[MD] Does the MOQ invalidate Subjectivity?

[Michael Hamilton]

Ham,

> I call your attention to the consistency with which you gentlemen reference
> the human animal.  All of the above statements (with the exception of Scott
> Roberts' and my own) use the objective terms "evidence", "response(s)",
> "behavior", "exhibit(s)", "reasoning", "emergence", "eudaemonia", and
> "dominance" exclusively to describe him.

What's so objective about eudaimonia?

> And, although Platt saw fit to
> change Scott's parenthetical definition of consciousness from "awareness of
> value" to "response to value", not once is awareness treated as a subjective
> entity.  As followers of a philosophy which espouses that "experience =
> reality", do you not find this strange?

I recently posted something dealing explicitly with subjectivity. Here
it is again:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let's look at another one of the patterns of value that Western
society inculcates through the generations - inanimate matter or
substance. Just as the societies of our ancestors were defined and
held together by a shared belief in nature-spirits, our society
inculcates a shared belief in inanimate substance. In one sense, it's
just another myth. However, it's a myth that bestows on us a radically
different view of life. A society that believes that the world around
them is filled with all kinds of intelligence and spirit will not feel
consciousness to be a purely subjective thing that is somehow crammed
inside the brain-boxes of humans and the higher primates. They
[pre-modern people] don't
experience 'proprietary awareness' at all. Awareness is, to them, the
nature of the world.

Because of the unique myth of inanimate matter, most Westerners feel
conscious awareness to be an inner, subjective thing. Barfield:
-------------------
The meaning which "inspiration" possessed up to the seventeenth or
eighteenth centuries carries us right back to the old mythical outlook
in Greece and elsewhere, where poets and prophets were understood as
the direct mouthpieces of superior beings - beings such as the Muses,
who inspired or 'breathed into' them the divine afflatus. Through
Plato and Aristotle this conception came to England at the Renaissance
and lasted as an element of aesthetic theory well on into the
eighteenth century, if it can be said to have died out altogether even
now. But, like so many other words, this one began to suffer that
process which we have called "internalization". Hobbes poured
eymologically apposite scorn on the senseless convention 'by which a
man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of Nature and his own
meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a
Bagpipe'. And we may suppose that about this time "inspiration"...
began to lose its old literal meaning and acquire its modern and
metaphorical one. Like "instinct", it was now felt, whatever its real
nature, to be something arising from within the human being rather
than something installed from without.
------------------- (A History In English Words, p207-8)

Barfield goes on to give another example of a word shifting from a
mythological to an inner meaning: "genius", "which in Roman mythology
meant a person's tutelary spirit, or special angel attending him
everywhere and influencing his thoughts and actions. Its early meaning
in English... signified an ability implanted in a man by God at his
birth. But from about the seventeenth century this meaning began to
ferment and expand in an extraordinary way...".

It's no coincidence that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also
saw the spread of the myth of inanimate substance...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In summary: conscious awareness has only been felt as 'subjective' for
about 300 years or so. The mechanistic view of nature forced
consciousness to retreat into the subjective realm of 'mind'. Prior to
this, most people assumed that consciousness/value/awareness was
simply the nature of existence and reality in general.