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Today's Topics:
1. Re: David Hildebrand's Dewey (david buchanan)
2. Re: Quick one: causation ([email protected])
3. Re: David Hildebrand's Dewey (Case)
4. Re: Quick one: causation (Ham Priday)
5. Re: Quick one: causation ([email protected])
6. Re: David Hildebrand's Dewey (Steve Peterson)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:03:47 -0700
From: david buchanan <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey
To: <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
"How would a pragmatist argue that religion isn't a good tool?" Good
question, Steve. I guess that the first thing to do is get a lot more
specific about what we mean exactly by the term "religion". Despite the
pragmatic theory of truth, the MOQ rejects beliefs based on faith, tradition
and authority and yet, in another sense of the word, there is an important
"religious" element. In other words, the mysticism of the MOQ is very
different from the conventional forms of theism, to which the vast majority
of today's Christians subscribe, and yet they can both count as religious in
some sense. The there is the matter of what makes a good tool? If we take it
to mean anything that helps us cope or makes us feel better then we can get
into some very hot water. Among psychologist and sociologists there is a
thing called the deprivation theory of religion, which claims that religion
caters to those who have been deprived of certain emotional and
psychological needs. You know, the sig
h of the oppressed, the opiate of he masses, the expression of infantile
wishes and the fear of death and, less grandly, people who just need love,
acceptance, certainty and a sense of meaning or purpose. I don't think the
deprivation theory of religion explains everything but it pretty well
describes the psychological motives of many, if not most, religious people.
The Christian myth no longer functions the way it is supposed to. The
symbols have been literalized, concretized and have lost their meaning AS
symbols. So the people who continue to subscribe, for the most part, have
more or less agreed to believe lots of things that just aren't believable,
actual virgin births and literally coming back from the dead, etc. And these
are the people that the New Atheists are talking about. Sadly, they take the
symbols literally too and fail to understand that "the promised land is not
about real estate", as Campbell puts it, anymore than the fundamentalists
do. Sam Harris is my fa
vorite of the new atheists because he does not dismiss the value or
validity of meditation or of religious experience per se, as you know. Carl
Jung disagreed with Freud almost entirely. Where Freud thought that
religious belief indicated an unhealthy mind, Jung thought spiritual
development was essential to human health. (Campbell was mostly a Jungian
but he takes Freud and other psychologists on board as well.) At the same
time, however, Jung saw a serious failure in the conventional forms of
Christianity such as in his own father's church. Even as a child, he saw
that his father and uncles preached sermons without having any actual
religious experience. He could see that they didn't know what they were
talking about and that they only believed on basis of faith rather than
knowing from their own experience. In that sense, he thought, religion often
prevents spiritual development. His stance was empirical in a way that is
similar to radical empiricism. He considered religi
ous experience to be a psychological fact. His religious claims begin and
end with those facts and he insists we can't go beyond that to assert
supernatural entities as the cause of such experience. The archetypal images
that present themselves in such experience will always to images that the
experiencer can relate to, depending on one's particular context, but this
is not taken as proof of anything beyond the experience itself. I mean, it
doesn't matter if you have a vision of Jesus, Buddha or Bob. The hero can
wear any number of a thousand different faces but it's essentially the same
vision, the same experience and is not taken as a legitimate reason to make
any ontological claims. And the test of the "truth" of these kinds of
experiences comes in subsequent experience. Did the experience result in
some kind of growth or transformation of consciousness? Does this change
lead to a difference in the quality of life? I think these sorts of
questions are a better way to get
at what it means to have a good tool, a belief that proves to be good in
terms of how we live with it as opposed to a more casual, hey, whatever
works for you kind of thing. Otherwise people who fit the deprivation theory
can say religion "works" for them simply because it provides emotional
comfort. Opium feels good but it will take over your life and eventually
kill you.
_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live?: Keep your life in sync.
http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_explore_012009
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:16:50 +0000
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [MD] Quick one: causation
To: [email protected]
Message-ID:
<011320092016.26047.496cf6b200001b5f000065bf22007614380d9d0a09070e9...@comca
st.net>
[ian]
> Many things that can be fully explained only in hindsight
Take a game of pool or pocket billiards.
