Jonathan B. Marder (marder@agri.hugi.ac.il)
Mon, 25 May 1998 08:58:38 +0100
-----Original Message-----
From: Fintan Dunne <findunne@iol.ie>
To: Multiple recipients of <lilasqd@mail.hkg.com>
Date: 23 May 1998 06:43
Subject: LS Re: Explain the Subject/Object Metaphysics
[heavily edited for brevity]
>
>OK, so I was going to talk about the primal consciousness- before
>language had developed. And I thought....suppose you plonked a classy
>impressionist painting in front of a group of apemen......and they
ignored it!
>Would the painting have Quality or not- regardless of the fact that if
Quality
>is WHAT YOU LIKE...then they obviously didn't like it!
Fintan's point is very much the point I was trying to make when I
suggested that
the word MEANING might make a good alternative to the word Quality.
The painting has to mean something to get noticed i.e. to evoke a
response.
The apemen aren't tuned to the right frequency, don't speak the right
language - pick your metaphor.
>Then I got an even better idea. Remember that monkey who could type for
>a trillion years and eventually produce Hamlet? Suppose he really knows
>what he is typing.....All around him other monkeys are cavorting in
blissfull
>ignorance of this great play, chewing up pages for snacks. Does that
affect
>the Quality. Is there an objective Quality in existence AT THAT TIME,
or is
>the Quality judgement only possible much later in the evolution of
earth.
The quality judgement can only occur when an "intelligent" observer
comes along.
Quality has to involve recognition of meaning. Otherwise it's like
talking about the proverbial tree falling in the forest. Pirsig's MoQ
has pointed out that there isn't a single observer or evaluation system.
It is evaluated by individuals, society and "the intellect" etc.
Another example - at what stage was the evolutionary "fitness" of Homo
sapiens evaluated? A million years ago when a tiny fragile population of
us existed? How about a few tens of thousands ago when language started
to develop so that we could better organize mutually supportive groups?
Or what about stages when learned to control fire, make tools, smelt
metal etc.? Perhaps it was the ability to control the food supply via
agriculture that did it? Or maybe it was the day the U.N. was set up, or
the day of the first environmental conference? The point is that
evolutionary selection is ongoing like any quality evaluation system.
Similarly, I have read and re-read Pirsig's books, keep thinking about
them, and am now discussing them in this forum. The evaluation/quality
process keeps going.
[snip]
>So, I vote that we refer to advocates of S-O henceforth
>as ....MONKEYS....or......SOMonkeys.
>Because, history shows us that if you are surrounded by the
unenlightened,
>it helps your psychological state a great deal, if you lampoon and
laugh at them!
I'd rather maintain some healthy respect - quite possibly we might nuke
ourselves before the SOMonkeys do. Besides, I suspect that Pirsig has
attacked the worst apects of SOM while quietly cannibalizing its good
parts for MoQ.
>Now, where the **** was I? Oh yeah....primal consciousness.
>There is undoubtedly an AT-ONE-NESS in the primal human mind that is
akin to
>the animal consciousness we can observe in the dog, or ape. Yes, there
is an
>awareness of self, but it is balanced by an intergation with the
environment that
>blurs the line between ME and NOT ME.
[snip]
>The thing that is going to play the key role in [this] transition....is
language.
>
>But, language is going to make a big mess of that At-One-Ness. It is
going to chop
>up that integrated Garden of Eden environment into the 125,000 words
we use in
>our languages today.
[snip]
Evaluation is a way of summarizing and compressing data. Language is a
great example.
Just by saying TREE, I can summarize a huge amount of information. You,
as fellow English speakers understand that I am speaking about a growing
biological structure with green leaves, cellulose/lignin trunk and
branches, roots in the ground - and with some biological training you
might know all about photosynthesis, flowering, genetics ... Another
example - the word HAMLET. Those six letters are an abbreviation for a
whole book, which in turn represents a performance of a couple of hours
by actors with their movements, facial expressions and intonation. So is
reading the six letters the same as watching the play? Of course not.
The intelligent reader can do considerable reconstruction, but the
"compression algorithm" causes most of the experience of watching the
play to be lost.
In an earlier post, I suggested that Dynamic Quality is what causes
an event to be noticed and registered as information or data. The
ongoing evaluation process is what distils, compresses and summarizes
the information to conform to patterns understood by "intelligent"
observers i.e. turns information into meaning. Our perception of reality
is not an awareness of raw information, but based on our patterns which
summarize that information. This takes us right back to a variant of SOM
where the OBJECT is the world of events (possible information) and the
SUBJECTs are the pattern matching algorithms, or intelligent
consciousness that evaluate and summarize.
I apologise that this is a bit rambling - a bit more compression might
have made the meaning/quality clearer, but I got lazy ...
Jonathan B. Marder <MARDER@agri.huji.ac.il>
Department of Agricultural Botany, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Faculty of Agriculture, P.O.Box 12, Rehovot 76100, ISRAEL
Phone: +972 8 9481918 Fax: +972 8 9467763
Web page: http://www.agri.huji.ac.il/~marder
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu May 13 1999 - 16:43:15 CEST