ELEPHANT TO TODD, BOBBY AND BO: Todd, I really liked your contribution!..... TODD WROTE: Dear All, The main problem is that "metapysics is degenerative" ~Catagorizing is degenerative. ~Defining is degenerative. ~ Prolonging life is Vanity. ~The pursuit of Happiness is Flawed. ~ Reason is Illogical unless viewed as a Tool. ~Comfort is Dulled Senses. ~Communication is Confining ~Men as books is Hell (And these are just a few) Oh yea, "Happy Holidays" Beyond "Good as a noun", Todd ELEPHANT: But I have a suggestion which is also a question, or a question which is also a suggestion, whichever way you would prefer to have it: Can we identify exactly what it is about metaphysics that is degenerative, and exactly what it is degenerative of? That's the question. The suggestion is this: that the degenarative part of metaphysics is exactly the bit which is claiming some perfect methodology for solving all questions, the perfect game in Chess that Prisig speaks of (p457 lila). Now, it seems to me that Prisig's apparatus of "evolutionary" levels, which are a very powerful instrument for explaining and moving forward in the game of chess which Prisig is playing so eloquently with the whole history of the 20th Century, is exactly that suspicious, risky, degenerative activity that we should be wary of. It is not something avoidable - as Prisig explains, just to think about the 20th Cent (for example) is to engage in this substitution of one's own static patterns for a dynamic reality. And what this substitution is degenerative of is a reality that is a continuum, a value laden continuum, but a continuum nonetheless: "the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories." - James. So, that's the degenerative part, IMO: fitting real life neatly into the conceptual categories of the evolutionary levels. But that degenerative part isn't the whole of Metaphysics, is it? There is something else metaphysics is trying to do, besides answer every question one might have about the 20th Century, Quantum Mechanics, or what to do about religious icons, bar girls etc. All that bit can hold our attention a little too much if those happen to be the sorts of questions we are normally interested in (and they are), so much so that we filter out and fail to notice that the metaphysics has all along be answering another kind of question altogether, questions like: what is real and what does 'real' mean? I think Prisig permits a metaphysical answer to this metaphysical question which is in no way "degenerative": that the aesthetic continuum is the fundamental, and in the end, only, reality. The rest is just a series of 'movies' playing in peoples heads - an image, by the by, which fit's Plato's similie of the cave rather well (the light from behind, projecting images on to the wall which are shadows of the real, ie the good, etc etc). How does that sound? Degenerative? I think not. "Good as a noun": that's metaphysics too. BOBBY WROTE: PzEph, You wrote, Well, my question is : are the levels actually patterns themselves? Bobby : IMHO, yes.The levels are static patterns about static patterns. Merry Christmas to all focusers. ELEPHANT: And a merry Christmas to you too! Nice to get a kind festive word (and nice to hear things I agree with). ---------------------------------- O.K. Bo, let's think about the spatial dimensions metaphor for the levels... ELEPHANT HAD WRITTEN: Well, my question is: are the levels actually patterns themselves? BO WROTE: Better reply here than in the MD where you have taken on Struan. Without delving too much into your own reason for asking this let me say that I find comparing the levels with the spatial dimensions very useful. Are height, breath etc anything in themselves? Does it make sense re. the "nature" of the levels? ELEPHANT: Just interject here that I've no special secret motive here, and that actually I think I'm taking the same attitude to the levels which Prisig does in his comments about perfect chess, alluded to above. But my thoughts on the spatial thing can keep awhile... ELEPHANT HAD WRITTEN: OK, the reason I ask this is that, when you try and think of what else [other than patterns] they [levels] could really be, nothing much comes to mind. What, after all, is our notion of Organic except for a set of habits or static patterns about how we see the world? And it seems to me that if the evolutionary 'levels' of static patterns are themselves static patterns, this does alot to explain why we find it more difficult to use them to solve every kind of problem in our discussions than did Prisig. BO WROTE: I have a feeling when you speak about "we see the world....coming to mind" that you see everything as mind in a SOM idealist sense. In other words that the intellectual level is THINKING and that the SOM is one thinking-pattern and that the QM is another - both different outlooks from the homunculus MIND inside our heads. This is not (my idea) of the Q-intellect. ELEPHANT: I'm sorry if I've given the impression of being an SOM idealist, and it's something I know I need to be aware of. I'd guess that my intellectual development is a bit eccentric for a MOQer, as I've come to Prisgian radical empiricism from something more like the idealist SOM direction, not the empiricist SOM direction (although actually this entire process took place while reading Plato, not Prisig, who I read after). So there might be something in what you say - need to be kept on my toes. Still, to be honest though, I can't see what exactly turns on such a careless mistake about 'mind' (that is if I am actually making it, about which I'm not sure) in the context of what is after all merely a turn of phrase: 'what comes to mind'. I suppose the stonger part of your accusation that I am departing from Q-intellect is that I seem (with a bit of careful quoting) to speak of the mind reviewing the world, as if 'world' denoted a separate substance. If I really did mean that their separation here is one of substance, then, yes, that would be a severe offence! But that isn't what I meant at all. In 'thinking about the world' I meant, I think, something really quite innocent of the ontological flavour you give it. I just meant that we have experiences of value, both static patterns and the dynamic aesthetic continuum, and that it is possible to direct ones attention at these things. That is what Prisig is doing, isn't it? The only sense I'm giving to 'world' here is the MOQ sense. Now, as to space and time. "Are height, breath etc anything in themselves? Does it make sense re. the 'nature' of the levels?" There's actually a lot of argument about whether space and time are something in themselves. Given that, in modern physics, they can be 'streched' and 'bent' in physical interaction with mass and energy, this does rather imply that they are substantial entities. Putting that to one side, this whole area of the substantial reality or unreality of space and time is something that has obsessed the hellenic philosophers and is also a presocratic topic. OK, so you didn't ask for this: you only wanted to use space and time as a metaphor.... Well, I guess that if you think of space and time the way Einstein thought of them, then yes, they are an exceptionally good metaphor for the levels, in that, in support of what I have been saying, they are absolutely *not* imutable measures which are nothing in themselves. You want, as your metaphor, the changeless euclidian/newtonian grid - but that doesn't really fit to well, does it? There's rather more to the idea "intellectual" than a line on a graph, isn't there? Likewise organic, social, etc. At a guess, I'd say, if you tried to definitively explain what all the levels really meant, you'd have to write quite a long book, like Lila, maybe longer.... maybe even a never-ending internet discussion..... with everyone disagreeing about words.... and no perfect final check-mate.... The Pseudonymously Pachydermous Puzzler Pzeph MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
