Ron and Platt [Arlo mentioned]--
Ron:
Personally speaking, I really do not see how knowing
how life began is useful in any way. Once we have that
answer (if an answer is even possible) what use could
it have? How would it apply to our everyday life?
would it change anything?
My point, exactly. Myriads of chemical and biological processes constantly
protect and sustain the human organism. Would knowing the details of such
processes, and when they became operational, make us any wiser or more
enlightened? Would it matter to us if consciousness in Homo neanderthalens
was not as "fully formed" as that of Homo habilis? For scientists who are
concerned about such data, including the sociological factors, Anthropology
can provide some answers. Mankind has managed to survive and flourish quite
well without such knowledge, but the question before Philosophy which should
concern man is not HOW consciousness developed in the species but WHAT IT
IS.
Platt:
I agree that a metaphysics ought to explain how life began,
and Pirsig does so in Chapter 11 of LIla. You may not agree
with his account, but to me it makes a lot more sense than
the scientific account of "oops."
Do you really think this is an explanation?
"Biological evolution can be seen as a process by which weak Dynamic
forces at a subatomic level discover stratagems for overcoming huge static
inorganic forces at a superatomic level. They do this by selecting
superatomic mechanisms in which a number of options are so evenly
balanced that a weak Dynamic force can tip the balance one way or another."
--LILA, Chpt 11, pg 167
To me this describes an accident about to happen, without cause or purpose,
save for chance "tipping the balance" of random atomic forces. "Oops?"
Surely, the making of a chemistry professor from carbon atoms (whose reality
Pirsig himself denies) calls for a more sophisticated scenario than this!
Arlo, who claims to have a "simple, direct" answer to the mystery of
consciousness based on the MoQ, articulated it to Christopher in this
fashion:
To rephrase this along the lines of the questions that Ham and Platt
are incapable of addressing:
What changed between early primates without consciousness and
humans with consciousness is... a level of neuro-biological complexity
brought about by DNA-driven biological evolution that spawned the
unintended consequence of allowing shared attention and hence the
emergence of social activity.
The mechanism by which consciousness evolves is.... the collective
consciousness (the "mythos"), which evolves over time as new
generations and new individuals assimilate it and add to it and
modify it. Successive generations of primates assimilated a greater
and more complex collective consciousness than their forefathers and
foremothers, and their activity moved it further still.
And to restate, from here the growing complexity of the social level
(shared symbolic activity) hit a level of complexity where it was
able to become self-reflective (the experiential descriptor "blue"
went from being a modifier in shared activity to a "thing in itself",
"what is blueness?"). The "self" is one such self-referential loop.
And if you buy into Arlo's theory that "DNA-driven spawning of shared
attention at the social level" became "self-reflective" individual
consciousness, I can probably sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.
Regards, and good luck,
Ham
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