Hi Ham, You said:
I take it 'LS' is short for Lila's Squad. I never watch that. Incidentally, I received a personal note yesterday from someone named Tim who "couldn't thank me enough" for introducing him to Donald Hoffman. He also mentioned LS, but seemed to know me from the past. "I've always had a great deal of respect for you," he wrote. I dimly recall conversing with a Tim on this forum some years ago. Can you fill me in on who he is? (Possibly a MoQ Discuss dropout?) J: He Didn't exactly drop out so much as was expelled. I also believe he was moderated from LS (LilaSquad) He's a very bright boy but seems to have problems with the social games required for communication, i.e., he thinks everybody should put in a lot of work in understanding him, while going to a lot of effort to make his writings obtuse. He also seems to read a lot into rap - that is the music form of ghetto culture - and posts his replies in the form of video links. His big hero is: *George Holmes Howison*(1834-1916) was an American philosopher who established the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley and held the position there of Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. He also founded the Philosophical Union, one of the oldest philosophical organizations in the United States. Tim was a doctoral student at Berkeley. Anything else you wanna know? :) > John: >> >> If the individual had no past memory of human society, then he would >> not see himself as human. Since he is a human then he would not see his >> true self. He would undoubtedly have the brain and attitude of a clever >> animal but even animals, or at least mammals, are socialized by their >> mothers to an extent. I doubt a human who was completely bereft of social >> patterns would even be able to think of anything, much less conceive >> himself. >> > > What exactly is your "true self"? I have trouble defining selfness in any > other way than as the locus of cognizant awareness. When experience is > added to this awareness, it takes on the dimensions of time and space in > which everything is an otherness to the self. > J: I'd say that one's true self is a chosen point of view. That is, out of all the levels of selfness construed by others socially, there is one that fits best - seems right - and that is one's true self. I'm not sure if that fits within your time and space model, but I see the self as primarily a social construct. > Furthermore the conception of ourselves is creatively influenced by our >> relations with others. If you were surrounded by a bunch of >> serious-minded >> puritans you'd be seen (and come to see yourself) as a hare brained >> >> flibbertygibbet. If you were surrounded by a bunch of dope smoking >> hippies, a staid, stuck-in-the-mud square. Our conception of ourself is >> formed out of contrasts and comparisons with others. With no others, no >> conception. That's the way I see it. >> > > I'm not demeaning the influence of parental love and social relationships > in shaping one's attitudes and behavior, but these are mainly cultural > amenities acquired in adolescence. I think it's more a 'you'd be seen as' > than 'you'd come to believe yourself as' conception. At base we're all > individuals, and the concept of belonging to a collective society is > rationalized from experience. > J: No argument there. Individuality IS rationalized from experience but the experience primary to this rationalization is social experience. We get our concepts from our culture and the self is, in a way, just another concept. Ham; Don't get me wrong, John. A relational world is the only environment in > which a cognitive agent can freely evaluate otherness in all its > experiential manifestations. Relative otherness is not only useful; it is > essential for the development of value discrimination. A self-supporting > relational universe whose laws and principles are consistently reliable is > what Schroeder points to as the "wisdom" revealed by Science -- his 'hidden > face of God'. > > J: That sounds good. > John: > > We >> constantly check and compare and build our conceptualized sensory input >> with others. My conclusion then is that reality is not an individual >> construct but a social one. >> > > Ham: > I tend to regard existential reality as a "universal" construct, rather > than "social". To be sure, individuals collectively consume, study and > manipulate this earthly domain for their benefit. However, the fact that > individuals borrow their human beingness from the same organic matter that > other creatures do would seem to rule out your theory that physical reality > is a social construct -- unless, of course, the "society" you have in mind > encompasses all living species. > > J: Yes, exactly. All living species indeed. Doesn't man obtain his definition from contrast with animals? We wouldn't realize that walking on two legs is what it is if there weren't animals that walk on four. We wouldn't realize our hair-lessness if we didn't have our fuzzy cousins to observe. All our ideas about our selves derive from contrasts with others and these others are human and non-human and we work together to obtain these conceptual ideas. I believe this one area alone - the individual and the society - cold take up a book, so we'll leave it for now and hopefully get back to it later. > > J: If I call it moral to steal my neighbor's car, the state will soon >> rectify my stance. Thus again, morality is a social realization rather >> than a personal one. >> > > To the extent that morality is a system of laws, the state will prevail. > But even laws are derived from individual values, albeit codified to > represent the 'moral majority'. J: I agree. The individual is just as fundamental as the society - they are co-dependent. It takes real individuals to make a society and it takes a real society to make an individual. The true goal of a good individual is to help form a quality society and the true goal of the good society is to help form quality individuals. It's reasoning thusly that we know we have a problem because our current society is turning out too many low-quality individuals and our populace is producing a low-quality community. We're spiraling downward rather than up. H: > Enlightened nations have struggled for centuries to reconcile individual > liberty with the ruling laws. America, for example, was founded as a > nation ruled by laws rather than men. (Excuse the plug, but you might find > next week's Value Page of interest in this context.) > > J: imo, the laws were expressions of felt values and I'd say America was a nation formed of ideas rather than laws. Especially my part of America -the West, where the only law at first was the law of survival. But in my view, that was the apex of the upward spiralling of hope and improvement and America peaked in its ascent, sometime after the war and since then it's been going down hill, with power accumulating to modern greedy despots - the military/industrial complex that our last good president warned us from, has taken over. It buys off our freedom with luxury. A pathetic sight. Obi Wan is our only hope. We need a hero. John 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
