[Platt]: > The levels are in constant battle with one another. But, it is immoral > moral for a higher level to completely destroy a lower level on which it > depends for its survival. That's suicide.
[Krimel]: > What good is a system of morals based on levels when hierarchy of levels > provides no guidance as to which level has moral priority? [Ham] My point exactly. The contest of levels is a battle going on in the MOQuists heads and being spilled out here in debates. If the universe must constantly battle itself in this schizophrenic scenario, it hardly exemplifies goodness and can't be the "moral universe" posited by Pirsig. [Krimel] Is the universe schizophrenic or not; the jury is still out for me. They are sifting though mounds of circumstantial evidence. [Ham] The way I see it (and I suspect how Pirsig meant it), Intellectual is just a euphemism for "rational". The more thought-out and reasonable an action is, the more likely it is to produce a favorable result. [Krimel] Rational thought can improve our odds but it can not guarantee success. Often impeccable reasoning falls prey to circumstance. [Ham] But unless you can be persuaded (as Platt apparently is) that atoms, trees and earth plates are thinking entities, the actions of Nature are not directed by reason, hence can never be moral. To repeat myself for the umpteenth time, Morality is a code of social conduct derived from man's sense of values. The universe -- also a construct of man's values -- doesn't "know" anything, let alone what level has priority over another, and is by necessity a-moral. [Krimel] We almost agree perhaps. I would say, "Morality is a code of social conduct that expresses man's sense of values." And I would simply say, "The universe doesn't "know" anything and is a-moral." [Ham] Krimel, the human individual is a "being-aware" representing the awareness/otherness dichotomy. The organic body that serves as the being of his awareness is borrowed from otherness. Self-awareness which directs all value-derived experience is NOT biological but psychical, including any ancestral memory that may be thought to influence consciousness. [Krimel] Self-awareness is biologically derived. There is nothing psychical going on. It is not as though these things have not been studied. Our understanding of how the mind works is pretty good and gets better every day. Human individuals can be more precisely understood in naturalistic terms. There are a good many actual theories going around and none of them require us to borrow our bodies from otherness. 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/