One can explain the 8-ball going in the side pocket by saying it bounced off
the side rail
or explain the 8-ball going in the corner pocket by saying it bounced off
the end rail. Both
explanations can be given before the event occurs, but the CORRECT
explanation of what
ACTUALLY occurs might not be KNOWN until afterwards.
Is this what you had in mind? Or do you think some events can be explained
either before
or after they happen, while other events can only be explained afterwards.
If the latter, what would be an example?
[ian]
> There are two-way causal processes between the lower and higher
> levels, and it is not helpful to think of these effects as
> "causation" in the traditional sense
When someone has had too much alcohol, their thinking becomes muddled.
When someone is frightened, they think they see things in shaddows.
Why is it not helpful to think of these effects as causationin the
traditional sense?
Craig
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:35:25 -0500
From: "Case" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey
To: <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <dc1a23361910401aa4016ce180c3c...@hplaptop>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
[Case]
Dave?
Communication's a tricky thing
>From Akron, to Jakarta on to Darjeeling
Readers, when they're reading,
Have their eyes at stake
Would it hurt to hit return?
Give your paragraphs a break.
You said this:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2009-January/0321
39.html
Did you intend to say something more like this:
---------------------------------------------------------------
"How would a pragmatist argue that religion isn't a good tool?"
Good question, Steve. I guess that the first thing to do is get a lot more
specific about what we mean exactly by the term "religion". Despite the
pragmatic theory of truth, the MOQ rejects beliefs based on faith, tradition
and authority and yet, in another sense of the word, there is an important
"religious" element. In other words, the mysticism of the MOQ is very
different from the conventional forms of theism, to which the vast majority
of today's Christians subscribe, and yet they can both count as religious in
some sense. The there is the matter of what makes a good tool? If we take it
to mean anything that helps us cope or makes us feel better then we can get
into some very hot water.
Among psychologist and sociologists there is a thing called the deprivation
theory of religion, which claims that religion caters to those who have been
deprived of certain emotional and psychological needs. You know, the sigh of
the oppressed, the opiate of he masses, the expression of infantile wishes
and the fear of death and, less grandly, people who just need love,
acceptance, certainty and a sense of meaning or purpose.
I don't think the deprivation theory of religion explains everything but it
pretty well describes the psychological motives of many, if not most,
religious people. The Christian myth no longer functions the way it is
supposed to. The symbols have been literalized, concretized and have lost
their meaning AS symbols. So the people who continue to subscribe, for the
most part, have more or less agreed to believe lots of things that just
aren't believable, actual virgin births and literally coming back from the
dead, etc. And these are the people that the New Atheists are talking about.
Sadly, they take the symbols literally too and fail to understand that "the
promised land is not about real estate", as Campbell puts it, anymore than
the fundamentalists do. Sam Harris is my favorite of the new atheists
because he does not dismiss the value or validity of meditation or of
religious experience per se, as you know. Carl Jung disagreed with Freud
almost entirely. Where Freud thought that religious belief indicated an
unhealthy mind, Jung thought spiritual development was essential to human
health. (Campbell was mostly a Jungian but he takes Freud and other
psychologists on board as well.)
At the same time, however, Jung saw a serious failure in the conventional
forms of Christianity such as in his own father's church. Even as a child,
he saw that his father and uncles preached sermons without having any actual
religious experience. He could see that they didn't know what they were
talking about and that they only believed on basis of faith rather than
knowing from their own experience.
In that sense, he thought, religion often prevents spiritual development.
His stance was empirical in a way that is similar to radical empiricism. He
considered religious experience to be a psychological fact. His religious
claims begin and end with those facts and he insists we can't go beyond that
to assert supernatural entities as the cause of such experience. The
archetypal images that present themselves in such experience will always to
images that the experiencer can relate to, depending on one's particular
context, but this is not taken as proof of anything beyond the experience
itself.
