From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Sun Jun 26 2005 - 19:28:28 BST
Bo,
On 22 Jun 2005 at 10:54, Scott Roberts wrote:
to Mike:
> Sorry to be so tiresome about this, but Owen Barfield has already
> knocked your thesis down. He shows how your various presuppositions
> derive from having a type of consciousness that only started to appear
> with the Greeks, though it didn't achieve its present absolute split
> between subject and object until about 1500 CE. It is only with this
> type of consciousness that such beliefs as:
> and your disbelief at the claim
> "You're [Bo, but me too] not telling me that before the Greeks, nobody
> ever wondered about those basic philosophical questions "how and why
> did the world come to be?" "who made the world?" Pre-scientific man
> answers in the only way he can: by stipulating a God."
> could happen. Pre-scientific (if by that you mean pre-Greek,
> pre-Upanishadic, etc.)
Bo said:
How do you, Scott, look upon Paul's claim that there was a
separate Oriental intellectual level (meaning non-subject/object
one). This does IMO go against the grain of both the MOQ and
Barfield's ideas. The S/O divide (in the MOQ) is the breakdown of
Original Participation and if the Orientals made a similar
philosophical breakthrough (as the Greeks) during the Upanishad
period it must necessarily be a SOM-like one. Maybe a short
sojourn - not like Westerns getting stuck - but nevertheless.
Scott:
As I see it, the Vedantists worked within a general population whose
consciousness gradually became S/O-like, same as with the Greeks. The
Vedantists, however, were more quick to warn that the S/O divide was
impermanent, so was not the basis of reality (not that there weren't such
warners in the West, but their voice wasn't dominant). Hence they avoided
turning the S/O divide into SOM. So intellect in the East was also mainly
S/O, and the evidence for that is that the philosophers (and not all of
them) felt the need to warn against it.
Scott said to Mike:
> humanity did *not* ask those type of questions,
> because the answers were given to them experientially. They
> *experienced* what we now call gods, or Spirit. We do not, so *we*
> have to ask those questions. You, and all modernists, SOMists,
> Darwinians, etc., assume that early humanity experienced the same sort
> of sensory world that we do. Barfield shows that this is not the case,
> that there were even differences between medieval and modern sense
> experience. So if you really want to blow SOM out of the water, read
> Barfield. He attacks it at a much deeper level than Pirsig (with the
> consequence of gettng different results).
Bo said:
I agree most profoundly with this, but the SOL-interpretation
corrects all shortcomings of the "standard" one. The congruity
between the MOQ and Barfield's participation scheme is obvious
in a SOL light.
Scott:
I wouldn't say it corrects all shortcomings -- one still needs to see
Intellect as the driving force of evolution, as being the same (non)-thing
as Quality. The belief that intellect just came into being in humans 2500
years ago is unworkable. And mathematics is an exception to the SOL idea
that all intellect is S/O.
Mike said:
> > Note that beliefs are not identical to thoughts, although they are
> > linked. Every static level has its foundations in lower levels -
> > intellectual patterns were made possible by (and transmitted by) the
> > social medium of language, and in turn, thinking (a _biological
> > function_) makes this possible.
Bo said:
If I understand it's rather the other way round. But Mike's
bracketed "thinking a biological function" I agree with in the sense
that increasing neural complexity enabled organisms to store
experience and re-run it in a way that made them learn from
experience. This is what is called intelligence.
My thesis is that this RAM where experience is stored (as sense
impressions with animals) was "invaded" by language when the
human species had developed a brain unheard of before. It is not
all language-dominated because we still dream in a sensual-
emotional way.
Scott:
There is a book, probably out-of-print, called Dismantling the Memory
Machine, but I can't remember the author -- Bursten, I think. Anyway, he
shows that this common belief that experience can be stored in a neural
system just doesn't work. In fact, trying to fit anything mental
(consciousness, language, memory, feeling, sense perception) into something
that brains produce is unworkable. This doesn't deny that increased brain
capacity is probably required for us to have the minds we have, but in no
way can the actual experiences be produced by neural activity (my guess is
that the brain's main function is to align all of our consciousness so that
it all agrees with each other, given that space and time are produced by
consciousness).
Bo continued:
At first, in the deep social era (I call) it was experienced as gods
speaking to them (gods=their myth). You know Julian Jaynes'
bicameral idea about this original participation/communication
breaking and the voices becoming thoughts in their heads.
This "shallower" social era lasted until the Greeks began to make
a metaphysics of this new "thoughts as different from experience"
reality . In this sense I see thinking having its root in biology, but
of course the REALIZATION of it as a new reality is SOM.
Scott:
Yes, I've read Jaynes. I am also aware that Jaynes' had to squeeze his
correct observation (that intellect -- that my thoughts are *my* thoughts --
started after Homer) into a materialist framework. Just as I see you and
Mike doing: following the mind-brain identity hypothesis, and talking about
thinking having its roots in biology. Show me the slightest hint of how a
strictly spatio-temporal mechanism can have an experience (which endures
*through* some span of time), and I'll rethink my position. Otherwise, I
fail to see why you all keep with these theses that have their origin in
strict materialism.
- Scott
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