From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Sat Oct 01 2005 - 07:19:26 BST
Matt and Apostles.
28 Sep. you wrote:
> For instance, Bo, you're willing to say that "experience=reality" is
> a tautology, when to others it isn't, but you balk at rocks having
> consciousness because "consciousness means self-consciousness,"
> referencing I suppose to some fact about the definition of
> consciousness. Saying "X means Y" simply means that you usually
> infer Y from X. But these usual routes of inference are sometimes
> what are up for grabs in the act of creative redescription.
In LILA "experience" pops up on every page, but this shows the
central tenet Quality=Experience
Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it
without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct
experience independent of and prior to intellectual
abstractions.
While Quality=Reality is said here:
And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that
means morality is also the primary reality of the world.
The world is primarily a moral order.
> Bo is well-disposed to take Pirsig's redescription that reality is
> value. He's also willing to take Pirsig's redescription (one that's
> more common to others) that reality is experience.
"To take" means "accept" ...no? Yes I do.
> In other people's
> usual routes of inference reality is _not_ value, nor is it
> experience. If it were, Pirsig wouldn't be saying anything nearly
> so revolutionary and instead simply recapitulating common sense.
> But he isn't, we all seem to recognize that.
This was a subtle one. You reject that Quality=Reality - also in
the Quality=Experience form? Well, then, what is Pirsigs
revolutionary message? That Experience=Reality? Why not, it
can be derived from the Q=E/Q=R "equation".
> So, the question I ask (and
> everybody else does, too) is how do these core redescriptions affect
> our other usual descriptions, like consciousness? Pirsig doesn't
> talk a lot about consciousness, so this is something we have to draw
> out on our own.
I agree, Pirsig is most vague regarding consciousness, in LILA it
hardly occurs, but he touched on it in the letter to Paul Turner.
About Lila Blewitt, that her lack of intellectual value didn't mean
her being unconscious. The need for such a clarification however
reveals the weakness of the initial take of Q-intellect, Pirsig
simply saw it as MIND thereby letting SOM into the MOQ. But
SOL sets this right by postulating Q-intellect as the whole S/O
aggregate.
> Bo, who feels fine about redescribing something usually taken to be
> paradigmatically human (i.e., value) into something covering the
> whole of reality, wants to reserve consciousness for humans. Which
> is fine.
"Humans" in the sense that the human biology has
reached the social level and developed this level to the degree of
hosting the intellectual level. Thus only human beings know the
conscious/unconscious distinction ... and demand that any
conscious entity must be be able to say: "I'm ..etc.".
> Something has to remain paradigmatically human or else there'd be
> no difference between us and rocks.
Agree, and I have just showed what is specifically human.
> But Scott has been trying to raise difficulties
Trust Scott! ;-)
> (I think successfully) in thinking of value without
> consciousness. To skirt around that, I'm suggesting that we simply
> redescribe consciousness, too. That Pirsig's redescription of
> Quality-as-reality-as-experience requires a follow-through
> redescription of consciousness.
The MOQ in the SOL interpretation redescribes everything
consciousness included ... as shown.
> This would, of course, commit us to
> redescribing _self_-consciousness, so that no longer would
> self-consciousness be thought of as requiring the spoken phrase "I
> am a rock," which Bo quite correctly points out a rock could not do.
Conscious is synonymous with self- and IS redescribed in the
sense of being seen as an
integrated part of SOM, i.e: MOQ's intellect. But it is only SOL
that makes such a redescription possible, with MOQ an
intellectual pattern it is impossible.
> Ham, quite naturally, asks what the difference is between "rock
> consciousness" and "human consciousness." He apparently was waiting
> for a response from me, but I'd dropped the topic because Ham's
> never really understood what I, or Pirsig for that matter, have been
> up to (for instance, he's weird remark that Pirsig's redescription
> of reality is a logical fallacy).
Agreement regarding Ham
> Most of his questions are
> inappropriate and I end up just moving away from the conversation
> after a few give and takes (like when he starts calling me a
> philosophologist when he can't really describe to me what the
> difference is between philosophology and philosophy). But, simply,
> the idea of "rock consciousness" simply banks on the metaphor that a
> rock "knows" another rock when he sees one. This pans out in common
> sense language to simply, a rock _reacts_ to other rocks.
These things I suspend until I know your reaction to my SOL-
ution. A rock is as you know no entity, but that inorganic patterns
"interacts" with each other is obvious.
End of part 1.
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 : Sat Oct 01 2005 - 07:23:58 BST