I mean, it doesn't matter if you have a vision of Jesus, Buddha or Bob. The
hero can wear any number of a thousand different faces but it's essentially
the same vision, the same experience and is not taken as a legitimate reason
to make any ontological claims. And the test of the "truth" of these kinds
of experiences comes in subsequent experience. Did the experience result in
some kind of growth or transformation of consciousness? Does this change
lead to a difference in the quality of life?
I think these sorts of questions are a better way to get at what it means to
have a good tool, a belief that proves to be good in terms of how we live
with it as opposed to a more casual, hey, whatever works for you kind of
thing. Otherwise people who fit the deprivation theory can say religion
"works" for them simply because it provides emotional comfort. Opium feels
good but it will take over your life and eventually kill you.
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:46:13 -0500
From: "Ham Priday" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [MD] Quick one: causation
To: <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <2eacf1c4d7414752a7c95f9f230c8...@hampc>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=iso-8859-1;
reply-type=original
Bo, Chris, Marsha --
Here's the gist of what Pisig says about causation in LILA:
"The only difference between causation and value is that
the word 'cause' implies absolute certainty whereas the
implied meaning of "value" is one of preference."
I would suggest that there is another difference: the passage of time.
Without the temporal dimension (of human experience), causation as the
direct result of a prior action or event would be impossible. If time is
the mode of experience, rather than an inherent property of existence, Value
is "causative" non-sequentially, while "preference" remains the property of
the observing subject. Creation then becomes a differentiated product of
experience with Value as its source. I define the subject of existence as
value-sensibility, and the "actualized" world of experience as its creation.
This avoids the necessity of chicken-and-egg, cause-and-effect scenarios and
the "forests of pulpwood" which Pirsig laments being sacrificed to debate
the issue.
Marsha says to David Swift:
> I hope that your strictly physical performance is some kind of
> interpretative dance, because if you are going to use words to
> explain it will have a mental component.
That's a red herring, Marsha. There is no alternative to words for
explication, which is why we have philosophy.
Bo says to Chris:
> As you will see this is the "ordinary" - in SOM-speak - physical
> causation Pirsig talks about, iron filings caused into a particular
> pattern by a magnet, and although his observation may be
> philosophically valid it sounds a bit contrived -- No causation
> because ...."we don't see it, touch it, hear it or feel it". By such
> criterions a lot of phenomena become paradoxical.
I agree. Iron filings "preferring" attachment to a magnet is a contrivance
by any standard and is epistemologically unsound. Preference requires
sensibility, for one thing, and by what neuro-physiological principle does
the author ascribe sensibility to an inert scrap of iron? Clearly, desire
and preference are exclusive to psycho-emotional subjectivity. And, Bo, as
I've said before, when you reject subjects and objects, you eliminate Value.
[Bo, continues]:
> As said I don't believe that value versions of the scientific
> disciplines (f.ex. a Q-physics where "B values precondition A")
> has a future. The SOL presents a more elegant solution by saying
> that intellect's S/O has created all paradoxes (while SOM) as
> MOQ's 4th. static level they all dissolve witout a trace.
Yes, but it isn't "intellect's S/O", it's the INDIVIDUAL's experiential S/O.
Intellect is the cognitive capacity of a human being, not a level of Value.
Difference is derived from the primary split between Sensibility and
objective Otherness. That's how we become individuated beings who
differentiate Value into the multifold objects of our experiential reality.
Pirsig also asks something else that is controversial in a later paragraph
(Chpt. 8) than the one quoted above:
"But if there is no substance, it must be asked, why isn't
everything chaotic? Why do our experiences _act_ as if
they inhere in something? When you pick up a glass of water,
why don't the properties of that glass go flying off in all directions?"
In point of fact, they do. Hydrogen and oxygen atoms diffuse into the
atmosphere, photons are reflected from the glass, and thermal energy from
your hand is transferred to the water. It just so happens that we don't
experience these properties, just as we don't experience being bombarded
constantly by x-rays, rf waves, and variations in atmospheric pressure and
electro-magnetic fields. I dare say, if we were able to experience
everything going on in the cosmos, it WOULD be "chaotic". Fortunately, we
are designed to experience only a finite fraction of these happenings, and
we intellectualize only the sensible events as "physical reality", negating
all the rest as "nothigness". That's the selective process by which human
beings make order and continuity out of non-symmetry and chaos.
