Just in case this was suppose to be your explanation... dmb says: >>> Right, Marsha is reading the rejection of the Cartesian conception of self >>> as a rejection of ANY conception of the self.
Marsha: No. That is not what I said, and I didn't reject anything. In fact, you have not addressed anything I actually did say. You've gone off on a tangent of your own making. Just like a politician. >>> dmb: >>> This rejection is part of rejecting subject-object metaphysics. Marsha: It may be, but it has nothing to do my statement. >>> dmb: >>> Sometimes Pirsig calls this the metaphysics of substance because Descartes >>> had divided all of reality into mental substance and physical substance. Marsha: Your premise was wrong, so this makes no sense in relationship to my post. Of course, that doesn't surprise me. >>> dmb: >>> These are metaphysical posits and that's what is being rejected, the notion >>> that there is some kind of entity behind thoughts and things. Marsha: Which exact "metaphysical posits" are you talking about. Posted by Pirsig's? By Descartes? By Santa Claus's? >>> dmb: >>> But that doesn't mean that Robert Pirsig is a fiction. Marsha: He is a collection of static patterns of value. Static patterns of value are useful illusions. Yes? >>> dmb: >>> It just means that he is made of the same stuff the rest of reality is made >>> of and better conceived as a complex ecology of processes rather than some >>> essential thing. Marsha: He is a collection of static patterns of value. Or what? >>> dmb: >>> Like Nietzsche and James, Pirsig is saying that there is no distinction >>> between consciousness and content, that there is no entity that does the >>> thinking or rather that the thinking itself is the thinker. Marsha: Ohhhhh, you have left the MoQ for a higher, broader intellectual context. From what theoretical platform are these statements being made? Do I get a hint? >>> dmb: >>> When we say "it rains" we don't really mean to suggest that some entity >>> separate from the rain preforms the task of raining. The rain itself is the >>> only "it". And so it is with thinking. When we say "I think", it's just a >>> figure of speech. It's just about the grammatical rules of English. >>> In James's 1904 essay titled "Does Consciousness Exist?", he answers the >>> title question in the negative. No, as an entity there is no such thing, he >>> said. Consciousness is a function, a process. Whitehead described this as a >>> direct attack on the Cartesian self. Bertrand Russell said James's essay >>> "startled the world" for the same reason. >> Marsha: "When we say "I think", it's just a figure of speech." Duh... I am not impressed by this blarney. My statement to Arlo were within a MoQ context in relationship to "MoQ says" versus "Pirsig says". >>> dmb: >>> But to simply say that Pirsig and you and me and everyone else is just a >>> fiction not only misses the whole point of what is being rejected, Marsha: I only rejected that Pirsig, you, me and everyone are inherently existing entities. That was the point I was trying to make to Arlo. >>> dmb: >>> it also leads to a rather vacuous nihilism. Marsha: The incorrect premise, makes this statement nonsense. >>> dmb: >>> One might as well say that the bombs that dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima >>> with just fictions and so were the hundreds of thousand so dead. In a world >>> of pure fiction nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Shall we say that >>> genocide and mass murder is "not this and not that"? What would be the >>> consequences if we acted as if that idea were true? >>> Or, what if we read the MOQ as saying that reality - including ourselves - >>> is made of values all the way down? What if we acted as if that were true >>> instead? Should we treat the world and ourselves as static patterns of >>> VALUE or as a fiction? Do you suppose Marsha's nihilistic reading would >>> have better consequences? Not me, brother. Even if it did make sense, which >>> it doesn't, I think that reading is an outrageous moral nightmare. >> Hyperbole! ___ ___ 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/md/archives.html
