From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 16 2003 - 01:08:42 GMT
Johnny,
Johnny said:
I started a reply to your post that I'm still working on. For now, I just want to say that low-Quality means low-Respect. The stronger the expectation, the higher the quality, the higher the respect for the pattern. I was equating respect with morality and quality and trying to point out that disrespecting morality is like a snake eating its own tail, or a dog biting the hand that feeds it, or something like that. Morality demands respect, it IS respect, in order for the expectation that patterns will continue to actually contninue the patterns.
Matt:
I think you are being a little ambiguous in your terms. I think its located in your assertion "morality demands respect, it IS respect" because I take you as thinking that the first half and the second half say the same thing, whereas I think of them as saying two very different things. I think Morality/Quality AS respect is perfectly fine. As you say, "low-Quality means low-Respect." However, if we take Quality and Morality to be synonymous with Reality, then the terms by themselves include both the low stuff and the high stuff. The point of respecting Morality, then, to me becomes pointless. It only becomes pointed when we take Morality to mean the high Quality stuff and Immorality to mean the low Quality stuff.
Johnny said:
What are your (your) feelings about determinism, free will, etc? I'd converse with David M but he seems not to be interested in discussing it anymore.
Matt:
Typically, I'm not much interested in discussing it either. As a good pragmatist, I think the debate moot. But here's how I think of it: when we look backwards at history, we tend to get the feeling of determinism because of all the research done in psychology and history. We can pin point why a person did something or what general conditions gave rise to a general social phenomena. But when we look forward, we are taken by feelings of free will because we are fairly uncertain what the future will bring until we get there. We look at all the weird twists our own personal lives have taken and we aren't so sure that we or anyone else coulda' predicted them, except in retrospect.
But as far as the debate, I take James' stance: there isn't a difference between the two that makes a difference. If we somehow figured out that the whole world was deterministic, would that change any of the choices in our own lives? No. Meaning doesn't disappear with free will and neither does morality. The locus of morality isn't on some metaphysical notion of free will, but on the ego, the pragmatic differentiation between me and you. And if we found out somehow that Sartre was right, that we are horribly and radically free, that doesn't do anything either. We've always acted as if we were free, we've always acted as if we've had a choice. And if you haven't, then there's nothing metaphysical about it, just a pragmatic power play of taking control over your life away from your mom, or the rich, or the white man.
Matt
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