From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Sun Nov 06 2005 - 18:28:01 GMT
Case,
Case said:
I went to Books-a-Million to pick up some Barfield and found him out of
print. They suggested a visit to Half.com. I come home for a bit of internet
research and find Ham's is on to something. The dude espoused Antroposophy
and followed Stiener who abandoned the Theosphists to commune directly with
the Akashic records. Is Barfield suggesting that consciousness played leap
frog in Sheldrake's morphogenic field?
Scott:
Though Barfield was an anthroposophist, you won't find any of his
argumentation in "Saving the Appearances" or most of his other books based
on revelations of Steiner. He does refer to one book of Steiner's, "The
Philosophy of Freedom", which is straight philosophy, written before he
(Steiner) got involved with Theosophy. That is, the argumentation is neither
based on, nor requires one to espouse, anthroposophy. Now it's likely that
your response to this is that you don't have time to investigate all these
approaches that contain fundamental divergence from your materialist
beliefs, but as I see it, that's what I'm here for: to point out that
Barfield, as opposed to the many others that I would agree are crackpots,
should be taken seriously. I might also mention that my own rejection of
materialism came about through reasoning about consciousness before I read
Barfield (or Steiner), in particular from ruminations on whether a computer
could be conscious (I was a grad student in Computer Science at the time). I
found in Barfield confirmation of my reasoning (some of which is given
below), and much more.
Case said:
Beyond the attack ad hominem, this idea that consciousness evolves in fits
and starts is fundamentally flawed. It is far more likely that changes in
the ways cultures see the world are ratcheted forward by technology rather
than evolution. Inventions like astrology, the plowshare, the drainage
canal, animal husbandry or the development of a leisure class more than
account for the paradigm shifts we observe in history and as far as we can
tell in prehistory.
Scott:
Do they account for the evidence that the data has changed, about which
understandings of the world are formed?
Case said:
I believe it has been readily demonstrated that in addition to being
linguistic creatures human beings think, learn and respond in many ways that
are purely nonverbal, from jumping at the sound of thunder to orgasm. We
"just get feelings about things."
Furthermore to identify the totality of experience with language seems a bit
limiting especially if this is based on semiotics which appears to be a
theory designed to explain language. The Saussurean model doesn't even need
to bother with referents since languages can be developed to talk about
nothing at all.
However, language is not even the only way we communicate.
There is a whole set of unconscious nonverbal behaviors that take place
between mothers and their infants. Both seem to be genetically programmed as
partners in a dance.
Humans are as easily conditioned as dogs in a Pavlovian sense.
In normal face to face conversations much, if not most, of the actual
information conveyed is not verbal.
Scott:
I again made the mistake of using the word 'language', rather than
'semiosis', since obviously there is more to reality than English, French,
Chinese, and so on. What I am saying is that every thing/event is a sign.
It exists *because* it is a sign. Here I am working from the semiotics of
Peirce (together with an important observation of Barfield's -- see below),
rather than Saussure. Put in MOQ-speak, it is that a static pattern of value
is a pattern because it repeats. An event in a pattern is an event only
because it takes part in a pattern. Hence we jump at the sound of thunder,
because there is a biological SPOV that the sound takes part in. That sound
acts in the same way that a word acts in a sentence. It is a sign. It
signifies the concept: be alert when hearing a loud noise because there
might be danger, though of course the body does not need this English
translation.
Now on to the (in your view) weird stuff. In another post you explain the
development of intelligence as the expanding of the scope of temporal
buffers. This makes a lot of sense, but leaves out one thing: in a strictly
spatio-temporal world, how can there be a temporal buffer? To hear a single
note in a melody requires that several hundred alternations in air pressure
be smoothed out into a tone. How does this smoothing out happen?
Barfield starts "Saving the Appearances" with the observation that we all
know that that which we experience (the contents of sense perception:
colors, shapes, etc.) are not at all like the entities that physics tells us
exist in the absence of perception, that is, quantum wave/particles. One can
also observe that what makes quantum physics weird is not that it is
paradoxical (there are no paradoxes in the mathematics that is used to
formulate it) but that what is formulated cannot be pictured. Now what is
picturable is the spatio-temporal. Quantum physics tells us of entities that
cannot be fit into a strictly spatio-temporal structure. From this we should
conclude that spatio-temporal structure is a product of perception, while
what feeds into perception is not spatio-temporal. In short, the familiar
macroscopic world's structure is the product of perception, and exists only
when perceived. We know this, remarks Barfield, but then we immediately
forget it when we ask "where does consciousness come from". We forget it
when we assume that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain's
spatio-temporal activity. In doing that, we are attempting to explain
consciousness with the products of consciousness (which Steiner refers to as
being like Baron Munchhausen saying that he lifted himself off the ground by
pulling on his hair).
What this implies is that the contents of sense perception are signs of the
non-spatio-temporal reality we know (partially) as the quantum world, just
as the physical (spatio-temporal) sounds and figures we call speech and
writing are signs of concepts, which are also non-spatio-temporal -- which
are, I would say, the temporal buffers you refer to. The amoeba reacts to
vinegar, not because there is a mechanical series of chemical reactions, but
because there is a non-spatio-temporal "amoebic intellect/consciousness",
which we call instinct, and which includes the habit (the temporal buffer,
the concept, the SPOV) of moving away in this situation. (Note: this last
sentence is speculative -- it is a possible redescription, made possible
once one has overcome the Munchhausen fallacy.)
Anyway, that's the basis of what you call weirdness, and I would appreciate
if these arguments were addressed rather than simply dismissed as 'weird'
and 'nutty'. And in this vein I would like to add one thing. In another post
there was this exchange.
Mike]
The second, closely related, point of disagreement lies in your (Scott's)
claim that "to say of some process that it is intelligent is meaningless
unless there is value involved, and to say there is value involved is
meaningless unless there is awareness involved, and a process that involves
choosing among possibilities based on estimating consequences."
[Case]
There is a house of cards waiting for a gentle breeze.
Scott:
Could you waft that breeze my way so I can see what is so fragile about my
house of cards?
- Scott
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