> Dan said: > ...Remember, ideas are patterns of value. Morals and quality are synonymous > in the MOQ. I doubt anyone here only keeps an eye on logical consistency. But > if a contributor consistently contradicts themselves it points to a lack of > quality. > > > David H replied: > I agree here. But why is there a lack of quality? Why does a contributor, in > your eyes, consistently contradict themselves? That's what I'm pointing > towards. Everyone has different values. So at some time or another - no > matter who you discuss anything with you will at some stage come upon a > disagreement. They value something which you don't which causes them to deem > their words with coherence, and you the opposite. ...If your values are > better than mine - why is that? Or are there other values which are better? > Why do you have the values which you do? Why do you deem them of value? We > live in a society today where people are almost frightened of openly > discussing their values and morals for fear of offending or appearing > insensitive. But the values/morals of the participants in a discussion are > not irrelevant and to be actively avoided (as is traditionally thought) - but > are the *most* important part of a philosophical discussion. > > dmb said: > I can see that you're trying to hook up values and intellect, even saying > that values are the MOST important part of a philosophical discussion. And > yet there is still a SOMish separation implied in what you're saying. This is > contained in the questions you pose; everybody has different values, you say, > which causes us to disagree about what is and is not coherent. If your values > are better than mine, why is that? This implies that the meaning of logical > consistency differs from person to person, that the distinction between > coherence and incoherence is just a matter of one's personal feelings and > attitudes. It just doesn't work like that, David. It's not as if each > individual has their own private mythos or that each person is a culture of > one, an isolated individual with no real way to communicate with another > soul, excepts as two ships passing the night. That kind of solipsistic > alienation is what you get with SOM, wherein each individual has her own way > of representing > reality. But in the MOQ, we are composed of the static patterns of our time > and culture and language. Marsha is not from some other place or time. She > speaks English (sort of) and lives in the 21st century West, just like > everybody else here.
David responds: The 'meaning' of logical consistency or coherence doesn't have to differ between person to person for folks to still disagree about what has high or low logical consistency and high or low coherence. Everyone knows what's good. Everyone knows what's logically consistent or has coherence. We just disagree about our words which describe that good… Coherence and incoherence isn't a matter of personal feelings. Quality is universal. Our different interpretations of Quality vary between person to person however - depending on our life experience. So along this line of thought - Marsha *is* a culture of one just like everyone else... "'You're sort of another culture,' he said. 'A culture of one. A culture is an evolved static pattern of quality capable of Dynamic change. That's what you are. That's the best definition of you that's ever been invented. 'You may think everything you say and everything you think is just you but actually the language you use and the values you have are the result of thousands of years of cultural evolution. It's all in a kind of debris of pieces that seem unrelated but are actually part of a huge fabric. Levi-Strauss postulates that a culture can only be understood by reenacting its thought processes with the debris of its interaction with other cultures. Does this make sense? I'd like to record the debris of your own memory and try to reconstruct things with it… That's what I think can be done with a single person. I can take parts of your language and your values and trace them to old patterns that were laid down centuries ago and are what make you what you are.'" But further to this, Marsha's problems, like everyone's problems on this forum are our problems because they are the problems also of our *shared* culture... Talking to her about her logic isn't going to change things because she has made value judgements *before* that logic which deem the logic unnecessary. So like it or not, Marsha is a part of this discussion group, and unless that changes then until the patterns of her life improve - we are stuck with them as part of a problem of our shared culture.. But on a broader point - this isn't just true of Marsha and her lack of value for logic. But true of all discussions - even ones which we may claim involve 'pure logic'. All intellectual logic comes from the values of the culture and the people expounding that logic. Unless we can not only show folks how wrong they are - but think about why they might be wrong and explain how something else might be better - then nothing will change. Well that's what I think anyway... > dmb also said: > But the thing is, as people keep saying to you repeatedly, intellectual > values are values in and of themselves. You don't arrive at them by way of > some other species of value. I mean, health is a biological good, fame and > fortune are social level values, while truth is what's good and right > intellectually. Again, in the MOQ intellectual quality is the highest form of > value, the most moral. This is protected in the MOQ's moral codes and it's > supposed to be protected in the Bill of Rights. This is supposed to be an > evolutionary advance over social level morality - what usually counts as > morality in the church, as well as the over the worship of fame and fortune. > Intellectual level morals are even opposed to these lower level in very > important ways. > > Long story short, intellect is not the enemy. SOM and amoral objectivity is > the enemy. And those are two very different things. > > And then there is the distinction between concepts and reality, the > difference between a knowable, definable metaphysical system and the reality > (the undefinable Quality) that it talks about. David responds: Intellectual quality in the MOQ is indeed the greatest static good. I agree with that. But I think a large part of why Marsha does not always seem interested in intellectual quality is because she deems Dynamic Quality as the better value. She isn't some crazy person - she's using the structure of the MOQ in her thinking. And I'm sure for every Marsha on this discussion board there's millions of folks on the planet just like her who would make the same mistake given the structure of the MOQ. We both know that a discussion about philosophy ought to begin by acknowledging this degeneracy of ruining the undefined nature of DQ. And we also both know that a good Mystic would avoid this degeneracy by acknowledging the *static* existence of *static* quality and not by muddying the reality of both DQ and sq. But so long as Marsha is a member of this forum and until Marsha sees the quality of a better perspective - nothing will change and we will be stuck with a lack of clarity on this forum about this. 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
