[MD] The SOM/MOQ discrepancy.

[Ham Priday]

Hi Craig --

[Ham, previously]:
> I have no quarrel with the fact that, existentially
> speaking, man and the world about him are made up
> of inorganic and organic elements working together...
> Intellect, however, is not a collective process and
> doesn't qualify as a form or level of physical existence.

[Craig];
> I hope you see the self-contradiction here.  See also:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_neural_network

There is no contradiction, except for Pirsigians who use "intellect" (in the 
collective sense) to mean "documented intelligence".

[Ham]:
> Evolution is only the process of nature as experienced in time.
> It is not a "cause" or source of the world, so it cannot answer
> the question "Why are we here?".

> First, there were apes & no humans.  Then there were humans.
> Q: Why?
> A: Evolution.

No, Craig.  The question "why?" demands a reason and, like Arlo, you insist 
on a historical answer which gives you only the "how" or "when" of a process 
rather than its cause.  It's like answering "Why does the TV work?" by 
saying that it works because you've plugged it into the power outlet and 
turned it on.  Evolution is not why we are, unless you're basing everything 
on anthropological history.

If you understand the development of human beings as a temporal process, 
then the ape that preceded man, and the organisms and cellular structures 
that preceded the ape, and the mutation of carbon and oxygen molecules into 
living cells are all sequential events of a process that Science says 
started with the Big Bang.  Cause-and-effect is how man intellectualizes his 
objective world.  Science can explain the process with a chronology of 
events, but no scientist can tell us WHY it occurred.

The question you should be asking is not why we are here, but why we are 
aware of ourselves as free, rational, value-discriminating beings, yet are 
totally dependent on something external to ourselves for our existence. 
That's a metaphysical question that goes beyond the experience of events in 
process.

Regards,
Ham