Hi Scott, John B, Bo and all,
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I was going to address the certainty which comes with mystical insight but I
need to address this post first. Hopefully I will be able to get to the
'fun stuff' of mysticism & the S/O divide.
----- Original Message -----
From: Scott R <jse885@spinn.net>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 27, 2002 6:04 PM
Subject: Re: MD Consciousness
> Gary and all,
>
> This seems to have become a 'tis/'taint argument, so let me try a
> different tack.
>
> In my opinion, you are denying the MOQ. Specifically, Pirsig adopts as
> the primary distinction that into DQ and sq. He then categorizes sq into
> four levels, inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual, each level
> developing out of the previous, thanks to DQ. Note that there is no
> division into internal and external reality. He then says that what we
> commonly call subjective can be identified as the social and
> intellectual levels, and objective the other two. Again, no division
> into internal and external reality. just a definition of two words. In
> traditional terms, no mind/matter division.
GARY'S RESPONSE: I know I do harp on about internal and external reality and
if we only had Lila, which Pirsig says is an inquiry into ethics, I would
seem to be left out in the cold. Lila's map is a map of reality through the
lens of Ethics and so we got a map from Pirsig that works best in the
Ethical realm of analysis. But Internal & External are both Pirsig unspoken
but described concepts from Zen and the Art. I could bore you with all the
gory detials but I'll simply refer you to my first essay "What's wrong with
this picture." (I can't recall / find in your prior posts if you said you
read my essay's, I dimly think either Bo or you Scott said you had.)
Anyway...I can't get thrown out of the church by the front door. My essays'
demonstrate I am a member of the faithful. So far I haven't had the need to
reference DQ and how it plays into reality. We will eventually get to that.
>
> Now you, on the other hand, say we need to divide
> things/events/processes into internal versus external. Say we do so.
>
> You see a bird land on a tree. To you this is two events, the bird
> landing in the tree, and your seeing the bird land in a tree. Well, now
> you've described the event in SOM terms. And so, I ask you:
>
> 1. How do you know there is really an external event, and not that you
> are simply imagining it (a la Descartes' demon)?
GARY'S RESPONSE: My personal focus is on mapping out and understanding Human
Reality, hence much of my perspective. The simple answer as to why there is
a belief in External Reality is honesty. I must honestly admidt that
everything was existing before I was born and will continue to exist after I
die. Yes, this could be a self-delusion but it seems much more likely that
the all of human culture and records weren't carefully constructed to give
me that deslusion. The other simple answer is it feels and appears that I
am babbling in my mind about things and events that are not in my mind.
Again, the self-delusion arguement could be raised but for the arguement to
work it gets awfully convoluted. The simple solution is to go with our
feelings of externalness and go with the overwhelming abundance of exteral
evidence, books [I do dearly love and am addicted to those lovely words!!!],
pictures, moives, tv, etc, that there is something that existed before I was
born and will be there after I was gone. I hope I need not in detail build
a step by step arguement of how I can get my self past this first question.
We could be here for weeks and it will be messy and tedious. But, you are
right in that eventually all certainty, yours and mine, is built on a little
leap of faith. I'm trying to keep that leap to a small step, and internal &
external reality and of course my favorite: maps & territories, are both
small steps of faith. When we get to certainty from mystical insight I hope
to show why these are bigger steps/leaps of faith.
> 2. Suppose there really is the external event and the internal event.
> Now we know (based on scientific study of external events) that the
> information of the external event passed into you via photons, which
> excited cells in your retina, etc., but you do not perceive photons or
> nerve excitations, rather you see a bird landing on a tree. So what can
> we say about the external event in itself, versus what we have produced
> "in our mind"? Kant says nothing at all. So why bother with the external
> event at all (or why is Kant wrong)?
GARY'S RESPONSE: Using Pirsig's MOQ map, it all starts with the inorganic
stuff, photons and then gets us into the organic stuff of cells in the
retina. But it gets alot more interesting. The biology and psychology of
perception is a grand field of study. My starting place was Robert
Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness, the 1972/75 penguin edition
which I encountered in 1976. From here I began a study of perception. Good
and important recent books on the subject are Erich Harth's The Creative
Loop: How the brain makes a Mind [I know I keep harping on the same book.] ,
Robert Ornstein's The Evolution of Consciousness: Of Darwin, Freud, and
Crainal Fire-The Origins of the Way We Think, and Steven Pinker's How the
MInd Works.
We do not perceive photons. Perception is a mental process and not simply
a biological one. Our eyes are not cameras, and that simplistic model is
outdated. Our sensory system selects and excludes data in its biology and
then the brain kicks in a series of reflexive and recursive steps to process
the data. Building up a internal set of coordinates of neural connections
that is very much like a map of corresponce with a fix ratio to the incoming
data. Internal stored memory patterns are cross referenced, memory of prior
perception and memory of linguistic/symbolic data. On it goes, this
elaborate process is perception. The photon collection is the simple
starting point. Kant didn't have much information as what how the biology
of eye and brain works so he can't help us much. He did figure out that we
must have structure and patterns that are in our minds.
[This is from that wonderfull web site you refer us to, where the link to
the articles on Merrel-Wolff can be found. I have been busy downloading the
stuff and reading it. Wonderfull!!!: http://www.integralscience.org/ Tom
McFarlane hosts the site, he is the founder of what he calls Integral
Science. His work parallel's Ken Wilber.]
