Marsha sais to dmb: I don't get much from Squonk's mental exercise, but I do not understand your objection to his thought experiment. I would think the mind would be the perfect place to perform such a controlled experiment. One could imagine the problems, test different solutions, and thoroughly explore all aspects without doing harm to anyone. (As has been pointed out by stating the difference between an infant and an enlightened Buddha.) The question for me is, if you would object to such a philosophical thought experiment, would you also want to inhibit the artist's imagination?
dmb replies: Well, first of all let me say that I understand a thought experiment is something we think about rather than put into practice. And I have to ask in all seriousness, who doesn't understand that? The reason I object is very simple. I think its a bad idea. Don't you know me by now? Expressing disagreement with folks around here is my favorite hobby. Been doing it for years. And most of the time mysticism will be involved in that disagreement. Hard to imagine how any MOQer could be surprized or fail to understand why I'd engage in this current round of disagreements. Basically, I think it all hinges on a flawed premise. By equating those who have transcended static patterns with those who never acquired them in the first place, static patterns have been construed as irrelevant or even as something negative. Even though its just an "idea", preventing human minds from developing is still objectionable on moral grounds. If one is going to include any kind of cruelty or deprivation as part of a thought experiment, I reckon there ought to be a very good reason for it. But in this case, the reason for it, to maximize DQ, is based on the fallacious equation of babies and mysti cs. In the case of infants, there is no possibility of getting consent from the subject. Of course, if I thought it was an actual proposal I'd do more than complain about it in cyberspace. I'd call Scotland Yard or the FBI. But so far I'm just saying the experiment is poorly designed, that it is based on a misunderstanding of the MOQ, as well as infants and mystics. But now I'm just repeating myself. The original "brain in a vat", or at least the one I know of, is a good example of a thought experiment. If memory serves, it can be found in "The Mind's Eye". This asks us to imagine that a brain can be kept alive and healthy in a lab. (The owner volunteered and would otherwise be dead of natural causes.) What would happen if another researcher wanted to take half the brain to his lab and they figured out a way to do that while keeping the whole mind in tact via electronic connections, even though the two halves would be very far away from each other physically. Then interest in this divided brain grew and grew so that 10,000 researchers each had a small section of this single brain and it was all still connected via electronics, etc. What if each lab had just a single brain cell? This thought experiment asks us to think about the mind/body problem in a novel way. If the brain is scattered in billions of locations - all over the planet, under the ocean and in orbit too - the n where is the mind? In what sense is it in the brain at this point? This illustrates the issue so that one really gets a sense of what the mind/body problem is all about. Doesn't have much to do with the MOQ, but that's how I remember the brain in the vat experiment and I think its pretty cool. It doesn't provide any answers but it paints a clear picture of the question. It helps us grapple with the question. So far, my objections have been met with explicit and implicit accusations of censorship, philosophological thinking, unoriginal thinking, of having no argument, of arguing from authority, of using twisted rhetoric, of using humor and emotion, of relying too much on Pirsig's thought, of straying outside Pirsig's thought and now with a wish to inhibit the creative imagination. But I don't think my objections are out of bounds or unfounded in the least and so all those accusations seems quite unwarranted to me, even a bit over the top. Like everybody else here, I'm just talking and trying to make sense of the MOQ. Obviously, I do not have the power to censor anyone and really wouldn't know how to inhibit the imagination of an artist. What the heck? Let's just say I object because I hate freedom and apple pie. Let's say I belong to a cult that worships highly educated babies and I'm secretly trying to convert all the MOQers. The other accusations are a little less silly, but not by much. I'm saying that a mystical experience occurs within the context of a person's developmental process. Squonk's experiment is all about arresting that development from the start, so this would be a pretty major objection. Frankly, I don't think there is much doubt that Squonk is mistaken on this point. Here's one of the bigger planks that form the basis of my objection... "...From the baby's point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention, This generalized 'something', Whitehead's 'dim apprehension', is Dynamic Quality. When he is a few months old the baby studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with the same sense of wonder and mystery and excitement created by the music and heart attack in the previous examples. If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to DQ he will soon begin to notice differences and then correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an 'object' to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values 'derived' from primary experience. ...In this way static patterns of value become the universe of distinguishable things. Elementary static distinctions between such entities as 'before' and 'after' and between 'like' and 'unlike' grow into enormously complex patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation to generation as the mythos, the culture in which we live. ...In the past Phaedrus' own radical bias caused him to think of Dynamic Quality alone and neglect static patterns of quality. ..But now he was beginning to see that this radical bias weakened his own case. Life can't exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power. To cling to Dynamic Quality alone apart from any static patterns is to cling to chaos. ...Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change, But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration . Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world, Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other." (Lila, pages 119-121, near the end of chapter 9) I think the worry that our culture will degenerate by slipping back to the social level, as opposed to being led by intellectual values, is consistent with the basic idea that static patterns "provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress". The idea of evolution as a kind of static latching applies this same idea to the widest possible context. If I'm correct on this point and it shuts down the experiment, that still doesn't make me a censor. It just makes me a guy who pointed out a big mistake, who disagreed with a bad idea, who still enjoys his favorite hobby. Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Use video conversation to talk face-to-face with Windows Live Messenger. http://www.windowslive.com/messenger/connect_your_way.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_messenger_video_072008 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/
