Platt, Rog, Jonathan, Jeremy, David, Bard, Andrea,
Forgive the new thread - but I think that one subject heading says it all -
and this way I can address all the various good challenges to my multiform
tendentious meanderings in one cheekly little directionally challenged post.
Which method I just happen to prefer. Today.
A pre-script:
Platt, are you planning to get round to those points I made about the
comparisions of awarenesses on the DQ v. SQ level? The DQ being
incomparable and the SQ being unattributable to atoms?
Did you forget the whole thing/find it all too boring/prefer the old battle
with Roger/secretly acknowledge that atomic awareness makes no sense?
Alternatively.... you are quite confident that I am wrong, yet cannot be
bothered to tell me why (thus expressing precious little concern for the
fate of my imortal soul...). Would you like to fill me in on which if these
is the case? Thanks.
Ok, now, on to Andrea. Sorry for detecting that non-existent irony. Sorry.
Again. I sympathise as well - people sometimes make the same mistake about
me.
Bard. About those ancient traditions. The greeks were a diverse and
inventive bunch, so practically any tradition you can think of is an ancient
one. The precise forbear of the theory you just expounded is Anaxagoras:
the theory of intermixture. This can be expressed as that a minute part of
butter is honey, and that a minute part of honey is butter. OK. But what's
the attraction? What's the quality in such a view? How does it help me
prepare a tasty breakfast?
Another thing about Anaxagoras: he said that everything is [mixed up]
together, *except* for mind [nous]. I would guess that if you go and ferret
his reasons for thinking that mind is different, you may be interested and
surprised.
Oh - and on the
hamlet-and-laurence-olivier-as-distinct-awarenesses-in-the-same-skin-togethe
r-is-ok-because-of-quantum-mechanics-argument: "really?". You *really*
think that Quantum Mechanics requires one to project the behaviour of quarks
onto both consciousnesses and medium scale molecular structures such as
human bodies?
David. If you think it's unproven that intellects create objects then
that's probably something I should work on. I have been making the relevant
points over the last few millenia....
I can run the gist of it by you one more time. It is: that "object" is a
term in grammar, that fundamental reality is continuous value and thus
un-object-like, and that language needs a language user to use it before
there is such a grammatical entity as an object. Sounds a bit like RMP?
The critique of the Subject-Object Metaphysics? No?
As to whether the intellect can create more than one object at a time - I
accept your point entirely. I will now rephrase my claim on the metaphor
thread to read: "some object*s* must have been in the first *set* of
objects, and for that set there would have been no prexisting objects for
this first set to be described in terms of (ie metaphorically).....
Therefore: discreteness (which is applied to the members of this first
*set*) is not metaphorical.
That OK?
Jeremy....
JEREMY WROTE:
Hi Elephant,
In refute of,
> Parrallel nonsense questions pile in when you start with the "atoms prefer"
> business. It is *as if* atoms prefer, because atomic scientists are
> proficient at their craft, in just the same way that Shakespeare is
> proficient at his. And don't you forget whose craft we are talking about
> here - because it sure as hell isn't the atoms. When was the last time an
> atom told you how to calibrate an quark detector?
If scientists were proficient in the same way shakespeare was wouldn't they
have produced a consistent role for them to play? Would'nt they know which
scene he was playing, and when? and with whom? Would'nt this have made
things much simpler for science?
Don't different actors impart different qualities to the role? Or how could
we say one was better than another?
My point; actors make choices independently of the script writer. And at
this point I'm inclined to think atoms do too. I'll sleep on it though.
ELEPHANT:
You had just got started with answering your own question. When Shakespeare
starts to create Hamlet, something true is expressed by the claim that at
some point the character "takes on a life of his own". It is as if the
charcter were making choices of his own. In reality, of course, there is
only the writer and his imaginings. But if his imagiation has real love and
dedication in them, selfless love, the result is something more than mere
fantasy. No mere personal wim is being indulged here, but a love of
something other than the self: truth - and the result is an imitation of the
truth: a portrait of the real word in five acts (or three stanzas, or
whatever). This "life of his own" that Hamlet has, this is the independance
and *otherness* of truth and the Good - something which we work towards in
strife, and which is distant from us, which we (and supremely a playwright
or author) can only move towards by abandoning his *self*, transcending his
subject. Pure attention. Hamlet the play would be fantasy, simply,
self-indulgent wish-fulfilment of the TV movie variety, but for the
remarkable absence of Shakespeare the subject. Hamlet is not about
Shakespeare in the way that a TV movie is simply about the wishes of the TV
audience.
When you allege that things would be "much simpler" for science if the
objects of scientific study were created by the scientific imagination, you
are confusing imagination with fantasy.
Alot of imagination should *rightly* be classed as fantasy, because it is
directed purely by wish fulfillment. But not all. The imagination that is
at work in good science is just the same imagination that is at work in good
art: and that is not about wish-fulfillment, but about devotion to the good
and the true. In it's best form, the cult of "objectivity" which becomes so
malformed in the SOM, is also a kind of spiritual discipline - an insistence
on removing self from the work of the imagination. That isn't a removal of
value, but a recentering of value. Imagination + Self = Fantasy. So take
away the fantasy and the self - don't take away the imagination.
The need for scientists to take observations in this situation should be
obvious: to check for fantasy. This isn't a matter of accessing some
ready-made objects in the wold and checking for correspondance - because
there are no such things: reality is the continuum. What it is a matter of
is checking that their creation functions - that Hamlet tells us something
useful and worthwhile that we can act on in our pursuit of quality.
Jonathan.
JONATHAN WROTE:
Roger, I have "known" you long enough in
this forum to recognise and appreciate your stance. Similarly, I think
you have a fair appreciation of my own position. As a result, our
various arguments are often quite productive. Unfortunately, I do not
get the feeling that Elephant KNOWS us in the same way, and it often
seems that he is merly interested in scoring cheap points - a pity
really, because he sometime has something valuable to contribute.
ELEPHANT:
Cheap? They cost me dear, atleast. But we can agree, from opposite
perspectives, that one measure of the worth of these points would the number
of occasions on which their targets fail, or refuse, to answer them, and
chose some other reaction to them instead. To call them "cheap" is itself a
case in point.
I am perhaps too much of a brujo in your vilage to make a valuable
contribution there more than sometimes - but even sometimes pleases me. I
don't forsee myself managing to rewrite your dictionaries, but I do
nevertheless hope to draw your attention to Pirsig the Mystic and Pirsig the
reader of Plato and Pirsig the Buddhist - important aspects of RMP's thought
which some contributors, however thorough and well practised their mastery
of MOQ in other respects, dangerously overlook.
In the context of Platt's atomic awareness notions I think Roger has a
similar general intent - though we are not without our differences either.
bye all,
p.e.
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