Marsha --
Greetings Ham,
The self is bits and pieces of patterns of value and the interdependent
energy associated with these patterns, and the energy in the immediate
dynamic awareness.
Do you like this explanation?
No.
You didn't really expect another answer, did you?
--Ham
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
On Aug 2, 2010, at 12:18 AM, Ham Priday wrote:
MoQers All --
A recent exchange between Krimel and DMB triggered my epistemology alarm.
Krimel said:
I don't think the cogito moves us anywhere near a subject or objects.
I just used "subject" because the statement contains some "I"s.
All it says is that I know that I exist in virtue of my thoughts.
I cannot seriously doubt that I am having thoughts but that says
buttkiss about what thoughts are, where they come from,
what my relationship to them is or anything whatever about the "I"
that is having them. Most of the "problems" associated with Descartes
come from his own elaborations of the cogito and from the
elaborations of his commentators.
David said:
Well, there is some truth to the idea that subsequent commentators
gave shape to Descartes ideas. But it's also true that Descartes is the
father of SOM. In fact the subjective side of SOM is what we'd call
the Cartesian self. For Renee the mind was an unextended substance
and matter was extended substance and the connection between
these two categories is THEE problem of Modern epistemology.
Before Descartes the word "mind" was not used as a noun, was not
conceived as a thing. It was just a verb, as in "mind your manners".
William James's ESSAYS ON RADICAL EMPIRICISM begins
with the essay titled "Does Consciousness Exist?". He answers in the
negative. He says that consciousness is not a thing but rather a
function,
a verb.. . .
Nietzsche had said the same thing in his own pithy way. He said
statements like "I think" are misleading insofar as the "I" is conceived
as the thing that does the thinking. Compare that statement to
statements like "it is raining". Do we imagine there actually is an "it"
that does the raining? No. The rain is all there is to raining.
When thunder rolls there is no thunderer that performs the task.
Maybe so, David. But only the observing subject KNOWS it is raining and
is aware that he is experiencing the storm. Without that experience
"thunder and rain" would never be known, either as a concept or as a
reality. So which do you believe to be primary in this example: the
phenomenon "raining" or the subjective experience of it?
Shortly before this, Bodvar was talking about levels as if they were
conspiring to take over civilization:
Then the intellectual - Logos - level that took leave from the social -
Mythos - parent level in the known Q fashion and started to debunk its
parent by way of its rational, scientific means. . . .
Intellect wants by all means to keep the MOQ an intellectual pattern
as such safely inside its domain and you - intellect's henchmen - have
already given us a show of its methods no less fierce than the social-
intellect struggle which is waged on society's home turf - violence.
The intellect vs MOQ will be with intellect's non-lethal weapons,
but no less effective. . . .
Anyway it's not the intellectual level that scoffs at biology,
it is the social that wants to organize biology's proliferation,
consummation ..etc., into socially approved institutions.
Do you catch the drift here? Subjects are no longer human beings who
think and act for themselves; they are functions of inanimate "agencies"
that compete with each other for world domination. Is this where
Pirsig's elimination of subjects and objects is leading us? Have we
totally dysfunctionalized the cognizant agent once thought to be the
choice-maker of the universe?
Perhaps it is high time to refresh our understanding of what an "agent"
is.
"Agency is a concept used in philosophy and sociology to refer to the
capacity of an agent to act in a world. In philosophy, the agency is
considered as belonging to that agent even if that agent represents a
fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity.
"The capacity of a human to act as an agent is personal to that human,
though considerations of the outcomes flowing from particular acts of
human agency for us and others can then be thought to invest a moral
component into a given situation wherein an agent has acted, and thus to
involve moral agency. If a situation is the consequence of human
decision making, persons may be under a duty to apply value judgments to
the consequences of their decisions, and held to be responsible for those
decisions. Human agency entitles the observer to ask should this have
occurred? in a way that would be nonsensical in circumstances lacking
human decisions-makers, for example, the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy
on Jupiter." --[Wikipedia: Agent, in philosophy]
If man is not the free agent of value, experiential existence is
unaccounted for and cognitive life is meaningless. I don't know about
you folks, but I find it hard to believe that this is what MoQ's author
had in mind.
Respectfully submitted,
Ham
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