Steve,
> > Steve: > Whether or not economic activity involves emotion is not really the > issue here. The question is whether emotional activity can manifest > without social patterns. I still say it can. > > I say it can't. But I conclude that the self is a social pattern. Without some sense of self, there is no emotion possible. > Steve: > I think I heard that the part of the brain that is responsible for > human emoptions is present in mammals but not reptiles, so you may be > right about lizards and cows with regard to fear. But then after > saying that cows experience fear you say "For fear to occur, some > sense of self must be in place." Are you saying that cows have a sense > of self? If so, this is an unusual claim that needs some defending. > Fair enough. It's an intuitve grasping on my part, it's why I call it hypothetical. Truly, I have no proof that anything outside my own consciousness has a sense of self. Heck, in an ultimate level, I have no evidence for my own sense of self. It's just a sense. But interacting with these various creatures, man and animal, I get the impression, the strong impression, that my dogs, my cats and cows have a sense of themselves. They express an emotional attachment expressed through predictable behaviours that they highly value being fed and they dread being beat. You can postulate all this as mere mechanistic stimulus response type behaviour, but I'd say that such a stimulus response mechanism relies upon the emotional mechanism as its driver - an empirically demonstrable function of the mammalian brain. > At any rate, what I've argued as key to distinguishing social and > biological patterns is that biological patterns are "hard-wired" > through DNA while social patterns are learned. Fear seems pretty > clearly to be this sort of "hard-wired" response to biological threats > rather than a behavior copied from one individual to the next through > social learning. > Young horses don't know what to fear. They pick this information up from their mothers during the infant nurture phase I've been ranting about. Humans have the longest infant nurture period of all the mammals, followed by the great apes, and the less sophisticated the "society" the shorter the period of nurture. Thus the correlation between social complexity and infant nurture is a big clue. Did you know goats love roses? Yet a goat herd will ignore a rose garden if their herd leader ignores the garden and heads out elsewhere. Ultimately of course, DNA is responsible for the evolution of potential socialization but the actual behavior of social animals, and emotions, are picked up by these all important social cues. The predators are much less social, but even mountain lions must teach their cubs to hunt, and isolated territoriality is a form of social behaviour in the same way self is a social creation. You don't need a lot of beings to have a society. > > > John: > >SOL is social, not intellectual. > > SOM is intellectual, because it takes this SOL as fundamental to > existence. > > > Steve: > I don't know what you are talking about here. There is no SOL in the MOQ. > What I meant was subject/object consciousness. I was looking for a quickie shortcut to express that term. > > >From Lila: > “The Metaphysics of Quality resolves the relationship between > intellect and society, > subject and object, mind and matter, by embedding all of them into a > larger system of > understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects > are social and > intellectual values.” > > > No problems there. It's the applicability of handing out subjectivity to mammals, that is probably the crux of my heresy. Thanks Steve, for the fruitful dialogue, John > Best, > Steve > 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/
