Ham: there is no such thing as collective consciousness. There is only correspondent behavior to a common stumulus.
Ron: Tomato, To-ma-toe, one mans collective is anothers correspondence. You pretty much say that it's a collective correspondence. Some fine wordsmithing. ----- Original Message ---- From: Ham Priday <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, November 24, 2009 2:29:24 PM Subject: Re: [MD] Is Quality Different from (Mother) Nature? Dear Mark -- > Thanks for that post. Not to get to far away from this forum, > but there is a definite overlap of sensibility. That is, it is not > confined to the lonely individual. There may be actual feeling of > a societal consciousness, or at least a pairing consciousness. > How this is actually transferred from one person to another, such > as the feeling of love or of fear, is hard to detect in physical terms, > that is scientifically. However, I would have to assume that each cell > in our bodies actually senses the overall consciousness of our entire > selves (this is more than the intellectual brain of course). In fact, > because of this conscious overlap cells can sense damage at a far > region of the body before there is time for biochemical communication. > > In the same way, sensibility can be transferred between people at > rates faster than the speed of light, in fact instantaneously. This is > because they overlap. It is in this way, that I understand the levels > of MoQ. Each one creates a higher consciousness. It would seem > to me that Value sensibility is a shared phenomenon as well as a > lonely individual one. Again, this is not through communication or > particle exchange in anyway, but simply through connection by > an overriding consciousness. With all due respect, Mark, I think you're straining too hard to accommodate the MoQ hierarchy. Nothing in D'Souza's essay endorses a multi-level value system or a collective conscience. The author only suggests a sensibility that "transcends the physical". To me, this defines the individual's sensibility to Value. Why do you say there's "a definite overlap of sensibility"? Two lovers share the passion of a relationship but not their individual sensibilities. Two gourmets may enjoy an entree of their choosing, but the flavors and succulence of the dish are experienced (sensed) individually. Sensibility is patently subjective; there is no such thing as collective consciousness. There is only correspondent behavior to a common stumulus. The feelings, the values, the satisfactions, and the very apprehension of the stimulus are experiences of the individual subject. It is axiomatic that social values like Freedom, Justice, and Compassion are universally appreciated, which is the basis of morality. But societal values reflect the value-sensibility of the individual members. Sensibility is proprietary to the cognizant subject. Any "overlapping of sensibility" is a behavioral (objective) response, not a subjective aggregate or collection. To view value-sensibility as an aspect of some collective consciousness is to misconstrue the dynamics of epistemology. I maintain that consciousness reaches its highest level in human beings, that it is a process which encompasses feeling, emotion, experience, apprehension, intellection, and conceptualization. No two individuals share in these subjective functions, except as they respond with similar behavior. I know this is promoting an SOMist position in this forum. But inasmuch as the Quality hierarchy never transcends existence, Pirsig is describing the empirical world in which the mode of experience is awareness of being. That experience is subjective, and the being of this world is the individual's experiential construct of sensed value. > For some reason, your post brought that out of me. Go figure, > stream of consciousness. Probably doesn't make sense. And > certainly not very scientific or philosophical. Perhaps deeper. Indeed, Value goes very deep. For me it is the creative power of Essence. But any "stream of consciousness" is differentiated and relative to the individuated Self. If the world were not constructed in this way, there would be no realized value, no experienced phenomena, nor a free agent to choose among them. Essentially speaking, Ham _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Mark and All -- On 11/23/09 Mark posted a query concerning the nature of Quality and how (if?) it can be separated from Nature itself (i.e., the evolutionary universe). > Nature is used as a specific term in evolution, as in Natural Selection. > Originally evolution was thought to proceed through a dynamic > interplay between the environment and the species. In this way, > to correlate the two terms, Quality is the environment and everything > else (help me here) is what Quality creates and inter-plays dynamically > with. Quality itself does not evolve but pushes reality towards a certain > direction. Opposed to this is the notion that everything contains > Quality as an inner Nature, and it is not possible to separate things > from Quality. In this way, Quality would simply be a descriptive > terms for something. ... > > So my question is, what is different about Quality? I don't claim to speak for the MoQ or its author, but I would like to pass along part of an article by Dinesh D'Souza which addresses Mark's question and (I think) may apply to the MoQ thesis as well. D'Souza may be familiar as the author of "Life After Death: The Evidence," (which my wife is now reading), or "What is Great about Christianity", among other books that preceded it. This article appeared in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer 'Currents" section under the heading "Mind over Matter." I was not so much intrigued by his premise that Socrates may have "made a case for life after death" as I was by his insightful analysis of the difference between intellectual knowledge and what he calls "inner quality" (sensibility, in my philosophy). The complete article may be accessed at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/70734737.html. "We all know that there is something that it feels like to be in love, just as there is something it feels like to watch a sunset by the ocean, or to smell fresh-brewed coffee. Philosophers call such sensations 'qualia,' a term that refers to the inner quality of an experience on the part of the one who is having it. "...It seems that no amount of scientific or objective analysis can capture this inner quality, this "what it is like" to have a particular sensation. To demonstrate this point, philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay in 1974 with the provocative title "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"... "Nagel's point was that there is something that it is like to be human, or male, or a dog; by the same token, there must also be something that it is like to be a bat. But however much we learn about bat physiology, bat brains, and echolocation, Nagel says we can never fully understand what it is like to be a bat. The clear implication is that an objective physical understanding is necessarily incomplete, apparently because there is something to living organisms that transcends the physical. "In 1986, philosopher Frank Jackson broadened Nagel's argument into a refutation of all materialist attempts to explain mental states in purely physical terms. In what has come to be called the 'Mary problem,' Jackson envisioned a brilliant scientist named Mary who is locked in a black-and-white room from which she investigates the world by way of a black-and-white television monitor. As a specialist in the neurophysiology of vision, Mary knows everything there is to know about color. She understands how different wavelengths of light stimulate the retina, and how those are channeled to the visual areas in the brain, resulting in such statements as 'The sky is blue' and 'Tomatoes are red.' "Now here's Jackson's question: Suppose Mary finally gets a color TV monitor or is released from her black-and-white room into the outside world. Will Mary learn something that she didn't know before? Jackson says she obviously would. She would for the first time know what it's like to see the blue sky or red tomatoes. These experiences would teach her something about color that all her previous knowledge could not." Maybe it's just that I'm more sensitive to color than temperature, but this simple demonstration of Quality (eg., value-sensibility) was far more enlightening to me than was Pirsig's legendary "hot stove" analogy. Anyone agree? Happy Thanksgiving to All, 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/ 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/
