirsig:
"The fact that artistic, scientific, and religious propensities still
slumber peacefully together in the small child, or that with primitives the
beginnings of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated
chaos of the magical mentality, or that no trace of 'mind' can be found in
the natural instincts of animals -- all this does nothing to prove the
existence of a unifying principle which alone would justify a reduction of
the one to the other. For if we go so far back into the history of the mind
that the distinctions between its various fields of activity become
altogether invisible, we do not reach an underlying principle of their
unity, but merely an earlier, undifferentiated state in which no separate
activities yet exist. But the elementary state is not an explanatory
principle that would allow us to draw conclusions as to the nature of the
later, more highly developed states, even though they must necessarily
derive from it. A scientific attitude will always tend to overlook the
peculiar nature of these more differentiated states in favour of their
causal derivation, and will endeavor to subordinate them to a general but
more elementary principle."
[quoted from
http://mythosandlogos.com/Jung.html]
Paul
> In the MOQ, mind, insofar as the term is employed at all, is loosely
> defined as intellectual patterns. But, as Matt recently said to Bo, it is
> not that mind *has* intellectual patterns or functions, but that mind *is*
> intellectual patterns. So it is not so much that you or I *have* beliefs,
> but rather that, along with physical and social patterns, you and I *are*
> beliefs.
Do intellectual patterns have self-awareness? If not, then we're not
talking about what most people consider "minds".
Paul:
> The idea of thoughts existing before they are "expressed" requires
> that we see language as a medium. From there we have the idea of a self
> with an independent and intrinsic nature which is using the medium of
> language for expression. This is just the subjectivist flip-side of the
> materialist view of language as a medium for representation of an
objective
> world and, as such, is still in the subject-object soup.
I can see language as a medium for expressing ideas but not as a source for
conceptualizing them. While I'm not a materialist, I believe thoughts are
our reflections on an objective world. Inasmuch as we don't see the world
any other way, I'm afraid we're doomed to swim in this "subject-object soup"
for a lifetime.
Paul:
> If reason is a skill one has to learn, how could it be something one
> is born with?
You're nit-picking a bit here, Paul. What I meant was that we're all born
with conscious self-awareness, which includes the potential to reason. These
faculties are proprietary to the individual, even though they have
biological corollaries in the brain and nervous system.
Paul:
> Why should the idea of an entity called mind be pivotal to the whole
> thing? What does all this talk of mind do for us? What has it done for
us?
> What is lost when we stop talking about mind as an independent entity
> swinging free of culture and language and look at the things people (to
whom
> we ascribe the possession of a mind) say and do / have said and done?
What has the MoQ's alternative view done for us? Has it given us a better
understanding of ourselves or the world we live in? Does it suggest a
reason for being born, a meaning for life in a world of otherness, or any
insight as to our value in the whole scheme of things? We all come into
this world with a naive awareness that it's our plaything.
Anthropocentricity made sense before we had the means to intellectualize the
term. It still is; only we've allowed ourselves to be persuaded by reason
and the logic of empirical evidence that the reverse is true, that we are
the world's plaything -- even worse, that we may not really have an
independent existence from the world.
Again, I'm reminded of Ayn Rand's pithy comment on the propriety of mind,
which I've quoted here before: "From the wheel to the skyscraper, everything
we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man -- the
functioning of his reasoning mind. But the mind is an attribute of the
individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such
thing as a collective thought. ...we can divide a meal among many men. We
cannot digest it in a collective stomach. ...no man can use his brain to
think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They
cannot be shared or transferred."
I find it astonishing that you so readily dismiss the value of individual
thought and action to support a philosophy that reduces proprietary
awareness to a series of patterns and levels. If what people independently
think and say and do are of no account, then who or what in your perspective
is the "prime mover" in the world? Is it pre-intellectual Quality? Is it
evolutionary Culture? Or is it (and I'm forced to repeat it only because I
see no other option) some kind of Collective Consciousness? In any case, it
doesn't say much for individual creativity, freedom or value in your world.
Regards,
Ham
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