[DM] OK, let's say I buy most of the below. However I still have a concern about the langauge and the implied values. Take the USSR example. Where a social order used a language of social ends to justify the sacrificing of individuals to such ends (and falsely too as it turned out as the ends were not really attained or sustained).
[Arlo] I don't see how anything I've said would lend support to a dictatorial regime. Nor do I see how anything I've said would lend justification to human beings being sacrificed to "social ends". I neither see "society" as the Great Enemy or as a Higher Power. This way of thinking, I say, comes right out of the misunderstanding (as you've said) about the dialectical necessity of interplay between patterns on any given level. I do think there is little doubt that maximizing evolutionary potential is a balance of static and dynamic forces. Too much static, stagnation. Too much dynamic, chaos. I agree with Pirsig, that a person, the "self", is a collection of ideas, and ideas take moral weight over the continuity of any specific social pattern. But the "self" is only one such intellectual pattern. It was immoral for the Church to suppress the finding that the earth revolved around the sun for the same reason it was immoral for the USSR to imprison dissenters. (By the way, this also supports the state's right to imprison individuals whose threat comes from below, on the biological level, like murder and rapists). [Platt] How would you see such error being avoided in future? [Arlo] By a clear articulation of the affordances and constraints mandated by the mind-as-social, and the need for static and dynamic forces to be in resonance. A tall order these days, to be sure. [DM] I think that there are clear benefits to valuing individuals? Perhaps as sources of high level DQ. [Arlo] "Individuals" are no the "source of DQ". The self, as an intellectual pattern, is capable of responding too DQ within the affordances and constraints of the intellectual level, and as such is a locus of evolutionary movement of these patterns. And I think there is nothing wrong with proclaiming the pragmatic value of "having a self", I just think we need to be clear that that's what we are doing. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
