MD,
with Roger's great gladness, I ruled the term "autonomous" out. Let me
just say that I did it not just for the blame of anthropomorphism,
rather for the eventual contradiction with complemetarity .. and with
the moq's tenet that the nature of "things" can't be independent of the
environment .....
Once ruled the term out for atoms, I'd say that we should rule it out
even for humans and giants and everything else. Anyway, I was just
trying to say that the law we create are not able to force patterns of
value to a certain behavior, so there's a sort of relative autonomy: the
soldier of my tale, when alone, can be autonomous from the laws of the
tribe... but of course can't be autonomous from the environment (the
incoming enemy, the tribe..): he is what he is (a soldier) exactly
because there's an enemy, and a tribe to defend, isn't it? Not
diversely, the particle is a particle because there's a space/time
universe full of particles AND there's a scientist who tries to tell it
what to do.... So, probably it's wrong to say it's autonomous, but we
are back to the problem of the term. We can call both the particle and
the soldier "value seeker", "aware", "prehensible" or whatever else,
but IMO there's a continuity through the levels. And this is the point.
The CONs will say it's anthropomorphism. I think it's hard to avoid it
from a MOQ viewpoint, as the MOQ assumes we are made of the same
"substance", VALUE, as well as every "thing". (That "we" is not merely
our body, of course, but, more important, all our behaviors, ideas and
so on... )
If I look a little back:
PLATT
My guess is that such sentences are too metaphorically strong for your
liking and thus present a false picture. Instead of “awareness” would
you accept Whitehead’s much less provocative word “prehension” to
describe a particle’s response to an observation or an atom’s
sensitivity to its environment?
ROG
Sure. No problem.
.... well, let me say that even "prehension" sounds to me
anthropomorphism, or at least, animism. Or not?
In order to surpass the trap we are blocked within, I tried a lateral
drift to the etymology of "aware". It seemed not very useful, as it
leaded me to the infamous autonomy... but then there's another message
from JoVo the lurker, who has suggested me a paper he has found
following my reasoning. It's a paper about the evolution of awareness,
and I suggest everyone to read it: it can be useful.
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/EAC.html
The title of the paper is: Experience, awareness and consciousness:
suggestions for definitions as offered by an evolutionary approach. (by
Mario Vaneechoutte)
The thesis is that there's a continuity from simple inorganic experience
of molecules and enzymes up to awareness (animals) and consciousness
(humans). This seems to be the same as Roger's thesis: the author holds
awareness as an evolved form of experience, and consciousness as a more
evolved form of awareness. But also, this seems to be more a problem of
terminology: we can call those kind of experiences as we want, but the
similarities are more than the differences, and actually the term
"experience" at the inorganic level must go along with "motivation",
"capacity to recognize ", "interpretation", "mood" and so on.... so that
the author must offer this sentence about the possible blame of
anthropomorphism:
«6. The use of concepts like experience and motivation (and many more)
to describe processes going on at the simplest (organic) chemistry level
may seem anthropomorphic. Still, I would like to remind that considering
the use of these concepts for describing processes of limited complexity
as being an anthropomorphically biased approach can itself be regarded
as anthropocentric reasoning.»
Well said!
Another point I'd like to point out is about the end of the paper:
«80. I have tried to argue how evolutionary, dynamic reductionism may
enable us to some degree to distinguish between experience, awareness
and consciousness. I conclude for myself that there are no philosophical
problems about awareness and consciousness. Mechanistically, aware and
conscious activity can indeed be considered as explained (Dennett 1991).
However, I think that explaining how these experiences feel like and why
it should feel like something, is not within the realm of our methods of
understanding. To me this comes as no surprise, since I CONSIDER OUR
LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURE OF EXPERIENCE AS A CONSEQUENCE OF
THE EVOLUTIONARY LIMITATIONS OF OUR INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL MINDS, DEVELOPED
TO THINK IN TERMS OF CAUSE AND CONSEQUENCE. We should adopt some modesty
in these matters. After all, also our basic laws are merely descriptive:
they enable prediction, but they DO NOT EXPLAIN WHY THINGS ARE THE WAY
THEY ARE. The physical laws which science has revealed, give us a false
impression of basic understanding, while these laws only reflect some
generalities, without explaining why these generalities are the way they
are. We can describe under what conditions two molecules will interact
and predict to which new molecule this will lead. WE DESCRIBE HOW IT
HAPPENS, BUT WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY THIS HAPPENS.»
(my emphasis)
I have the temptation to write him: "BECAUSE IT'S BETTER!".
The whole paper lacks of the philosophical analysis of the why (at
least , he recognizes it). This changes a lot the matter. He has found a
good way to describe the continuity of experience, but without a basic
concept of VALUE. It makes me think, and I try another lateral drift.
The point is that it is possible to talk about awareness avoiding value.
But, is it possible to talk about value avoiding awareness? In ZMM,
Pirsig writes:
«His answer was an old one belonging to a philosophic school that called
itself realism."A thing exists,'' he said, "if a world without it can't
function normally. If we can show that a world without Quality functions
abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it's defined
or not.'' He thereupon proceeded to subtract Quality from a description
of the world as we know it. »
And... do the MOQ work normally without awareness? Well, could be. In
my first posts I wrote
«Do we really need the "awareness" concept?»
and
«"And what is good, Phædrus, And what is not good... Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things? "
This is, IMO, the Q-awareness.»
Leaving aside the infamous "Q- ", I was pointing to the possible
conclusion that probably we should avoid the term at all. Or we should
enlarge it to something wider than the common usage.
I could be wrong, but, after all, awareness seems to concern more with
the static than the dynamic. If I'm aware, it's because I've already
experienced, and I've got:
a) a memory of the experience
b) a skill to evaluate the memory of the experience
c) a skill to decide depending on the evaluated memory of the
experience.
But do we need this c) skill to decide for BETTER?
"If you had asked the brujo what ethical principles he was following he
probably wouldn't be able to tell you. He wouldn't have understood what
you were talking about. He was just following some vague sense of
"betterness", that he couldn't have defined if he had wanted to".
(LILA chapter 9)
Indeed, not very aware of the situation.... And another example: if you
ever have played tennis, you will recognize that the first thing to do
is to keep yourself "unaware", or simply you will not play.
It seems to me that an immediate seeking for DQ can't be aware, if we
use awareness in the classic meaning Roger has offered more than one
time: "cognizant, conscious, sensible, alive, awake, and having
knowledge of something". This is what Roger the CON has always tried
to say. But we PROs were probably pointing to something more wide,
where possibly awareness is related to the "motivation", "capacity to
recognize ", "interpretation", "mood" we have to ascribe to atoms as
well as to humans.
So what is my conclusion? Let's try this. There is DQ, and there are
four levels of static quality. "Things" experience DQ according to
those four levels of static quality. And evaluate the experience
according to four possible levels. There's a continuity, VALUE, and a
discontinuity, the kind of EVALUATION. The more we go back to the basic
levels, the more the evaluation is immediate (that is: non-mediated), as
memory is more weak at those levels. The more we go up to the above
levels, the more the evaluation can be mediated by memory. In all cases,
static memory could be a problem as seeking for DQ and freedom does not
require it.
That's all: IMO the MOQ can work even without awareness.
thanks for your attention.
Marco.
p.s.
HI BO! Very happy to see you back! I think we reach similar conclusions,
and it makes me doubly glad. The draft of this message was written
before and independently by yours... but not independently by you, I
guess. Of course, the analysis about Intellect is different.... but we
were talking about atoms, after all!
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