To John:
Thanks for the input. Your understanding of the MOQ and the issues is
impressive. However, allow me to use the "dialectic method" to clarify or
present some minor suggestions, and to boost up some of the weaker spots of my
last post. This way, we can both come to a combined understanding on each
other’s views……
John Wrote:
"Roger says the debate on cloning is really about defining the self. Yes,
though there seem to be problems defining just what counts as evidence when we
are theorizing. Roger's scientific argument "you are a system" may work well
in its own territory. The question is whether that territory is adequate to
encompass all that we experience as human beings."
Roger Now Responds:
Much has been left out of the discussion. The theories from which I have been
borrowing are under the category called Autopoiesis, which I have expanded on
in the other discussion group of the Squad. A key post is listed at the
bottom of this response. Your input is very much appreciated. However, let me
clarify that SOM science was intended as just one of three prongs of my
argument. It was included to show how, within its own vast scientific
limitations, there is a theory that is totally consistent with this aspect of
the MOQ. The other two prongs dealt more with common sense experience, and
that ‘self’ and ‘body’ and the ‘world’ are all value patterns inferred from
Direct Experience. (However, in now rereading my post, I agree that it is a
bit over scientific and SOMish....maybe I can fix that now?)
John wrote:
"Theories are concocted in our minds as living creatures capable of observing
the world (including ourselves), hence 'conscious', and expressing our
observations in language. Any worthwhile theory must 'agree' with our more
primary experience of the world
and ourselves, which includes our feelings, or must justify departing from
such agreement. So counter-intuitive theories require evidence more directly
accessible to experience to support them."
Roger Responds:
Our minds are one of these theories. Primary experience creates reality. Via
language, we infer the existence of the self (Pirsig’s little editor) and the
world. The MOQ’s Empiricism subscribes to pure experience and considers the
subject and object as abstractions, as assumptions that have been taken for
granted in traditional materialism.
John:
" If such evidence is lacking (eg in psychosis) then the theory
is better labeled 'fantasy'. At the deepest level, though, all theory is
fantasy, held in a web of language that can never be totally tested."
Roger:
Exactly. The self is a theory or fantasy held in a web of language. But
again, theories are just as much a pattern as any other static pattern of
value in the universe.
John:
"To test any new theory requires that much involved in that testing is
accepted for the time being as given, and the whole can never be tested at any
one time. This is as true in the language of science as it is in the language
of ethics."
Roger:
Pragmatic truth values consistency with direct experience, other truths, and
with the values of the ‘lower’ levels.
John Wrote:
"Pirsig, in using the term quality to point to the basis of all experience
seems to be saying that the traditional scientific world view is an
abstraction from a richer experiential world (experienced by individuals) and
that therefore the self cannot be
encompassed by physics. He uses the novel in the computer as an analogy. As
organisms, we react to or interact with the world, and what does not excite us
effectively does not exist for us. Our nervous system has evolved to respond
to threats or rewards,
and even single celled organisms move towards food or away from danger….."
Roger:
Very well said! RMP explains that the missing pieces in the mind/matter
duality are biology and society.
John wrote:
"Our experience of quality occurs most significantly inwardly, in feelings and
emotions inaccessible to science (that is, the quality of any experience is
ultimately different to the neurological and physiological substrate in which
it forms)."
Roger:
I agree that feelings and emotions are directly experienced, as is thinking.
I also agree that the quality is quite different than the inorganic substrate.
However, as Horse wrote recently, they are intertwined like the computer and
software that you referenced.
John wrote:
" No amount of study of the computer can adequately explain why I laugh at the
joke on the screen."
Roger:
Probably because it was funny, no? :-)
John:
"So I suggest it is unlikely that any combination of atoms in a clone, even if
cloning were possible, can guarantee a personality, rather than a body. While
the physical and biological substrate which could in theory be cloned is
essential to person hood, to assume the molecules are the person seems risky.
"
Roger:
But is a copy of an atom a real "atom"? Is a copy of a body a real "body"?
The molecules aren’t the person….but they aren’t the static materialistic
things of classic science either. All is VALUE PATTERNS. I believe there is
a group of Lila squadders that view the inorganic realm as being somehow more
real than the other levels. None of the levels are truly materialistic. (nor
are they truly mental). They are patterns of value.
Where is the mind located? Nowhere. Location is a relational value
characteristic of inorganic patterns, and that is NOT a value characteristic
of the other levels. There is no center to an intellectual pattern such as
RMP’s little editor that we call the ‘self’.
John:
"I am presumedly the same physical body when asleep or in a coma as when
conscious, but the analogue 'I' (to use Jaynes term) is present in one and not
in the other."
Roger:
Are you? Are YOU really present in either? One involves experience….one
doesn’t.
John:
"Ultimately the argumant comes down to that between those who place conceptual
reality ahead of experiential reality, which it seems to me is a richer
amalgam of thought, experience and feeling incapable of being encapsulated in
any single mode such as the conceptual. Surely this is where the MOQ does
change our world view, allowing quality ( which is a relationship term) to be
more fundamental than the traditional language of being, which isolates one
aspect of the experiential whole and gives it a
spurious reality."
Roger:
I agree , and see the ‘self’ and ‘I’ as being the most intractable concept of
all.
John:
"It is another question why so many of us prefer this 'scientific' sense of
being to dominate."
Roger:
???? I would drop the word ‘scientific’ and answer by pointing to my response
directly above.
Be Good All
Rog
PS – For more input on my attempts to synthesize the seemingly disparate
worlds of science and mystic experience, see my post yesterday in the sister
site:
moq_discuss@moq.org/msg00219.html">http://www.mail-archive.com/moq_discuss@moq.org/msg00219.html
Your guidance and input are valued
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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