On Wednesday 12 March 2008 10:59 AM Krimel writes to Bo and Joe <snip>Bo [Joe] To the S/O distinction I prefer the Mechanical/Conscious distinction. It broadens the playing field by including a broader amount of the literature of music and sports, as well as thought. Static/dynamic carry a weight of meaning for rational thought, and Conscious/Mechanical puts a nice sheen on it. [Krimel] The mechanical view has held sway in the west since Descartes and Newton. See the MindWalk discussion. The view that has been gaining grown since you were a young man is an organic and probabilistic one. Hi Krimel and all, IMO the Organic view is a Mechanical view in a logic of culture. The Probabilistic view is more limited than a Dynamic view as 1/0 produces nonsense, whereas the Dynamic view accepts a value when 1 existence is divided by 0 Dynamic-undefined which changes the game. Joe
On 3/12/08 10:59 AM, "Krimel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [Bo] > We are on the same track (parallel at least), I vouch for every > word of this paragraph ... except that of me not getting it, I > understand perfectly what the problems are with the mind/body > divide (an offshoot of the S/O root) > > I particularly liked your "if we regard "mind" as an emergent > ...etc" part. Your quotation marks hopefully indicates that it's not > mind in the SOM sense, but that the biological brain's ability to > store experience, retrieve it and play around with it via logical > loops what makes for INTELLIGENCE. With the coming of the > intellectual level and its S/O this function became something > going on inside a mental realm, inside a mind. This makes the > mind/matter problem go away, it dissolves the SOM-indued > paradoxes. > > [Krimel] > My quotation marks were meant only to indicate that 'mind' is an ambiguous > concept but that whatever it is, it emerges from biology which emerges from > the inorganic. > > As near as I can tell, current thinking is that folks with mental capacities > identical to our own left Africa about 50,000 years ago. What distinguishes > us from them are primarily improvements in mental techniques for organizing > and processing information. > > It works something like this. Each subject is tasked at birth with > constructing an internal representation of the cosmos. As building blocks we > have only sensory input from the environment and the biological structures > we have inherited. The rest of the conversation is of necessity how we stack > those blocks. > > [Bo] > The biological level has a self/not self distinction - a biological > necessity for an immune system, but it's not about subjects and > objects in the intellectual sense. This biological distinction was > adopted and refined by the social level where the individual got > personhood, name, ancestry and a host of other settings, but > sociol VALUE is the "common cause" that spawned groups > beyond the family: Klans, tribes, nations ...etc. Yet, even if a > social level person (by this I mean at an age before intellect) > perfectly well knew the difference between himself and his fellow > tribesman, this was not intellect's subject, the fundamentally > isolated entity, shut off from subjects and the reality "out there". > > [Krimel] > Here the problem is your insistence on having 'levels' at war, exploiting > adopting and interacting. It is not a matter of levels but of events, > circumstances and adaptations to change. These might be classified according > to a level system but it is the specifics that matter not how those > specifics fit into a particular taxonomy. For example most primate social > groups have structures like klans and tribes. These are the kinds of social > structures humans are adapted to fit into. > > What led to higher orders of social grouping was climate change at the end > of the last ice age and technological advances in such spears, bows and > arrows, mud and stone huts for relatively permanent dwellings, shifts in > patterns of hunting and gathering, domestication of animals, agriculture, > writing etc. > > Even into the present day these technological advancements alter the way we > understand the world and our place in it. Personally I view the structure of > our understanding taking a particular shape that is found throughout nature. > It is the shape of lightning, river deltas, the root and branch systems of > plants, our own arteries, lungs and nervous systems. It is a shape that > evolves to allow the most efficient distribution and flow of 'fluids'. In a > conceptual sense technological advances reshape our thinking to allow more > efficient and inclusive ways of organizing and structuring our internal > representations of the external world. > > I would add this structure to Kant's list of time, space and causality as a > priori, hardwired attributes that we must use to format the world. This > structure of thought exhibits the property of self similarity across scale. > This is as close to 'levels' as I get. Levels emerge as a function of scale. > Or as I have said before in my usual effort to distill anything meaningful > down to where it will fit on a bumper sticker: Zoom in, Zoom out, Refocus. > > [Joe] > To the S/O distinction I prefer the Mechanical/Conscious distinction. It > broadens the playing field by including a broader amount of the literature > of music and sports, as well as thought. Static/dynamic carry a weight of > meaning for rational thought, and Conscious/Mechanical puts a nice sheen on > it. > > [Krimel] > The mechanical view has held sway in the west since Descartes and Newton. > See the MindWalk discussion. The view that has been gaining grown since you > were a young man is an organic and probabilistic one. > > 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/ 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/