> This quandary will never be resolved from the premises that
> S/O is reality's deepest split. MOQ's dynamic/static premises
> must be applied and in this context all S/Os are STATIC
> intellectual patterns - included psychological/physical - and
> only valid at that level. No need to look for SOM problems
> that have been solved by the MOQ.
Again, "patterning" is the work of the human intellect. Patterns themselves
are not metaphysical reality; they are only intellectual projections of
beingness that represent the values to which we subscribe. The
differentiated universe is our actualized world, a product of the
sensibility/otherness dichotomy. All the laws of cause-and-effect, logic,
mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences are derived from human
experience. We depend upon them to survive and flourish as a value-sensible
species. But they are not innate or essential to ultimate reality.
Essentially yours,
Ham
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:02:18 +0100
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [MD] Quick one: causation
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <496d0f6a.22340.c8b6...@localhost>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Hi David.
Pleased to meet you (or have you been here before?).
12 Jan. you wrote:
> Dear Chris
> I have reasons for believing that a strictly physical explanation of a
> performed action by an individual is possible. They start with Kant's
> assertion that Quality is an a priori synthetic judgment and a
> characteristic of mind just like time and space. They continue with
> the realization that mind is not mental but rather physical,
> biological, entity and therefore, intentionality can be explained by
> the laws of physics. But the whole explanation cannot be done quickly
> so I'll leave it here and get back to it as its own topic in future.
Kant did not exactly speak about Quality in the MOQ sense, but to
begin with a kind of the beginning. Western philosophy has
always had SOM as its premises, but then came the discovery of
the empiricists that all qualities, color, sound, taste,smell, touch
were produced by the senses - were subjective - Berkeley went as
far as to claim that there was nothing "out there". everything was
subjective.
Then Kant who set out to save reason from this mad "pure reason"
and claimed there were something he called "forms of perception"
built into existence itself, not learned FROM experience rather
what experience was filtered through These were TIME, SPACE
and CAUSATION that made up OUR experience "das Ding f?r
Uns" (the world for us) But note that Kant did not shake the
foundations of SOM, the was still a world out there "das Ding an
Sich" (the world in itself).
But the MOQ has taken leave of SOM , so I'm a bit surprised that
some of us keep speaking as if SOM's artificial problems has any
bearing inside the MOQ with statements like yours
> ... "They continue with the realization that mind is not mental but
> rather physical, biological, entity and therefore, intentionality can
> be explained by the laws of physics".
Yes, we know that the SOM struggles with such self-inflicted
problems stemming from its faulty premises that the S/O split
being existence's ground. The MOQ's premises however is the
DQ/SQ split and then the static levels, the said S/O split is
intellect's STATIC value. Kant's just cemented SOM, but has no
bearing on the MOQ.
Bo
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:10:46 -0500
From: Steve Peterson <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Hi DMB,
Thanks for your response. A few more questions...
I think what you are saying is that the pragmatists answer is simply to
try to figure out what religion is supposed to do and see how well it
does it. The tack that most people would like to take in conversations
with theists is to argue that what theists believe just isn't true. I'm
wondering if the pragmatist can argue in that vein or if he is
constrained in such conversations by his use of the word "truth" or his
denial of there being a way things really are. Though "the MOQ rejects
beliefs based on faith, tradition and authority" it suggests that there
is such a thing as intellectual quality that is independent of those
things and has its own measures of goodness in terms of coherence with
other beliefs, parsimony, and agreement with experience. Though
pragmatists may agree that truth is what is good in terms of belief,
pragmatists don't separate the terms by which beliefs should be
evaluated from the terms by which social patterns should be evaluated
(e.g. authority versus agreement with experience, coherence versus
tradition). Could this explain James' and Dewey's ambivalence about
religious dogma?
Regards,
Steve
------------------------------
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