Hi Marsha, sorry for the interruption, I have a few things left unsaid here.
On 2010-07-19 16:51, MarshaV wrote:
I think you're forgetting something regarding "experience". Experience
is not just about you, it requires something on the other end of the
experience as well.
Do you think so? I don't think it always to be so. There are static
patterned experiences AND unpatterned experiences.
Yes, I do. Unpatterned experience is still experience. It's never *only*
DQ, only DQ is nothing (no-thing). If you really, really try to
experience nothingness, would that be something like meditation? In that
case, it's still an experience of something in your brain. It can be
very dynamic thoughts, you may have no concious control over them, but
they're still thoughts, and as such intellectual patterns.
Or what else would you describe as an experience completely void of SQ?
This is usually used the other way around, to
indicate that a tree might *not* fall in the forest if nobody is there
to hear or see it. However, it's just as valid if we turn it around. For
you to have an experience, it requires both an experiencer and something
to experience. This is the subject and object side of the Quality event.
This isn't speculation. The way you use the word "experience", it seems
as if you just acknowledge the subjective side of it, but that's just
half of the experience, half of quality, and half of reality.
You do not need to acknowledge anything: neither the subjective nor the
objective.
What? So you have scrapped the quality event?
Regarding the "most useful hypothesis" you mentioned. I think the MoQ
levels are quite useful here as well. As I replied to Ham yesterday, some
are often afraid to take anything for granted nowadays, and that is because
SOM doesn't acknowledge anything but the lowest possible explanation to
be really real. It doesn't acknowledge that taste is real, because taste is just
a biological process built using inorganic ones.
Nothing wrong with direct tasteful experiences. I won't deny them.
And then gravity is next, gravity isn't real anymore because there is some
underlying process that explains how it works. So, in fear of believing in
something that might get jerked away, people stop believing in anything.
The only thing that people *can* believe in is experiences that science is
quite incapable of explaining, like why a work of art is beautiful, or why you
like a song. So that becomes the only things that people can say: "This is my
reality. Neither you nor anyone else can take that away from me by explaining
that it's just chemistry, or magnetism, or entropy, or whatever."
Conventionally useful and workable patterns are good, and some offer more
beauty and harmony than others.
When you say "Conventionally useful and workable patterns are good", I
sense you're referring to the *theory* of gravity, right? But that's not
what I meant. When I say "gravity", I mean the force (or whatever it is)
that keeps our feet on the ground, not the theory with formulas that can
be used to calculate how fast an apple will fall.
That article about gravity you posted a link to for example, the aim of
that was to make us doubt, not the currently used *theory* about
gravity, but gravity itself! We were not supposed to doubt Einstein's
formulas, but the very fact that gravity holds us to the ground. The
realness of gravity was defined as something else, and we sticking to
the ground was just a side-effect.
Also, in the taste example, you have no problem acknowledging the
realness of taste, but you duck the realness of gravity by talking about
useful and workable patterns. I think it's a bit inconsistent.
But the levels of the MoQ *are* exactly such stepping stones that we *can*
believe in. We can claim without having to ever take it back, that the taste of
the freshly brewed coffee in my cup is real, that gravity keeps my feet to the
ground, etc.
For me the levels offer a hierarchical, evolutionary criteria on which to
consider
moral questions. Why do you need to believe in a cup of coffee? If a cup of
coffee is there, taste it. If you trip, pick yourself up.
Because if you don't have a good framework with which to show that the
taste of a cup of coffee is real, SOMeone will take away that experience
and explain it in terms of biochemical formulas.
I know very well that you're not the kind of person that believes more
in biochemical formulas than a taste experience, but some people are.
Did I somewhere state that your sister has a mustache or wore army boots?
No, did I state something similar about you? Or why did you say that?
But in the fourth
level it has become formalized and can do the most damage by its
emphasis an objective, thing-in-itself world and "real" knowledge.
And what damage is that exactly? That things you believe in can be taken away?
For all the advanced technological and scientific knowledge the world is a mess
with too much ugliness, and without any abatement of greed, and without much
relief from suffering. imho
IMHO, science and technology can be extremely beautiful, and I think
it's a big mistake to connect technology and science with ugliness,
greed or suffering. I bet there are plenty examples to show they stick
together, but I also bet there are at least that many examples to show
the opposite. So, there's simply no connection, it just depends on which
examples you choose.
Magnus
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