Ian said to Matt and dmb: I guess I'm one of those with the (distasteful) "cultural illness" view - but at least I'm aware of it. Particularly liked the "synthetic" angle here - stop thinking of other philosophers as "enemies" and see what they can bring to the party. No surprises there.
dmb says: So far, it seems that there are a bunch of philosophers acceptable to academia that can be used to take a thinker right up to Pirsig's Quality, but none quite go there. In other words, it seems Pirsig has a unique contribution that totally makes sense in the standard context. And all this, as far as I can tell, happens at the cutting edge, at the current state of philosophy. Obviously, I'm thrilled about this. Ian said: On cost-benefit. Reading (well, my younger son is reading) "The Economic Naturalist" by Robert H Frank, and we're relating the idea that ecomonics is just (psychological) evolution and evolution is just economics - Dawkins / Dennett et al all use cost-benefit ideas in explaining various evolutionary mechanisms. But I hadn't made the connection to Phronesis, not consciously anyway. Thanks for that. dmb says: Smells like social Darwinism to me. I'm suspicious of economic in general because of the way it is so deeply implicated in materialism. But I recently read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", which traces the recent history of "disaster capitalism". It explains how a small group of dedicated free-market zealots influenced U.S. policy in places all over the world. It connects Pinochet, 9/11, Katrina and a whole bunch of other things that you only think you already know. It shows how we got to be where we are now. It explains how we're letting democracy and the American form of government slip away from us. And it is psychological in a way. I mean, this "disaster capitalism" wouldn't ever work except for a psychological phenomenon that it invariably takes advantage of, namely, fear makes people stupid and compliant. Apparently, this is a principle with which capitalism rules the world. Ian said: On the "its all too much like maths" view of analytic philosophy my elder son has just written his dissertation on Completeness and Consistency in Systems of Ethics and concludes that kind of analytic view will never work, thanks to Godel. dmb says: Along the same lines, Hubert Dreyfus says that artificial intelligence will never work. He teaches Heidegger at Berkeley now, but started out in the sciences at MIT. He has the very tough job of trying to explain to the IT community that they are working with certain metaphysical assumptions that lead them to error. He uses Heidegger to explain what they don't know about human cognition. I think this is similar to Pirsig's polite comment about the possibility of thinking machines. He said something like, well if computers could respond to DQ it would be possible to have a machine that can genuinely think. Its my impression that the "if" here is insurmountable. Computers can't respond to DQ and I think they can't for very much the same reasons Dreyfus comes up with in his work on Heidegger. You know, that whole being-in-the-world thing is unknown to the IT guys. They're typical SOM scientists. If anybody I know would be interested in that issue, it would be you, Ian. You and Mr. Google can take it form here. I don't know how to say it or even why I believe it, exactly. But it seems this is all related. Basically, its an over-extension of logic and a blindness to a certain dimension. There's a sort of brittle, rigid and shallow way of thinking that also happens to be oblivious to its own limitations. That's how we get mathematical analysis of ethics and the attempt to make machines think. A robot like Data (Star Trek: Next Generation) because even if he was programed with every fact in the universe, he'd never know which facts to value or which facts matter and why. It'd be a case of autism on steroids, much worse than the misunderstandings we saw on the show. And there will never be a transporter like they have on Star Trek either. Its impossible for the same reason. _________________________________________________________________ Change the world with e-mail. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?source=EML_WL_ChangeWorld 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/
