From: Mark Steven Heyman (markheyman@infoproconsulting.com)
Date: Tue Aug 09 2005 - 19:11:18 BST
Hi Sam,
On 6 Aug 2005 at 18:51, Sam Norton wrote:
> msh:
> You can also point to his ideas and say they are original only
> insofar as you understand them to be, within your own necessarily
> parochial domain of experience.
Hmmm. Smacks of relativism to me. What might 'original' mean if not,
by definition, 'within my own parochial domain' etc. If Liebniz comes
up with calculus, and so does Newton - independently - then why
doesn't both work count as original? taking original to mean - not
known (around here) before.
msh says:
I'm arguing against the idea that there is one, individual leader-
genius responsible for any single cultural advance. So, I have no
problem with recognizing a potentially "new" idea within a bounded
environment, though I will continue to argue that it is IMPOSSIBLE to
know for sure that any idea is original. More important, who cares?
> People claim that human fingerprints
> and snow flakes are unique; this is weak inference stemming from
> the fact that no two sets of prints or snowflakes have been found
> identical. Same deal applies to ideas.
sam:
Hmmm again! Shades of Hume saying that we don't know that the sun is
going to rise tomorrow, we just have more or less dependable shades
of inference. A logically defensible position, but I'm not sure it's
one that you want to hold is it? I'd be happy to say that we can hold
'originality' with the same sort of confidence that we can expect the
sun to rise.
msh:
I don't see how. We have no evidence of the sun not rising. We have
plenty of evidence indicating that ideas come out of cultures the way
leaves come out of trees. And that different culture-trees
simultaneously produce identical idea-leaves.
> <snip Witt stuff, cause even he is no more original than a
> snowflake.>
sam:
Hmm for the third time!
msh:
I mean only that we have no way of determining the uniqueness of
Witt's ideas, no more than we can be sure that no two snowflakes are
alike.
sam before:
>
> But it doesn't stop it being true that the source of a new idea
> comes through a single person. Which is what I take Pirsig to be
> saying about the brujo.
>
>
> msh:
> That new ideas must come from a single person has already been
> shown to be false. New ideas evolve out of a culture and, as shown
> by the examples of Newton-Leibniz Darwin-Wallace Salk-Sabine, can
> arise simultaneously from within different people. There was no
> "first" walking fish; I see no reason to expect cultural evolution
> to occur differently.
sam:
I must have missed the posts where that was established. Can you
remind me of where it was, or re-summarise the argument? coz I think
I disagree with about 100% of it or so (roughly speaking ;-)
msh:
Established in my first few posts to this thread.
> As for the brujo, his ideas were new within Zuni, but old hat among
> the Plains Indians, say. I think Pirsig agreed with Benedict here.
> See my 7-29 post starting this thread. Or carefully re-read the
> relevant 8 pages from LILA-9.
>
> I think it's worth repeating here that I'm not claiming there are
no
> individuals; my claim is that no one individual is intellectually
> unique and, therefore, worthy of special celebration. Where such
> celebration occurs, it is a public relations con job catering to an
> apparently common human need to idolize.
sam:
Or - on re-reading what you're saying - are you saying that no
'individual' is (intellectually) unique, but that particular ideas
can be? So Wittgenstein isn't unique, but the idea of, say, the
private language arguments are? I probably still wouldn't agree with
that, but it seems more defensible.
msh:
I'm saying no individual is a stand-alone genius. I'm also saying
that it is possible, I suppose, for there to be an original idea,
(emerging from a whole history of preceding ideas) but that there is
no reason to suppose that the new idea is unique to one person. And
no way to prove it. And, even if we could prove it, what's the point
in doing so, other than to satisfy some childish longing for
intellectual heroes?
> Finally, and most important, though individuals exist, none take
> precedence over society. Only ideas take precedence over society.
sam:
This is what I think is terrifying (and was the original cue for me
rejecting the standard account of the MoQ). Isn't this a
justification for flying planes into skyscrapers? (Western ideology
is a bad idea; it's threatening the social group of Islam; let's
destroy it any way we can.....)
msh:
Well, remain calm. You are being terrified by actions, not ideas.
And, in the case you suggest, you are referring to actions stemming
from very low-quality ideas, just as the US reaction to 9/11 flowed
from ideas of equal low-quality.
When I say ideas take precedence over society I mean, as does Pirsig,
that it is immoral for societies to suppress or destroy ideas. If
the ideas of the 9/11 attackers, and thousands (and now millions)
like them around the world, had not been systematically suppressed by
the USG and its subsidiary commercial information systems, if these
ideas and grievances had been openly discussed and analysed and
addressed in the many years prior to the start of the attacks against
US interests at home and abroad, there is a very real possibility
that the attacks would never have happened in the first place. What
we are seeing is blowback from 100 years of western interference
around the globe.
sam quotes Cohen:
Now you can say that I've grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor And
there's a mighty judgement coming, but I may be wrong You see, you
hear these funny voices In the Tower of Song (Leonard Cohen)
msh:
Beautiful. Thanks for that.
Mark Steven Heyman (msh)
-- InfoPro Consulting - The Professional Information Processors Custom Software Solutions for Windows, PDAs, and the Web Since 1983 Web Site: http://www.infoproconsulting.com POCKET PARADIGM Regardless of who did it, the recent events in Spain show once again the futility and stupidity of the war on terror. You simply can not suppress anger by military and law enforcement means. The more you try, the more anger you create and the greater your problem becomes. The media has committed a sin far greater than those of Jayson Blair: it has repeatedly misled and lied to the American people concerning the practicality of the war on terror and has kept from its pages and airwaves doubts on this score. In this it has behaved with a reckless negligence which, if committed behind the wheel of a car, would be considered criminal. The only way out of our crisis is to reduce the anger of the most rational, thus also reducing the constituency of the least rational. Yet we have done nothing since September 11 to improve relations with the Arab and Muslim world, and we have done nothing to make Israel do likewise. Instead we have persisted in constructing an illusion of security and a fantasy of strength and alienating aggressiveness that can be penetrated at any moment by a sufficiently determined though not particularly skilled adversary. We do not have homeland security, only a homeland hubris that may prove, in the end, to have been our real enemy. - SAM SMITH MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archives: Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Aug 09 2005 - 20:45:42 BST