Krimel (insinuating that I don't read the articles I publish on my website):
Ham, Did you actually read the article? The thrust of it is that morality and our sense of beauty arise from our evolutionary heritage. We are biologically hardwired to sense some things as good and some things as bad. Reason is a capacity in humans that evolved much later and it serves primarily to clarify the built in heuristics that emotions provide.
That's not my interpretation of Brooks and his quoted sources. The only reference to "evolution" relates to morality in the social order. Brooks: "The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there's an increasing appreciation that evolution isn't just about competition. It's also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. ..."
"Moral judgments," he says, are " ...rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Reasoning comes later, and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it." Clearly, he doesn't mean later in evolution, but later in the individual's reasoning process. This statement, incidentally, supports Pirsig's assertion that value is "pre-intellectual" experience. It's also why I distinguish value-sensibility (psycho-emotional awareness) from experience (intellectual cognizance).
The idea that humans are "hardwired to sense some things as good and some as bad" contradicts the principle of free choice. The brain's wiring facilitates the integration of sensory information, not our realization of value. What Brooks is saying is that we form "an implicit preference" for everything we look at. Although the brain is an evolutionary development, "...what our brain has evolved for is to find what is of value in our environment."
If we were hardwired to sense things as either good or bad, there would be no need to "find our values" but instead would all agree on what is good. In that case, human behavior would be uniform and developing a collective morality system would be superfluous.
--Ham 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/
