[MD] Pantheism as Seen by the MOQ

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[John]
I'm not a big fan of emergence theories as explanatory of "why" we are here.
That's for sure.  But I do remember chiming in that I greatly valued your "aha".

[Arlo]
To risk painting broadly, "Oops/AHA!" pretty much summarizes the emergentist
paradigm. Yes, I do recall the last time we bantered about this you remarked
positively on the AHA! summarization. In fact, if I had to distill the MOQ to
one word, it'd be "AHA!". 

But if you did expect emergence theories to present a "why" rooted in the
coercive, interventitionist puppeteering of a an external hand then you'll be
left wanting. What fascinates me is that the very foundations of unexpected
consequences is the heart of freedom. If you, like Platt, try to excise this
from the mix, you end of castrating the very aspects of Dynamic Quality that
are then, ironically, championed elsewhere.

[John]
But on the surface, it doesn't attract me to trying to dig into it on my own. 
It seems to me an attempt to explain the unexplainable by virtue of randomness.
 Even if it's true, I'm not attracted to the idea.

[Arlo]
I think if you saw that "randomness" or "chaos" as being the necessary ground
for "freedom", that the "beginning response to Quality" is not determined,
programmed, coerced, manipulated, machined, orchestrated nor planned, you might
be more attracted to what emergence does say.

[John]
Well I don't know what the true definition of anything is, but I know what I
like.  And  I do like your formulation of Pantheism better than Platt's.
Especially with Wiki support.

[Arlo]
More than just Wikidpedia. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "...
certain religions are better understood as pantheistic rather than theistic
when their doctrines are examined. Philosophical Taoism is the most
pantheistic, but Advaita Vedanta, certain forms of Buddhism and some mystical
strands in monotheistic traditions are also pantheistic..."

[John]
Honestly, I thought Platt's post pertained more to pushing the Pirsig
philosophy upon the populist pantheism promulgated in Avatar, and evidently I
read him all wrong in that.

[Arlo]
Platt saw an opportunity to beat his Wurlizter, but in his zeal completely
ended up supporting what he was opposing. 

I don't know what you mean by "populist pantheism", the "science" of Avatar
suggested a world where all living things were linked in some form on neural
network. In this case, you might refer to it as "biological pantheism", since
its base is an actual network of neural cells, rather than a "spiritual
pantheism" found in many Amerindian cultures. But this is like arguing that the
Lord of the Rings is a horrible story because no one ever found any proof that
Hobbits existed.

[John]
Worth more than a mere "considering" imo, more like worth a whole dang
conclusion. Doesn't the MoQ refer to Nature as the source of Value?  I seem to
recall that in the Coppleston paper.

[Arlo]
Do you mean this?

"Is man merely a child of Nature? Yes. Quality is nature. Or is there in him a
spiritual principle which makes knowledge possible, whether it be knowledge of
Nature or moral knowledge?  The MOQ says there is no spiritual principle in man
that makes knowledge possible.  Nature does the whole job." (Coppleston
annotations)

[John]
And even if it doesn't, this Deep Ecology afficianado sure does.

[Arlo]
I'm with you on this one.