<001b01bff88d$98f60380$[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi, response-ish to Jonatahan Marder, Richard Budd and other stuff thorwn in. I'll *try* to be non-rambly for once. I'm not sure that 'mu' means shrug-shoulders-and-go-away. It simply means that the question cannot be answered within the premises of the question posited. Which I guess in the context of Zen training means go-and-work-on-your-ontology-little-student. And other cultures might say that it means that the question can't be answered. The position that it can't be answered may just be because the limitations of the precepts of that culture is of course a manifestation of insanity. So yes, "is quality S or O?" The answer is mu. The expansion is that Q encompasses and gives rise to S and O. Which from an S&O point of view is ridiculous if not quite mu. If you constructed an algebra which could only construct concepts in terms of SOM, Q would be risible. Fortunately our existence and language don't quite tie us down to such an extent [q.v. Orwell's '1984' and Newspeak] and the open-endedness can be sufficient to prise open the conceptual barriers. In the context of Zen, koans are this method, I guess. In the much more freewheeling western culture you need books like ZAMM and Lila and www.moq.org to prise the lid off the metaphysical cookie jar, 'cos we're not too hot on pithy aphorisms anymore. Why? - because language still is able to transcend both 'rationality' and 'emotivism' I guess. So I'll say - yes the whole proposition is a bit mu, but we can get around a lot of this. I think that the emotion is separate from the mental process associated with reasoning has been pretty much rubbished from the point of view of many contributions. The idea that rationality is separate from emotion is a post-hoc evaluation to try to get full marks from teacher/peers. The whole 'emotivism' concept is perjorative designed to exclude 'people who don't think our way'. Well, the best scientists for Capital are precisely those who don't think in terms of the broader picture about the influence of e.g. GM crops, and those who restrict themselves to considerations of biochemical manipulation of cellular evolution. Hence the recent editorial comment in New Scientist magazine [sorry date and issue available on request - doing it off top of head and not available at this instant] which castigated HRH Charles Windsor-Mountbatten for trying to urge scientists to be more responsible : New Scientist's response was in a nutshell "science is pure intellectual research and the side effects are all commerce's fault". This was 'rational science' reaction to 'woolly minded emotivism'. Okay, I think we pretty much realise that rationalism is a rhetorical stance designed to pander to the preconceptions of current culture - and we have pretty much within the contexts of this discussion group put paid to said preconceptions. I.e. 'emotion' is as part and parcel of perception as 'reason'. Indeed, the 'selflessness' of reason belongs to the quality that exists before the concept of self gets in the way. The problems arise in the 'rational' world view constructed where the only reasoning gets done by emotional egos in a material world. So much so good. This can be 'hey there's a point' or 'namby-pamby' depending on initial starting point et al. by the recipient of 'the message'. I believe that the acid test posited by Rick at the beginning of this month's discussion was how can we 'objectively' [i.e. consistently and independently] deal with the questions posed by MoQ. [And yes - touche, Rick - you are quite right Lila was written to try to help distinguish between DQ and quality-within-ego and witin other things]. My answers were somewhat casuistic in that I doubted the possibility of a method which could be accepted as producing such answers. My use of the word 'algebra' was not meant to be derogatory, just that any formal system can end up being described symbolically and computationally - and this is what I think would be required by such a consistent and independent approach. This is in the same way that physics mediates with mathematics via the concepts of energy, distance... and the measurement [conversion between numeric and physical aspects] of such properties, a Q-algebra would have to deal with the interaction between DQ and SQ, and the encompassing of one level of SQ by another. And, er yes, such an answer might yield e.g. "0.61" and that would have to mean e.g. that "the encompassing of level-a by level-b has its advantages but cannot be entirely said to be 'good'" with various factors thrown in as to the open-endedness of the system [= responsiveness to DQ and its ability to remain intact and responsive after responses to said DQ]. It is quite simply founding a new branch to mathematics - or in all likelyhood expanding upon one long forgotten. In case this rankles, such techniques are championed by 'fuzzy logic' which is an attempt to get maths [by expansion of boolean logic] to work with the vagaries of social morality amongst other things. OK. So at the moment we haven't such a mathematical approach I guess, and *this is what it would take* to get the consistency requested [? - apologies if I am incorrect in this assumption about you] by Rick. It would also take a lot of expansion from the current 4level MoQ - perhaps by the mediation of said maths - to get something that was at least internally consistent and not just by a few clever words, i.e. to describe e.g. where one level was spawning the sort of behaviour that *could* eventually dominate it as a higher level. The price? I guess we kill the romance. The reward? Invitation onto the chat-show circuit gravy train for life. Regards, Hamish ------- End of forwarded message ------- MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
