hi. i'm new here. normally i would lurk much longer (and
better) before replying to such a deep group; but, david
buchanan brought up a point to which i think i should
comment in the hope of adding two things. one a specific
response to his point and two a general comment as to a
possible parallel effort to this MOQ stuff. (i hope i get
the response style correct: you guys need a style
manual.<g>)
______________________________________
David Buchanan:
[...]
> The neurosciences are inherently reductionist. I can't believe that even
> a perfectly valid scientific experiment on the brain could ever make
> claims about the nature of human consciousness. Chemistry could never
> explain shakephere or the blues. Besides the brain/mind split is classic
> SO thinking. Its the old mind/body problem.It becomes an impossible
> situation when the subject is also and object. I think it's at the heart
> of what Pirsig was trying to overcome in his quest for Quality. His
> copernican revolution in consciousness was meant to overthrow this exact
> problem.
[...]
> The brain is the king of organs and my personal favorite. It seems to
> run things, and that is a big part of the confusion. Again - the
> biological level is confused with the intellectual level when brains are
> confused with minds. The mind and the intellect are dependant on the
> brain, and have grown out of the organ to reach a new level of Quality.
> Within every brain are areas more primitive and wild. Remnants of former
> brains lie beneath as building blocks of our present state. One could
> even say there are levels of quality within the organ itself and levels
> of quality in the mind that grows out of it. Who wanted to talk about
> complexity? Nature seems to be inclined to produce our kind of
> consciousness. DQ is the underlying evolutionary force and it created
> our brains and minds. The MOQ is very flattering to human consciousness.
[...]
__________________________________________
Bryan writes: (i think Bryan is a unique identifier here;
if not since "horse" is already taken, i could be "ass".
probably an old joke, sorry.)
Point 1) i'll agree that neuroscience as practiced today is
overwhelmingly reductionist, but not wholly (sorry re. pun).
you can find good work going on, both theoretical and
experimental, using holistic/system approaches. good
starting points for the literature would be both dennet's
and penrose's "new" books dealing with neuroscience or
waldrop's, bak's, and lewin's books on complexity science. i
would say in my definitely nonauthoritarian opinion that
neuroscience is tied with population dynamics as the two
areas of biology in which holistic approaches have been most
accepted in the "mainstream" work. (and no i don't work in
either field.)
Point 2) i searched the moq archive for "complexity science"
and "santa fe". (i also searched for "NECSI", but the engine
seems to choke.) i am surprised at the lack of hits. in my
mind, numerous parallels exist between the MOQ enquiries
represented here and complexity science. both think:
- reductionistic science needs to be supplemented with a
dose of holistic data and theory.
- there is an interesting split of reality into inorganic,
biological, social and intellectual groups. Yaneer
Bar-Yam has written a good textbook on complexity and my
copy is sprinkled with "see Pirsig" comments.
- the more interesting aspects are the interfaces between
these four categories.
- dynamic non-equilibrium is what's happening.
- emergence of new phenomena occurs in interactions (thus
the reductionism disdain).
so you see, i think there are some great ideas from
complexity science that may be worthwhile mulling around in
this forum. sorry if i'm preaching to the choir and i just
wasn't thorough enough in my archive search.
toodles, back to lurk mode.
homepage - http://www.moq.org
queries - mailto:moq@moq.org
unsubscribe - mailto:majordomo@moq.org with UNSUBSCRIBE MOQ_DISCUSS in
body of email
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:44 BST