Steve:
> Steve:
> I doubt there are many here who want to hear it, but I think on the
> contrary Harris's book would give MOQers a more effective vocabulary
> for publically addressing the "intellectual emergency," and for Harris
> to add metaphysical arguments about how Quality creates subjects and
> objects would only make him a less effective spokesmen for our
> concerns about the role or values and morals in the world and the need
> for a new spiritual rationality. Consider that most intellectuals are
> likely to think that Sam Harris is already a nutcase just for
> asserting that science is not divorced from values.
I think all scientists understand morals. They carry the knowledge of
morality around with them in the same way the christianity they left behind
carried selfishness. With a guilty conscious and an omnipresent driving
force behind everything. Values are subjective and it's bad to be
subjective... but you can't help it.
Only scientists got no facile messiah to save them, just a very stable (and
degenerating) pattern bequeathed from W. James and only capable of taking
them so far.
What would they
> say of him if he added to his crtiques of the fact-value dichotomy
> that he believes that A causes B ought to be understood to mean B
> values precondition A
Scientists are always looking for good and interesting intellectual tools,
and while causation itself has been handy, there are big glaring aspects of
understanding that its just no help on.
The MoQ, like pragmatism, doesn't solve these problems once and for all, so
much as it shows you how to look for solutions. Just as ZAMM didn't give me
a real stuck -screw solution that I didn't already know, but it sure helped
me on how to think about future stuck screws.
> or that a human being is a collection of static
> patterns of value of four types with the extra-added ingredient of an
> ability to respond to dynamic quality?
No help at all Steve. There's a certain flow and context to all ideas and
all teachings, I agree that translating the MoQ quickly and briefly is
probably impossible. I don't see going out and gaining converts in this
fashion as helpful, either. That's the mistake religions make.
> Could such notions do anything
> but subtract from the case Harris already is making for dissolving the
> wall of separation between values and rationality? I don't see how
> they could.
>
And yet I do think dave's idea of a letter is interesting. I like the idea
of a communal voice, doing little more than saying "this is good, you are
right, we agree". Getting a kind of institutional affirmation like that, is
what writers live for and means a lot more and pulls them in quicker than
any kind of preaching about where they go wrong, metaphysically.
But how the hell to pull anything like a "communal voice" outta this crowd
of misanthropic individualists is beyond me!
> It is impossible to know to what extent Pirsig has influenced culture.
> The positivists have been steadily losing ground, and Pirsig may have
> made a big contribution to its gradual demise, but twenty years after
> the publication of Lila it never seemed less likely than it does today
> that the MOQ vocabulary for talking about values will attain a static
> latch in intellectual culture.
There's a lot of truth in what you say. But I don't completely blame the
MoQ, neither. I hear the same song sung, from many directions and many
voices. Old indians hanging stubbornly on while they age and the young
watch tv and the only vocabulary that dominates culture is provided by
central programming. Everywhere, old languages and old ideas die out
because the old ways of transmission are lost.
Pirsig spoke aptly to a certain generation, me amongst. But my children's
generation are much further down the road that RMP warned against. In
some ways, pointing them to Bob is just pointing backwards. I get that.
New voices are needed, no doubt. Sounds to me like you're pinning a lot of
hope on Sam.
At this point, it is clear to me that
> Sam Harris is the public intellectual best placed to start and
> contribute to a needed conversation about values and rationality, and
> Pirsig's Quality won't help him do it.
>
Sounds like a challenge, to me.
Hmmm... "Pirsig's Quality" As Agnostic Abe was said to have said, "It's
not a question as to whether God is on our side but whether we are on His:
I'll have to ponder that. I really will.
John the mentally challenged
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