[MD] Social Imposition ?

[David M]

Hi Case

What I would say is that there is certainly some pretty
rigid SQ around where the patterns can be relied on to repeat.
Science focussed on these rigid patterns to get itself going as
a formof knowledge and control and called these patterns
mechanistic and by now this picture is being qualified and
expanded into patterns with more complex behaviour.

But a problem remains when the majority of philosophers
and the man in the street will describe themselves as materialists.

I would also say that even a science of propensities fails to set out before
us the surprising reality of all SQ patterns, and this is their emergence 
and
contingency. The sort of contingency scientists discuss when they say
that they cannot explain the vriables of our universe such as the electron
and proton masses.

I also think that the only clue we might get to the problem of 
contingent-creation
is what we find in our own human experience. I think Pirsig calls it DQ.
I think we can call it choice or agency (but these terms carry too much
baggage) and this is pretty simply the transition that occurs between the
many possibilities that constitute the lived aspect of experience, the what
is too be done problem that we all face, and the turning away from all
but one of the possibilities before us to create what is our actual lives.
This is the process of living in the context of our experience, the primary
process of act-ualising, which pushes away the many-possible to create
the actual, collapses the wave-function perhaps, making finite being,
all else is the context of the past that we find ourselves thrown into
(as Heidegger puts it) as it impinges on us and places us into a certain
individual set of possibilities.

Ta
David M

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Case" <Case at iSpots.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2006 11:16 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Social Imposition ?


> [David M]
> I see, I think this goes back to Pirsig's
> discussion of causality. Sheldrake turns
> this table too, and says mechanistic causality
> is more anthropomorphic than seeing all
> Others and object-Others as agentive and
> purposive. And this goes back to quality-experience
> as primary. We have no way to make any such
> anthropomorphic vs non-anthropomorphic distinction.
>
> [Case]
> I will tactfully decline to comment on Sheldrake but if what you mean by
> Pirsig's discussion of causality the section where he says:
>
> "The only difference between causation and value is that the word 'cause'
> implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of 'value' is one 
> of
> preference."
>
> I agree with the thrust of what he is saying but again take issue with his
> choice of terms and the spin it gets when put in the wrong hands. I have
> previously argued that this should make people look at little more closely
> at what we mean by "value". This implies to me that just as we have to 
> look
> harder at the meaning of "cause" in the classical sense we need to look
> harder at what we mean by value in an ethical sense. If the terms are to 
> be
> used interchangeable we should be importing some of the meaning of 
> classical
> causality into ethics. But for most this seems to be a one way street and 
> we
> get all this stuff about apples falling to the ground because they like to
> be there. And single cell organisms having preferences.
>
> The fact is, even the "hard" sciences are coming to increasingly
> probabilistic views of causality. I have mentioned in the past Jung's view
> of synchronicity as meaningful coincidence. I have suggested that 
> causality
> is synchronicity with a high probability. That should match with your
> anthormorphic/nonanthropomorphic distinction. Classical causality is 100
> percent synchronous.
>
> I have noticed something like this in the past listening to experts in
> religious history debate, say the meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They 
> talk
> about the relative probability of their models being correct given the set
> of data they have to work with. More recently in a series of lectures on
> primate evolution Dr. Barbara King refers repeatedly to probable
> explanations given the evidence at hand. I think many of the complaints
> against materialism are based around the rather outdated notion anyone 
> still
> thinks in Newtonian terms in this regard.
>
> But back to Pirsig, like so much of what he says in Lila, he is almost
> there. He just barely misses. When he says: "...the implied meaning of
> 'value' is one of preference." He is really talking about probability and
> likelihood. But we both know that's not going to fly in certain quarters
> where it is all about what we like. And the MoQ contains no Math.
>
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