John said:
...Thus, intellect is individual and religion is social. This might seem to
you, like it does to me, a "duh" sort of realization, but for some reason it
never occured to me to formulate the conflict between the two exactly like that
before. It must be all this philosophical debate is doing some good after all.
I made a realization! Religion is static. Intellect is dynamic. A religion
that doesn't allow intellectual questioning is doomed to become outmoded in
time.
dmb says:
Well, no. Intellect is more dynamic than tradition in the sense that it is more
flexible, more open to change and it's self-correcting but it doesn't work
without a certain amount of stability. We are talking about a level of STATIC
patterns after all. Also I think it's a mistake to construe the
social-intellectual distinction as a difference between collectivity and
individuality. Science and philosophy, for example, are both constituted by
specific conversation or "discourses" within the culture. That's what peer
reviewed journals and repeatable experiments are all about. The history of
science shows that progress almost never occurs except when it is preceded by a
long period of what Thomas Kuhn calls "convergent thinking", which is opposed
to "divergent thinking". In terms of the MOQ, you'd say that dynamic changes
can only grow out of static consensus.
John also said:
This is where the MoQ missteps, imo. By making "Good" subservient to a
hierarchical system of values, the intellectual individual becomes paramount,
but you can't have individuals without a society anymore than you can have an
intellectual questioning of current values without some current values to
question. Pirsig makes the point in ZAMM when he describes the Mythos roots of
Virtue.
dmb says:
Ummm, no.
"In the past empiricists have tried to keep science free from values. Values
have been considered a pollution of the rational scientific process. 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 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 say 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 than the old biological
and social patterns. But the MOQ also says that DQ, the value-force that
chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant
experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether.
DQ is a higher moral order that static scientific truth, an it is as immoral
for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for
church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral
part of science, It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." (Lila,
end of chapter 29)
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469226/direct/01/
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/
