Dear MOQers.
May I tell about a special issue of "Scientific American" (The Hidden Mind)
dedicated to the latest development, findings and thoughts about the
consciousness/awareness enigma. But first a comment to the current
"Creationist" topic
******************
I am a little surprised at the imprssion given that the Jempties are
antagonists regarding the MOQ. Pirsig takes as much leave of Darwinism as
of Creationism, but I should think he would be considered a creationist by
science and an evolutionist by the Church. Adam Aurich said:
> Science has no place for gods, if it did, it wouldn’t
> be science.
wich is true, but it has as little place for "good". That is why in (my) MOQ the
intellectual level is SOM - which is sience - and it can't be expected that the
value dividing objectivity from subjectivity will endorse any revival of
"subjectivity". Thank God for that! However, George said something
significant in one of his latest posts.
> Quality, the Tao, God are not like that: rather they are experienced with
> something other than the 5 senses, indeed with something other than
> intellect. I know I am the richer for that; I hope you and everybody else
> can be too.
Right! The Quality Idea is something that wants to escape Intellect ... the
level that is. I'm afraid that in your book it means the usual SOMish "belief
beyond thinking". Never mind it was an important statement.
*******************
The magazine consists of a series of articles the first of which by Anthonio
Damasio known for his book "Descartes' Error". It strikes the usual note of
there being many problems in determining how neuron firing produces our
conscious experience, but somehow, sometime it will be unravelled, and
thus it goes on article by article (other authors are Francis Crick and Michael
Gazzinga ). One piece that evoked my special interest was "Emotion,
memory and the brain" by Joseph E LeDoux because of my "emotion-the-
social-expression" idea, but even if he tries hard the subjective feeling
becomes something secondary to the nerve signals criss-crossing the brain.
It results in the conclusion that an unpleasant feeling (fear f.ex.) is an
unwanted fall-out from the biological beneficial getting-out-of-harm's-way. I.e:
someone becoming anxious because of imagining a dangerous situation is
diseased (I'll return to that).
The last article - The Puzzle of Conscious Experience - by David Chalmers
caught the dilemma by the horns (although not reaching Pirsig's
conclusions). He coined an "easy" and a "hard" problem, the first one is how
and where information is stored and processed in the brain, the second is
how it gives rise to the subjective experience we call consciousness. He
doubted the hopes from the other about solving the second problem and
even ridiculed the "quantumists" Penrose and Hammeroff's suggestions of it
having its roots in the "microtubulae" (anyone remember Danah Zohar and
her source of mind due to quantum effects in the Einstein Bose
condensate?). This he says will no more close the mind/matter gap than any
other theory ...(says Chalmers and goes on) ...making that leap will demand
a new kind of theory."
And a new KIND of theory is exactly what the MOQ provides. Just consider
Pirsig's inversion of the whole damned causation "...a dynamic drive to
escape static limitations"! Life was neither created nor brought into being
by chance, it was an ESCAPE from the inorganic prison in spite of its strict
security and the same goes for the rest of the Q-evolutionary steps. But what
makes the MOQ relevant regarding the said SOM-induced mind/matter
dilemma is that there is no gap to be bridged.
Funnily enough, in an article concerning sleep and dream my favourite
"epiphany" was mentioned: All creatures sleep .... but the inevitable
conclusion that they must "wake up" to a state different from sleep was not
drawn. Forgive me for constantly returning to this point, but it is so
outrageous and I can't understand it being neglected. One CAN'T wake up
from unconsciousness unless it is to consciousness, but the SOM
postulates a special kind - the so-called selfconsciousness. In the MOQ this
means that animals wake up to biological consciousness and the human
beings to the whole range of consciousnesses, not the absolute insight it
sounds like, and that there are consciousness waiting to be entered ...but
please no Wilberian "spiritual" realms.
I would have liked to go on, but this is enough.
Bo
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