[Ham] I gave up trying to argue with you months ago. [Krimel] Backatcha! It generally turns out to be about as acrimonious and productive as arguing with Dave. Lot's of heat and no light.
[Ham] Since then most of your posts have compared various philosophers with William James. They are dissertations of the kind that Pirsig would call "philosophology". [Krimel] That's interesting because I admit to sucking a "philosophology." My foray into James was mainly an attempt to find a common point of reference with Dave but you can see where that has led. [Ham] But I have to say I'm impressed, and quite surprised, by the recent stance you have taken with Ron and John. In particular, I call attention to your statement: "The problem with this is that Values are perceived." This is probably the most significant observation anyone has made here in recent years. Indeed, you have expressed the problem I have with Pirsig's philosophy. Values are perceived; they require a sensible agent to realize them. Man is the subjective agent, and his response to value is emotional. I've said before that "unrealized value" is an oxymoron. It simply doesn't exist. The source of value does not reside in the empirical world or in man's intellect. The sense of value is proprietary to the individual and cannot be realized without it. [Krimel] But the problem with your approach is that you seem to think that Value is "out there" waiting to be realized. Well that and you think that emotion is a response to value. It is not. Emotion is the value. Emotion tells us immediately whether something is good bad or neutral. It motivates us to act. But I do agree that Value is only significant to whoever is doing the evaluation whether it is a zebra being stalked by a lion or a commuter stuck in traffic. While I agree that Value is not a property of the external world I don't think it is a property of the subjective self either. Value arises from the interaction of the individual with the environment. [Ham] Yet, Pirsig has posited Value (or its epistemological equivalent, Quality) as the fundamental reality -- the reality of nature and the universe as well as man's sense of morality. In one fell swoop he has renamed what philosophers and theologians throughout the ages have called God or the Creator. He doesn't define it, he says, because "everybody knows what it is" and because metaphysical definitions only "destroy the concept". Had he attempted to do so, he would have discovered that epistemology does not support his euphemistic concept. [Krimel] Value in the way that Pirsig uses it describes well the way that individuals experience Value. He is starting his "metaphysics" not with "things" but with "appearances". It is not about "what is" but how things "seem". This renders his position, especially as pushed by Dave, as purely phenomenological, purely subjective. Pirsig is quite right that reality is undefined. It is continuous, infinitely divisible. Humans are equipped with the capacity to break that continuous stream into "meaningful" units. This is how we abstract concepts or definitions from the continuous flux. Concepts are mental representations or encoding of physical experience. They are not only valuable they are essential to human interaction and survival. The problem comes when they are taken to "be" what they merely represent. OR when they become so automatic that we can't see past them. This is a tricky problem that seems really simple but turns out to be very hard to grasp. I think the distinction James makes between percepts and concepts really helps to clarify the situation. I suspect given the number of times these "memes" have been used since I brought them up about a month ago that others find them useful as well. The distinction between them is important. A percept arises from the physical interaction of an organism with the world. Energy is converted to neural impulses. In this direct interaction we come as close to contact with an external world as it is possible to come. This kind of interaction is common to all living things and we can see it spread across the realm of biology as a ariety of strategies that have evolved to capitalize in it. Any biological creature sufficiently complex enough to move, develops at its front end, sensors that detect physical stimuli. They also have the ability to discriminate whether those stimuli have Value in terms of should I move toward or move away from this. It is through this process that organisms, both plant and animal acquire the ability to influence their own future states. If I am a root fiber I have built in ways of detecting where water and nutrients are spatially located and I can grow in that direction. Most of this does not require "conceptualization." These processes are highly complex but flow directly from the conditions in which they are found. As organisms drift into increasingly complex relations not just with the physical environment but with each other, other sorts of relationships emerge. Emotions arise in animals as mechanisms of valuation. Mammalian young cannot survive without attention from their parents. Emotions arise to bind adults to their offspring and to each other. In primates a whole set of emotions emerges to facilitate social interaction. The feelings of emotion are express physiologically as facial expression and body posture. These expressions are once again encoding of emotional states into physical action. They are decoded by con-specifics to facilitate appropriate or mutually satisfying social interactions. What human's have done as a species is expand this form of emotional communication. We grew extra brain cells to accommodate more elaborate forms of encoding. In fact one of the consistent indicators of "intelligence" across different species is the brain weight to body weight ratio. Increases in neural tissue provide a greater range of possible responses to circumstance. The real function of conceptualization or rationality is to provide a check on our emotions. It allows us to compare the present circumstances to past events and use those encoded experiences of the past to assess the probability of the success or failure of our responses. Concepts are tools that let us break the continuous flow of experience into manageable chunks. We are born with the ability to do this. We spend the first few years of our lives single mindedly pursuing this end, both psychologically and biologically. Conceptual systems are communal. They are arrangements of concepts that can be accessed by anyone with the gray matter and linguistic skills needed to unravel them. Systems like geometry took a couple of thousand years to develop. These conceptual systems and tools are the intellectual level. They exist as code. Physically the intellectual level resides in individual brains, in written form, in movies and songs and stories, books and tapes and film and the dots and dashes of binary code. The intellectual level is the accumulation of concepts over the broad expanse of human history. Conceptual systems work because they reduce uncertainty. All biological system work to influence the odds of continuation. Conceptualization is a biological adaptation that provides lots of selective advantages. Concepts, especially those resulting from Kant's causality a priori, are in effect biological systems for reducing uncertainty. Never-the-less concepts are always subservient to perception. They must in the end terminate or refer to some kind of perceptual experience which is much more directly connected to the continuous flux of the immediate. In other words percepts are required to tell us if in fact there was some reduction in uncertainty. Even fantasy and fiction have a perceptual referent. Concepts that don't have this property, like your "Absolute Whatever" cannot have this kind of reference. That is what makes your approach irrelevant. What makes Dave's approach wrong is his delusion that we can or should even want to be free of concepts or that all concepts are 'just' concepts and forming them is completely arbitrary. [Ham] Undeniably, the ability to realize value is fundamental to man's material progress and spiritual fulfillment. But value theorized as "the primal metaphysical existent" is a major flaw in the MoQ. Now that we are aware of this error, what do you suggest we do about it? [Krimel] Well they are others here much more concerned with spirituality than I. Ask Dave or Marsha. 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/
