From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 21:01:37 BST
Hi Rick,
>I don't
>think wolves have social patterns. I believe their behavior is entirely
>genetically hard-wired.
Do you disagree that a species evolved its bioogical patterns simultaneously
with its social patterns? Fish that travelled in schools evolved
differently from fish that 'thought for themselves' (the Plattfish?) because
the social patterns (or relative lack of them) made different biological
traits beneficial.
>R
>So you're willing to distinguish between 'strong and weak patterns' but not
>'high and low quality patterns'? What exactly would it be that makes one
>pattern 'stronger' than another if not that the former is of higher
>quality???
Just to answer again: OK, I define "higher quality" as "more expected", or
"stronger pattern" and so accept that some patterns are higher quality than
others. The limb I had been going out on was that all patterns have the
same desire to repeat, in and of itself. If there is not a stronger pattern
in its way, it will contninue its existence as a pattern by repeating,
because expectation being made real is the source of value. This is the
central tenet of morality, as I understand it. This is why I don't like
murder being seen as a pattern at all, and hence objected to it being called
a low quality social pattern. But I guess translating "low quality" to a
"weak pattern", a pattern that is usually kept from realization by other
stronger patterns, is OK with me. I just thought "low quality" was too
subjective a statement, though of course "low expectation" is equally
subjective. It just points toward empirical evidence and history more than
the word quality does.
>R
>Again, I think all this 'immoral inverse' stuff is just useless and
>confusing. That some things are better than others is one of the very
>foundations of the MoQ.
Not a very good foundation, since the percieved betterness of some things
comes long after the foundation was poured, indeed when the foundation was
poured, were there even "some things" and "other things" to be better than?
I don't think so. I think value comes from expectation being realized, and
expectation (read: morality) was the foundation.
>R
>There are some among us that believe that DQ is only currently active at
>the
>intellectual level and that the lower levels have all been 'locked down'...
>I'm not one of those. I believe that DQ remains active at all levels. I
>see a continuum throughout the levels which places the 4th level as the
>'most dynamic' and the 1st level as the 'least dynamic'.
I agree with you. Note how in my view, the least dynamic would be the level
of the most expected, strongest patterns, and hence highest quality, and the
most dynamic would be the least expected patterns, and hence of lowest
quality. What do you think is highest quality: water freezing at thirty-two
degrees (long live human-centric Farenheit) or Enron Corporation?
>J
> > Our memories came from outside us. I remember the Columbia tragedy
>because
> > it happened, it doesn't exist only in my memory.
>
>R
>Yes J, it "happened", that's past-tense. Now it only exists in our
>memories
>(which are nicely contained in the present). The present is our only
>reality.
I'm just saying that our expectations aren't groundless, they aren't insane,
they come from experience.
>R
>But this is not the same as saying that our expectations come from
>somewhere
>outside us. Now you've back-peddled to saying that our expectations come
>from within us but are reflections of our experience, which I would agree
>with.
Maybe you thought "from outside us" was too close to suggesting that they
come from God, when what I meant was that they come from Morality (aka God)
as experienced.
> > You can't be surprised by WHAT you are expecting, but you can expect to
>be
> > surprised in general.
>
>R
>I'm not sure why you think 'generalizing' the expectation defeats the
>notion
>that you can't be surprised by what you're expecting. If one cannot be
>surprised by WHAT he is expecting, and WHAT he is expecting is to be
>surprised (even in general), then it would seem to me that he couldn't be
>surprised at all, precisely because some sort of surprise is exactly WHAT
>he
>was expecting. This sort of paradoxical absurdity is an example of just
>one
>of the many reasons why your philosophy of expectation falls flat for me.
>You wind up painting yourself into these silly corners where you have to
>awkwardly explain how things like creativity and surprise are somehow
>species of expectation. I think it's confusing and just goes logically
>nowhere.
Creativity is a species of expectation. There is no absurdity there, I'll
defend that if you want me to. Surprise is certainly when something happens
you don't expect, true. I was saying that this is only *good* if one was
expecting to be surprised, as in the movie example. No one goes to a movie
expecting to see the same movie everytime, you go for the surprises. This
is the only kind of surprise that can be considered good - the expected
surprise. As for unexpected things that turn out to be good (serendipity,
like not expecting to find five dollars on the sidewalk), the good comes
from other patterns, not from the pattern that broke. Over on top of your
specific expectation that you won't find five dollars on the sidewalk, there
is the expectation that if someone drops five dollars on the sidewalk, it
will be there for someone else to find. If you epect to find money in the
street, you will be dissapointed most of the time.
>J
> > Expectatins change to match what we percieve as the current reality in
> > advance, in the "pre-intellect" simultaneous to the quality event (the
> > quality event is our expectations being changed).
>
>R
>Huh? How could our expectations change in advance of our perceptions of
>the
>present? Are we all psychics?
It's the same mystical "pre-intellect", or "pre-awareness" that Pirsig talks
about. That is where the reality that we percieve is created, and so is
where our expectations are brought into line with what we percieve.
>J
> > Well, go back and look at the etemology - moral comes from mores, from
>the
> > latin "mos" - and it described what "mos" people did, not merely what
>people
> > thought they ought to do (though it did that too, but Plato tried to
> > separate the good, the ought from the probable, and began the whole
> > confusion). Also ask yourself why FOUR WORDS all have that same dual
> > meaning. If they were equivical meanings, I wouldn't expect every word
>for
> > morality to have the same split.
>
>R
>What's unnecessary is your insistence on ignoring the evolution of the
>etymology of 'expectation'. Once it meant one thing. Now it means two
>things. It evolved because the former use of the term (the one you're so
>stuck on) became overbroad as we realized that what was probably expected
>wasn't always the same as what we believed was morally best.
I don't ignore "the evolution," I am very aware of it. I lament it and am
trying to show that this is what Christ and the Buddha and Lao Tzu were all
trying to save us from, and indeed the splitting of the two halves of
morality threatens the existence of the entire universe. It origninally was
one thing, but then immediately became two. But it never "meant" one thing,
it always, from the very beginning, meant two things, but the two things
were so linked and dependent on each other that they defined each other, and
are indeed "one thing" - morality.
I can rephrase this as our favorite metaphysical split: Morality is what it
should be because it should be. So my "split" would be the two halves of
should, each half relies on the other half for its own meaning and creating
the whole by their oscillation, like yin and yang, defining each other and
expanding on each other. One would be the created existence (Christ/SQ)
from which expectations come, and the other is the good of realizing
expectation (Holy Spirit/DQ) (God the Father would be Quality or Morality).
Johnny
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