From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Sat Oct 22 2005 - 07:10:49 BST
Ian,
Ian said:
I'm not sure our disagreement is as deep as you suggest ...
You said
... once intellect sees itself as cybernetic, it is free to be
non-cybernetic. And that is the case with any description, or
limitation. Once one has identified a limit, it is no longer a limit.
Another way of saying that (dynamic) intellect is DQ.
I realise that final assertion is your main complaint about intellect
in MoQ - the reason you see it as "wrong", whereas I see it as "almost
right".
That said, there is a lot in that paragraph I sympathise with - a
limit once "defined" is not longer a limit - Rings true.
Scott:
No, I didn't think we'd disagree much here. It was in the next paragraph,
where you said "I suspect it's the replicating / feeding-back / evolutionary
aspect that causes "meaning" to emerge in higher layers - so there is
information in rocks, but no meaning in isolation." that I find clear
disagreement. As I see it, meaning doesn't emerge in higher layers. It just
becomes more obvious to us deluded creatures. Meaning (aka value) is where
it all starts.
Ian said:
The Peircian vs Dualist stuff is intriguing - but I'm short of time
here - the point that jumps out at me is the "interpretant" in the
tryad. You are saying - therefore "intelligence" in all levels - is
that right ? I don't buy that but I'd like to understand your idea(s).
Scott:
I (and Peirce) am saying -- therefore semiosis in all levels, and where
there is semiosis there is intellect (and consciousness and value, of
course). We tend to think of an interpretant as a human mind, but what
Peirce meant by that is more subtle. It is the relating of the
'representamen' (e.g., the physical word) to its referent, the experiencing
of the representamen *as* a sign. So now if we conflate the two uses of
meaning.....
Ian said:
I have no problem conflating those two uses of meaning - they are the
same in my book too - but only where information meets and
interpretant - so we're back to where that intelligence exists.
Scott continues:
....and with the MOQ equating 'experience' with 'perceiving value', which is
thanks to the conflation the same as 'perceiving meaning', then as I see it,
the MOQ is saying that all experience is triadic, is semiotic. Now bring in
Barfield, who gives the argumentation that in pre-fourth level cultures
(original participation), all perception was meaningful in this triadic
sense. That is, what we call nature did not appear to them as dyadic (as
just a bunch of physical cause and effect), but instead appeared to them as
spiritual expression (they *felt* the gods in nature -- they didn't just
make them up). Gradually, thanks to the rise of alpha-thinking (S/O
thinking), that way of perceiving died out, so by the time of Newton people
learned to believe that nature was just dyadic, since that is in fact how it
appears to us now. With materialism, the dyadic was assumed to be all there
really is, and so one had to come up with "emergence" as an explanation for
the triadic. But Peirce argues that emergence doesn't work, since you can't
get to the triadic from the dyadic. And with Pirsig saying that value is all
there really is -- if one accepts it and draws out the consequences -- then
emergence is simply no longer needed to explain meaning at the higher
levels, since meaning is at all levels.
So in a way, I also see the MOQ as "almost right". But as I see it what
keeps it from being all right is that it thinks about intellect and language
(semiosis) in the same way that materialism does (as emergent), and Peirce
and Barfield give us the reasons for why that is a bad thing to do.
You differentiate "where information meets an interpretant" from, I assume,
information not meeting an interpretant. I say that if there is value in the
meeting, then there has to be an interpretant -- or at least an interpreting
(one doesn't want to assume that there is necessarily a 'self' involved).
Or, as I've put it before, information + value = semiosis.
- Scott
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