Tom McFarlane refers to Kant in Tom's essay Integral Science: An Overview:
"Central to Immanuel Kant's philosophy are the Forms of Intuition and the
Categories of the Understanding. These are psychological structures common
to all humans which are the preconditions for experience as we know it.
Without the Forms of Intuition, experience would have no spatial or temporal
structure. Without the Categories of the Understanding, our thinking would
be without logical structure. Although its details may require some
modification in view of modern developments [Gary's note: here is post Kant
biology & psychology of perception science stuff. ]" Kant had built up
similiar ideas about pattern recognition that the biologists and
pychologists figured out in the workings of our brain/neural system. So,
actually Kant does refer to mind processing in perception.
Now to the point, you said: "but you do not perceive photons or
> nerve excitations, rather you see a bird landing on a tree. So what can
> we say about the external event in itself, versus what we have produced
> "in our mind"? Kant says nothing at all. So why bother with the external
> event at all (or why is Kant wrong)?"
The point is that the external world is the one we live in. it prompts us
to interact and we live in it. We are stumulated by the external world,
prompted by it, process internally and come to our understanding of it. How
the mind works/ how we come to understand intelectual stuff, is all modeled
on the processes involved in perception! So when the mystic's have mystical
union the same process of perception comes into play in that experience
also. Which is why I spent so much of my time understanding perception! All
this internal process is only important so that we can build our maps of the
external and thus come to interact in the external. We do end up
'seeing'/perceivng a bird landing on a tree. That common sense feeling is
the result of all that sophisticated mind/brain-body processing. We can and
do say volumes about describing what we perceive! We all feel compelled to
tell people about our perceptions, which is why the Mystics after having the
union with the Divine, for the most part end up telling and writing others
about what they had experienced. All the 'in our mind' stuff is the tools
used to build up what we beleive we see in the external world.
I do hold the seemingly radical notion that properties of things, those
external stable patterns of DQ. These properties/characteristics are
inherent in the structure of those stable patterns. They have a range of
probabilites but that is a range not a 100% random collection of probalbe
properties. Hence there is agreement about the external world. prompted by
all that reading from the web site I have a working hypothesis that can
handle the whole quantuum mechanics issues of reality is not suppose to be
independent of the obeserver!! [Yes, I do occasionaly seem to suffer from
'delusion's of granduer!!]
> 3. Or do you maintain, like Ryle and Dennett, that "mind" is not really
> real, just a word we use to group together a set of patterns that are
> really just external events happening in our brain. If so, how do you
> explain the feeling that you seem to exist as something that is NOT
> external?
>
GARY'S RESPONSE: I beleive, as do Harth, Ornstein and Pinker, that Dennett
[and I think they would, or have written, said that about Ryle also.]
doesn't get it right. The mind starts with stable patterns of DQ
manifesting in inorganic and organic patterns. But this is only the tools
that eventually out of which the mind arises. Ala Wilber, all things have
internal-external characteristics. Internal stuff for us is the lower
levels of mental processing which is built off of the external neural/brain
stuff/processing. We can not be reduced to only external neural/brain
processing! Dennett doesn't understand it all.
> In other words, how do you avoid the platypi that the SOM engenders?
>
> Now I should confess that I don't think the MOQ as delineated in LILA
> has completely eliminated the mind/matter platypus (but since it is
> primarily an inquiry into morals, that is excusable). However, I would
> agree that the DQ/sq split is a step in the right direction, while
> resurrecting the subject/object split as a metaphysical founding
> principle is a mistake.
>
> - Scott
GARY'S RESPONSE: I avoid the platypi by being all inclusive. To use
McFarlane's and Wilbers favorite word: Integral! I use Pirsig, and so many
others to get me out of the platypi. I beleive in Quality/Tao as the
guiding structure and reason for structure in the universe/ in reality. I
beleive that Quality's sturcture is found in recognizing the idea of the
Holon and Holarchies. All Holon's having Internal-External,
Individual-Collective, Dynamic-Static characteristics! Thus I am in MOQ
land and dissolve the substane -- non-subtance aka mind/matter divide of the
S/O problem.
But, because I am focusing on building a map/ metaphysics of the nature of
Human Reality I do end up acknowledging the map/territory, word/thing divide
as foundational to understanding how Human's come to understand reality.
All this talk of holons, brain processes, psychology of perception, etc gets
us to understanding how it is we come to experience and map out realtiy.
I been trying to get an agreement as to foundational issues such as how we
come to know anything before we go off into talking about what the mystics
tells us about their maps of reality. It all comes back to understanding
how we bias ourselves, how people shape, and are shaped by, ideas. Or to
put my phrase into MOQ terms: how Q-Intellect shapes, and is shaped by,
Q-Social.
I am going to stop here. And then post again directly talking about our
mystic friends and what is going on with them. I will even reference
Merrell-Wolff, so don't touch that dial, you won't want to miss the program
that is coming up next on Gary's Learning Channel. [Hmm... I have this
paranoia, (one of many!) that my displays of humor will be misunderstood. Oh
well, Jewish guilt keeps me from completely getting rid of my paranoia and
feelings of granduer, I just HAVE TO HELP my shrink make her mortage
payments on that yacht and mansion of her's!!!! Not to mention all the
jewels she needs to wear!!!]
Ever paranoid, but still working my butt off towards bring clairity,
Gary
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