From: Paul Turner (paul@turnerbc.co.uk)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 10:26:00 BST
Ham,
--- Forgive me if I consider the "inheritance of beliefs" preposterous --
--- whether or not there's a collective conscience.
Paul: Forgive me if I think it is preposterous that you cannot see that
your upbringing, your language, your education, your viewing and reading
habits, the law, the constitution, the Bible............have all contributed
to the cultural inheritance of almost all of the beliefs that you call your
own.
--- Do intellectual patterns have self-awareness? If not, then we're not
--- talking about what most people consider "minds".
Paul: Self-awareness is one of those slippery terms, particularly within a
philosophical inquiry, that can waste a lot of discussion time if not
carefully defined. May I ask you to elaborate on your use of the term here?
--- Paul:
--- > The idea of thoughts existing before they are "expressed" requires
--- > that we see language as a medium. From there we have the idea of a
--- self
--- > with an independent and intrinsic nature which is using the medium of
--- > language for expression. This is just the subjectivist flip-side of
--- the
--- > materialist view of language as a medium for representation of an
--- objective
--- > world and, as such, is still in the subject-object soup.
---
--- I can see language as a medium for expressing ideas but not as a source
--- for
--- conceptualizing them. While I'm not a materialist, I believe thoughts
--- are
--- our reflections on an objective world. Inasmuch as we don't see the
--- world
--- any other way, I'm afraid we're doomed to swim in this "subject-object
--- soup"
--- for a lifetime.
Paul: As long as we see thoughts as a reflection on an objective world we
are in the subject-object soup? Yes, that seems like an innocuous
tautology. Was I supposed to have something more to say to this?
--- Paul:
--- > If reason is a skill one has to learn, how could it be something one
--- > is born with?
---
--- You're nit-picking a bit here, Paul. What I meant was that we're all
--- born
--- with conscious self-awareness, which includes the potential to reason.
--- These
--- faculties are proprietary to the individual, even though they have
--- biological corollaries in the brain and nervous system.
Paul: What is the point of saying that we are born with the "potential to
reason" though? Is it any more philosophically interesting than saying that
we are born with the potential to juggle or the potential to speak
backwards?
--- Paul:
--- > Why should the idea of an entity called mind be pivotal to the whole
--- > thing? What does all this talk of mind do for us? What has it done
--- for
--- us?
--- > What is lost when we stop talking about mind as an independent entity
--- > swinging free of culture and language and look at the things people
--- (to
--- whom
--- > we ascribe the possession of a mind) say and do / have said and done?
---
--- What has the MoQ's alternative view done for us? Has it given us a
--- better
--- understanding of ourselves or the world we live in? Does it suggest a
--- reason for being born, a meaning for life in a world of otherness, or
--- any
--- insight as to our value in the whole scheme of things? We all come into
--- this world with a naive awareness that it's our plaything.
--- Anthropocentricity made sense before we had the means to intellectualize
--- the
--- term. It still is; only we've allowed ourselves to be persuaded by
--- reason
--- and the logic of empirical evidence that the reverse is true, that we
--- are
--- the world's plaything -- even worse, that we may not really have an
--- independent existence from the world.
---
--- Again, I'm reminded of Ayn Rand's pithy comment on the propriety of
--- mind,
--- which I've quoted here before: "From the wheel to the skyscraper,
--- everything
--- we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man --
--- the
--- functioning of his reasoning mind. But the mind is an attribute of the
--- individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no
--- such
--- thing as a collective thought. ...we can divide a meal among many men.
--- We
--- cannot digest it in a collective stomach. ...no man can use his brain
--- to
--- think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private.
--- They
--- cannot be shared or transferred."
Paul: I've answered Rand's asinine comments before. She should apply some
of her proprietary reason to see that language cannot possibly be private
and that the construction of skyscrapers, for example, is based on
structural engineering principles which are the result of hundreds of years
of development and communication through very public institutions.
--- I find it astonishing that you so readily dismiss the value of
--- individual
--- thought and action to support a philosophy that reduces proprietary
--- awareness to a series of patterns and levels. If what people
--- independently
--- think and say and do are of no account, then who or what in your
--- perspective
--- is the "prime mover" in the world?
Paul: What individual people think and say and do is most definitely of
account and import but I just don't see it as the work of some mysterious
entity or faculty called mind. I see it as the work of people dealing with
and trying to improve experience for themselves and others by striving to
make quality decisions.
Regards
Paul
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jun 14 2005 - 10:30:58 BST