From: Arlo J. Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 27 2005 - 12:21:10 GMT
[Platt]
Good. It would be nice if you gave the creators their due.
[Arlo]
I do. Both the "individual" and the "collective" are the creators, or the
creative Yin-Yang on any given MOQ level. It would be nice if you'd give credit
where it is due, and not to some illusionary "individual" creating away in some
vacuum.
[Platt]
Well, it's big of you to admit you never had a original thought in your
head and that you are merely an echo of other individuals who did have something
new and different to say.
[Arlo]
Ah, see, you continue to distort rather than see the dialectic relationship
between the "individual" and the "collective". I never said there are no
"original thoughts", but the ones you do have emerge out of the historical
dialogue, and because OF the historical dialogue that is the collective
consciousness.
If you want to pretend that Rand's words (and Pirsig's, and the countless others
you've read, talked to, interacted with, not to mention the structure of the
language you've appropriated) are not part of the thoughts in your head, please
do so if it gives you some needed "identity" isolate from the rest. But every
time you (for example) use the word "brujo", I'll chuckle at how your thoughts
contain Pirsig's voice, without whom you'd not have this little word or
thought.
[Arlo previously]
If you are so anti-emergence, why are you so fond of an emergentist
metaphysical hierarchy?
[Platt]
Because it was all there from the beginning and simply took time to
flower, whereas for you it just emerged out of the blue..
[Arlo]
So there's the MOQ, sitting out in space, before time because there was no time.
Having no mass because there was no mass. Sound to me like someone fell prey to
the Aristotelian "The [MOQ] comes before everything else".
Tell me Platt, where was the Intellectual level 4 billion years ago? Sitting
around waiting for the inorganic to "flower", then the biological, then the
social, so that it could finally apply to something?
Thankfully, Pirsig knew better, saying of how "intellectual principles"
(individuals on the Intellectual level) emerge from "social activity"
(collectivity on the social level), "These rituals may be the connecting link
between the social and intellectual levels of evolution. One can imagine
primitive song-rituals and dance-rituals associated with certain cosmology
stories, myths, which generated the first primitive religions. From these the
first intellectual truths could have been derived. If ritual always comes first
and intellectual principles always come later, then ritual cannot always be a
decadent corruption of intellect. Their sequence in history suggests that
principles emerge from ritual, not the other way around. That is, we don't
perform religious rituals because we believe in God. We believe in God because
we perform religious rituals."
Finally, Pirsig said on the emergent relationship between the levels, "An
excellent analogy to the independence of the levels, Phaedrus thought, is the
relation of hardware to software in a computer." In your world, the software
program was always there, waiting for hardware to apply itself to. In Pirsig's,
it had emerged Dynamically.
Arlo
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