dmb, It is refreshing to see you at least trying to use someone who makes reference to "data" although it is hard to see how de Wall escapes your distain for proceeding from a faulty metaphysics. I sincerely hope it is not news to you that evolution does not necessarily proceed from the premise that it is written in tooth and claw. The thing that gives me pause is your reference to Rand and Dawkins in the same sentence. Dawkins is saying that we have the capacity to understand our genetic inheritance and to act according to other interests. Our genes "want" us to reproduce but we may decide that having children is not in our economic interest. In fact he was saying the exact opposite of how you portray his views.
Dawkins and E.O. Wilson kind of jump started evolutionary psychology in the late 80s with "The Selfish Gene" and "Sociobiology" respectively. In many ways they were restarting interest that was pioneered by William James in the functionalist school of psychology. Evopsych reflects James lasting influence on the field that he pioneered. The problem here for the MoQ is that Pirsig denies the importance of any species but humans at the social level. Certainly the social level arises from the biological but without an understanding for how social behaviors "function" in nature, to use James' term, everything we can say about human societies arises in a vacuum. What cripples Pirsig's view is his insistence that evolution has some purpose or direction. He doesn't seem to grasp some of the most basic ideas of the science and even in the Baggini interview defends his misconceptions. I have not read de Wall's book but I am very familiar with the subject. Humans share almost all of their genetic code with our nearest ancestors. Out of that code emerges a great deal of our social understandings and certainly our emotional responses. I suspect he pays a bit of attention to the gradation of social similarity between common chimps, bonabos and humans. Bonobos, falling roughly half way between us and common chimps in their more sociable style and casual mating habits. Primate social behavior represents the kind of continuum you talked about earlier. Seeing it as discrete among the various species is illusory just as separating out human social behavior from biology is artificial. What you are highlighting and appear to love is the emergence of one level out of the other. Reduction as I see it is just reversing the process. Reduction provides a feel for the constraints that shape the emergent level. No experience, mysticism is JUST another kind of experience, can be understood as purely a brain function but no understanding of experience that excludes brain function should be taken seriously. Emotions, those areas of experience most highlighted in the mystical experience, are more primitive than intellectual experiences. I suspect that we share many emotional experiences in common with other primates but there is almost no overlap in intellectual functioning. And yet despite Wilbur, intellectual functioning does not transcend emotional responses. It may give account of them but it does not transcend and include them. There are feedback loops in our neural networks that attach emotion to our thoughts and influence how we think feel and act. As an example I have a video of a man whose stoke damaged the pathways between his emotional centers and his cortex. He has and physically expresses some emotions but he is unable to "feel" them. He is unable to attach "value" to his experiences. As a result he has a difficult time making decisions because the various choices before him don't have an emotional quality to them. This speaks directly to Pirsig's claim that scientists seek to make valueless claims. It is the fact that scientists do have values that allows them to make any claims at all. The emotional experience of "rightness," as you described it yourself not long ago, is what drives the pursuit of knowledge in all its forms. It is a heritage humans derived from our distant ancestors. It is interesting to see you advising Ian that we need to include the social sciences in our understanding of the levels. Here is an example from Michael Shermer's evopsych book "The Science of Good and Evil". He claims that in more primitive times there was no need for formal social codes. How each individual responded to each other individual was a matter of personal acquaintance. He claims that formal moral codes, that is, social interaction intellectualized, arose when social groups began to exceed 150 people with the development of agriculture and cities. With groups larger than 150 many of the people we encounter are "strangers" and we needed rules to make our interactions with strangers predictable. I would argue that is static encoding of social rules and the encoding of knowledge into static written form is the birth of the intellectual level. It allows encoded intelligence to last indefinitely, in fact as along as there is someone around capable of decoding it. The intellectual level is the accumulation of knowledge, accessible to any one with the capacity to decode it. This IS collective awareness. And in modern times it is expanding at a geometric rate and is instantly accessible. Krimel 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/
