1. CONSCIOUSNESS
2. QUANTUM PHYSICS AND EMPIRICISM
3. LOGOS AND ARGUMENT
Hi Robert, Magnus, Maggie, Mary David and all,
Robert's post was interesting, but not nearly as interesting or
revealing as some of the responses. What struck me hardest were some
very brief statements:
MAGNUS (to Robert)
> Do you think a one-cell amoebae is conscious or doesn't its movements
seem
> arbitrary from a physics viewpoint?
I've probably written more about conscious vs. unconscious than anyone
else, especially recently. Neither amoebae nor supercomputers need the
distinction in order to do the things they do, however sophisticated
that might be.
Consciousness is something perculiarly human and somehow very closely
meshed with the whole Subject-Object division, with the implication that
"objectification" involves bringing things entirely into the realm of
the conscious.
To make my point, how can one properly distinguish between sense,
awareness and consciousness? Anyone care to supply some definitions?
I recall that these terms featured prominently in Maggie's "Levels"
table. Are you still with us Maggie?
PLATT
>Robert ignores quantum physics when he claims, "There is a
>structure to reality apart from experience." The assumption that
>reality exists independent of observation has been proven wrong.
That's not quite it Platt. The philosophy behind quantum physics is that
"non-experienced reality" is irrelevant. It's an axiom of strict
empiricism i.e. the only things that count are the things that are
counted. The same philosophy lies behind Karl Popper's requirement that
a meaningful hypothesis must be falsifiable.
One more statement that caught my eye was this from MARY (to David):
>In an English class one time we discussed 3 different ways of forming
an
>argument. Logos is an appeal to logic, ethos an appeal to ethics or
values,
>and pathos is an emotional appeal, such as Nixon's Checkers speech. We
learned
>that an appeal to logic is the only one of the 3 that doesn't have some
>manipulative element to it.
That last sentence seems to be the most anti-MoQ statement I've read in
the discussion in a long time. I assume that Mary realized that for
herself. The clever and ruthless manipulation of logic is (IMHO) the
cruelest rhetorical trick of all, especially when there are teachers out
there teaching the unsuspecting that it can't be done!
Thanks Mary for bringing it up.
Jonathan
MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:07 BST