[MD] The Greeks?

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Krimel,

Krimel said:
Right, I think that, woke up one morning with a bi-cameral 
mind, stuff comes from Jaynes. It's been a while but I don't 
think his evidence was anything but suggestive and he was 
long on what and short on how.

Matt:
It's interesting how Dennett comes to Jaynes' defense on 
pointing our noses in the right direction (in Brainchildren)--he 
says Jaynes' facts about biological evolution have largely 
proven out to be wrong, but the project is right: essentially 
looking at software stuff for changes in consciousness, our 
mind.

Equally interesting is that Walter Ong, the best theorist on 
orality/literacy, independantly of Dennett says that Janyes 
didn't need to posit biological changes to explain the 
evidence he'd dug up about Greek culture and their mind: 
all he needed to do was, like Eric Havelock, talk about 
the shift from a purely oral culture to the incorporation of 
literacy.

Krimel said:
Interesting I tend to see philosophical worldview obeying 
some kind of Laffer curve with the intellectual trickle down 
taking decades to drip through.

Matt:
Sure, which just punches up how _not_ coherent and 
integrated a daily, common sense Weltanschauung, with 
all sorts of drips into it, must be.  Even a philosopher who 
articulates a philosophical system--it's coherent and 
integrated _on the page_, not in their head.  The philosopher 
typically pretends that their mind _is_ the page, like Bo 
wishing reality _were_ the MoQ, and hopes for a total 
revolution in other people's heads.  But that was just a 
philosopher's myth.  The dripping is the only process that 
has ever happened, and should be the only process the 
philosopher hopes for.  As Rorty called philosophy near his 
end: "cultural politics."  And as Rorty tended to think, 
philosophical systems might have a use, but they might also 
not be the best way to aid and abet the dripping process.

Krimel said:
I see loosing the telos as a very good thing. I often wish 
Pirsig had thought of that. I am with you for the most part 
here but I really don't think of either as mechanistic in any 
kind of Newtonian classical sense. Talking in terms of 
ecologies, systems and dynamic interaction may sound 
mechanistic to someone like dmb but perhaps you mean 
something else.

Matt:
Losing telos was a good thing, but Pirsig was expressly 
trying to add it back in, I think.  Nobody that is an 
evolutionist, as I see it, is a Newtonian mechanistic 
anymore, but what people like Pirsig sense is blind 
determinism, and they want to become Aristotelian in the 
face of losing the organic nature of experienced life.  What 
they don't really understand is how determinism was 
always a fake philosophical problem (posed by an antithesis 
to "free will," which was a philosophical conjuration by 
Christian theologians to get sin, and specifically their salvific, 
off the ground), and that 1) the sheer complexity of "life," 
taken as the summation of billiard balls bouncing around, 
protects enough from the appearance of straight, foreseeable 
lines (it's all "dynamic interaction," as you said) and 2) 
experienced life doesn't lose meaning just because we are a 
series of reactions to prior events.  Meaning isn't ascertained 
on that level, and neither is it negated _because_ of that 
level (of contingent cause and effect).

In that earlier paper ("Yellow Brick Road"), I had thought 
Pirsig was right, that we needed to "defend" ourselves 
philosophically against mechanistic versions of evolution.  
Now, I've come to think that they were just a series of 
faux problems that just needed to be dissolved (by, for 
example, seeing the notion of "will" as an illusion).

Krimel said:
I see Wilson as much more like Pirsig than the other two. 
He emphasized culture as a biological strategy that grows 
"out of" biological systems. But then the idea of levels as 
discrete and in competition with each other has always 
seemed bogus to me. I think one level grows out of another 
when the lower level provides enough static quality for a 
new level of DQ to operate. In fact in this sense I would 
say SQ is a much higher level of betterness or whatever 
than DQ.

Matt:
Well, "higher" in the sense that it allows us to not "die" it 
whatever analogous sense (depending on level).  The 
reason, I think, Pirsig treats DQ--the breaking of static 
latches--as "higher," or "betterness itself," is because he's 
trying to account for not only change, like the Greeks, but 
progress, like the moderns.  As Pirsig saw it, if you treat 
stasis as the highest good, you get conservativism, and a 
Heideggerian narrative of the fall of humanity (change as 
always leading away from goodness).  Pirsig wants to tell 
an upbeat story about how, e.g., women's suffrage and the 
end of overt slavery was a good thing, so he says DQ is 
betterness, and modulates to say that stasis on good things 
isn't bad (the idea of latches).

I'll grant you that levels as competitive is curious idea that 
isn't nearly as useful as I think people think, but 
"discreteness" seems to me of fundamental 
importance--without it you get our behavior's necessary 
reduction to biological impulses (to just take culture and 
biology).  And while culture may have arisen to help us survive 
in our harsh physical environment (a "biological strategy"), I 
don't think that helps make sense of a number of later stage 
developments, like happiness and love and liberty.  You 
_can_ make sense of them that way, but I don't see why you 
would all the time, or what it helps with to do so, rather than 
reading, say, the impulse to poetry as the impulse of 
self-creation (rather than as a covert impulse to become 
famous, accrue status, have sex with chicks, and continue 
your genetic line--which seems pretty implausible these days 
for poets, though perhaps not for Byron).

Matt
 		 	   		  
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