Steve said: In the MOQ, bad ideas are less moral than good ideas. It is moral to challenge bad ideas wherever you find them.
Platt replied: In the MOQ I find little to distinguish bad ideas from good ideas other than maintaining individual freedom to pursue DQ and to keep an open mind. Again I'm thinking of the paintings in a gallery analogy. What do you find in the MOQ that helps you choose good ideas? dmb quotes Pirsig: "But the MOQ makes it clear that the pollution is from threats to science by static lower levels of evolution: static BIOLOGICAL values such as the biological fear that threatened Jenner's small pox experiment; static SOCIAL values such as the religious censorship that threatened Galileo with the rack. The MOQ says that science's empirical rejection of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher evolutionary order that the old biological and social patterns." (end of chapter 29, Pirsig's emphasis) dmb says:When we add passages like this to the quotes expressing a low opinion of faith and the MOQ's anti-theistic stance, I think we have plenty in the MOQ to distinguish bad ideas from good ones. I think it's also worth underlining the idea that it's "rationally correct" and "morally correct" to reject the bad ones in favor of the good ones. Doesn't all this make it clear that Steve is quite right? I think so. Also, the gallery of paintings analogy only works when comparing things that are on the same level. Notice here that he is only talking about intellectual explanations. "Then one doesn't seek the absolute 'Truth'. One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanations of things... One can then examine intellectual realities the same way he examines paintings in an art gallery, not with an effort to find our which one is the 'real' painting, but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value. There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more quality than others..." (near the beginning of chapter 8) I suppose it would be okay to use the analogy with religion if you wanted to compare it to other static social level realities but it doesn't really work when comparing theism with the sciences that study it. That's what Arlo has been getting at, I think, in saying that a Joseph Campbell like comparative analysis would be a better way to approach the issue of theism. Or, to take a bit of a tangent, capitalism and socialism can't really be compared like paintings in a gallery either because there you'd be mixing levels too. In that case, it's apples and oranges. That's also why it doesn't work to dispute the scientific consensus on global warming with social level stuff like politics. In that case, you'd need good scientific reasons to doubt it. So far there is very little science on the other side and what little there is not very credible and is politically motivated too. That's all Al Gore is saying, that there is overwhelming agreement within the scientific community. I think it's just goofy to characterize Gore as some kind of tyrant for simply stating that fact, you big drama queen. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: E-mail. Chat. Share. Get more ways to connect. http://windowslive.com/howitworks?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t2_allup_howitworks_012009 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/
