From: Arlo J. Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 03 2005 - 12:18:52 GMT
{resend}
"Propietary aspects of our subjectivity"... "proprietary self"... The Great and
Glorious Me... How could anyone envision a "reality" devoid of the wonders of
Me and All I Am? Doesn't all philosophical inquiry begin by the Lone Self of
Wonder standing on the cliff proclaiming His Total and Absolute Propietary
Nature?
Hogwash. Plain and simple. I've been through this with Ham, spent many a post to
explain emergentist and evolutionary thinking within semiotics and Pirsig's
MOQ. But, as I've found, all there is is either the Great and Glorious Me or
the Nether Void of the Abyss. There is nothing else. No other way out but to
choose either My Grandeur or some warped variety of Nihilistic Voids of
Nothingness.
Ham has made it clear that His View is that the "Me" is the all important, and
Nadir Point of All There Is. The MOQ doesn't contain it, and so it is useless,
broken and/or repugnant. We are all stubborn and blind to the Wonders of the
Me. We should all repent. We should all be nice Me-ists in the Temple of
Essentialism. Ham is nearly pissin' in his britches that he has found a Convert
to the Way of the Me.
Why don't we all see it? Are we blind, he asks? Or afraid? C'mon... masturbate
your Me, it'll make you feel better.
Please...
[Ham]
what is most incomprehensible of all is how anyone could envision reality as
made up of symbols and words.
[Arlo]
No one has ever said this, and this demostrates only the inability to grasp
evolutionary, emergentist patterns. The Intellectual-level, I'd argue is indeed
made up entirely of "symbols and words", or I should add "value patterns that
manifest as what we call symbols and words". What else could it be made of?
I said to Ham, months ago... "The "proprietary awareness" of which you speak is
dependant on culturally salient symbols and values. Certainly the individual
"adds" to this, or in a sense the process of appropriating a semiotic system
(which is a larger collective system) is "tweaked" by the individual's unique
micro-cultural experiences (which is individuality). Semoisis does not makes us
automatons of collective patterns, but it (as Giddens would say) structurates
the trajectory our thoughts, feelings, and sense of purpose wille evolve. The
best I can sum it is, "I become unique THROUGH a social symbol system."
The "I" emerges as a result of semiotic appropriation. Before this, there is no
"I", no Glorious Me floating around waiting to Bask in Ham's Glory. It is a
semiotic fulcrum. "I" am "I" only because the biological patterns of "my body"
were born into a social-cultural milieu that values the "I" through language.
"I" learned "I" am "this I" as a useful tool for organizing experience, sharing
experience, and partaking in social-pattern activity.
Where is the "I"? Is it trapped in my brain? Is it my biological body? Is it the
strange little "little homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out
through them in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world"?
Ham runs scared of the notion that the "I" may indeed be social, and may indeed
consist of the cultural dialogue of others, echoing and guiding, influencing
and orienting. That the "I" may consist of a lot more than His Majesty Me.
Pirsig says it very well in Lila, "At this moment, asleep, "Lila" doesn't exist
any more than a program exists when a computer is switched off. The
intelligence of her cells had switched Lila off for the night, exactly the way
a hardware switch turns off a computer program.
The language we've inherited confuses this. We say "my" body and "your" body and
"his" body and "her" body, but it isn't that way. That's like a FORTRAN program
saying, "this is my computer." "1 his body on the left," and "This body on the
right." That's the way to say it. This Cartesian "Me," this autonomous little
homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to
pass judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. This
self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that
collapses the moment one examines it. This Cartesian "Me" is a software
reality, not a hardware reality. This body on the left and this body on the
right are running variations of the same program, the same "Me," which doesn't
belong to either of them. The "Me's" are simply a program format. Talk about
aliens from another planet. This program based on "Me's" and "We's" is the
alien."
Amen, brother. And lest anyone forget that, Einstein (who was known for being
"spot on") had said (which I had previously stated to Ham), ""A human being is
a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from
the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.""
There are those, of course, that don't find value in spending their days and
nights Glorifying this Optical Delusion, attempting to build philosophological
structures around it. I prefer the route of Einstein and Pirsig to Me Me Me.
They saw the delusion, and they understood its value, and its role, and its
place in the evolutionary, emergentist underpinnings of "reality".
[Ham]
The ability to use language is just one of man's attributes and, despite
insistence by some that all thoughts involve language, I believe most concepts
and evaluations are not words or statements at all.
[Arlo]
Such as?
[Ham]
Indeed, language is the least of the attributes I would list under subjectivity.
Defining self-awareness are emotions such as awe, joy, sorrow, pain, disgust;
cognitive values such as beauty, freedom, excellence, magnificence; and there
is desire which compels us to work toward specific goals. These are all
propietary aspects of our subjectivity, and none of them is dependent on words
or logical propositions.
[Arlo]
Sadly, this is both way wrong and way right. There are these wonderous emotions,
experience, but they are all conceptualized. Without language, what is "love"?
If Ham were whisked away from his mother at birth, and raised by wolves on the
Isle of Man, alone and away from others, in the Great and Glorious Isolation,
would Ham ever know "love" they way he knows it know? Having heard stories
since his childhood, and associating the carebringing and nurturing of the
mother with the symbol "love", and then learning through culture to extend that
emotion out to others, to feel pain and heartbreak, and songs about loss and
joy, to hear The 9th Symphony and Ravel's Sexual Bolero? All these things make
the emotion feel pre-verbal, and the part of it that is repsonse to Quality,
but that response is driven and fostered by the culture. An Eskimo hearing
Bolero would likely dismiss it is intolerable noise. Ham hears an lurid orgy of
beats. I see Bo Derek running towards me. An aboriginal seeing a Matisse or
Rembrandt would likely say it has no Quality, while we would stare at it in
reverie. Why? Learned emotional associations made salient by language and
culture.
[Ham]
It's just another way to put down individuality and pretend that the proprietary
self is nothing but an artifact of biological evolution.
[Arlo]
Heavens no! The self is an artifact of social evolution. The brain is a product
of biological evolution. The MOQ is a product of Intellectual evolution.
Collective activity on the biological level engenders the emergence of social
level patterns (the Gloriously Dialogical Social Self), from whose collective
activity emerges the Intellectual patterns.
Arlo
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