[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[David Thomas]

Hi Matt,
> 
> Hi Dave,
> 
> Dave said:
> For me that makes the problem even more difficult.
> Biological evolution by natural selection at least has  a
> well defined theory with dedicated scientists/philosophers
> working on it. Evolution, unfolding, at the physical, social,
> and intellectual levels really don't have any evolutionary
> theories per se let alone people exploring them from that
> POV.
> 
> Matt:
> For me to rightly assess the level of difficulty you perceive
> in these kinds of exploration, I think it would turn on
> what you perceive as a good "theory."
"Good" theory was not the best of choices which goes to my fluidity of
thought in the written format. I, unlike you I guess, write very slowly and
poorly. For example Bo's response to my previous post to him arrive at
10:18 this morning. From then until 2:48 I pretty much worked full time on
it. Even though I had in my mind some of the directions pre-organized.
'Integrating" might have been a better word. The problem with philosophy is
that it is just so many words that unless they are integrated usefully into
your life and actions they are a waste of time.
> 
> To my mind, a general framework for perceiving cultural
> evolution is supplied well by Richard Rorty when he
> analogizes cultures to what Wittgenstein meant by
> lebensform (forms of life), and says that, just like in
> Darwinian biological evolution, forms of life kill each other
> off as the outlive their ability to survive.  I don't see the
> problem in having a big view like that, and then taking
> the individual disciplines as marking out different little
> pieces in the big picture.

Perfect example. Take the biological truism, "Eat or you die."
And how many ever dense essays or books later Rorty concludes that, cultures
([social] forms of life) kill each other off [often literally] as they
outlive their ability to survive." First I'm not sure I agree with that and
second how usefully is it. The bad form of pragmatism might suggest once you
know this as a culture you immediately go on offense to literally kill all
other cultures before they kill you. Mussolini's perversion of pragmatism is
part of what killed it.
> 
> For instance, why did the epic, as a literary genre, die?  A
> short answer would be that the epic was a form of
> narrative that grew in response to humans needing a
> manner in which to store knowledge.  In oral cultures,
> since nothing could be written down, knowledge was
> _literally_ what you could remember, and so we can
> explain the epic's use of narrative, epithetic formula,
> heroes, gods, and archetypal thematics as instruments
> for "storing" knowledge (with its increased ease of recall).
> The epic began to die when writing came on the scene
> and written prose took on it's cultural storage function.
> With that gone, poets began to experiment and found the
> epic boring, and moved beyond it.  Nobody goes back to it
> partly because of not needing its noetic function, partly
> because poetry and literature generally became rooted in
> the search for technical novelty (also rooted in the
> creation of writing), but partly because of other cultural
> transformations that began afterwards, like our changing
> sense of what a "god" is.  That's why Milton wrote the last
> epic.  The epic couldn't survive in our cultural climate now
> that we have other ways of storing knowledge, and other
> attendant beliefs about what poets should be doing.
> 
> That's just a small story about one little blip on the
> cultural screen, and it uses a lot of different kinds of
> resources from different disciplines (anthropology, literary
> history, archaeology, media studies).  For my money, we'll
> just get better at integrating little stories like this, and we
> need no bigger theory to house them than Rorty's
> extrapolation of the Darwinian theory of natural selection
> to human artifacts (both physical and cultural).
> 
> Do you see a different kind a problem at the level of
> theory, or are you just thinking of this kind of current
> stratification of disciplines?  (What you said later
> suggests the latter to me.)
Integrating the however many billion individual POVs we currently have,
grouped however they are, and making any individual or collective sense of
what to do and then doing it effectively on any issue seems to me beyond the
pale of any metaphysics or philosophy. But the MoQ may help.

Bo has long hated Pirsig's SODV diagram which he designated the upper two
levels as "mind" and therefore synonymous with subject and subjective.
I now think this is good thing as long as EVERYBODY understood that. The
subjective choices that we make individually and as groups has real positive
and negative consequences on others and biological and physical world
holding them all up. Kinda like, I think, could end up making you or I not
be.

Whew, enough for today. I'm turning this sucker off!

Nite,nite.........
Dave