[MD] Dawkins quotes RMP on religion.

[skutvik at online.no]

Platt, Ham, Arlo, All.

I'm way behind, but 20 March Platt said (to Ham)

> I guess you missed what I said about "the laws of physics" being
> unfriendly to life. Once you leave the inorganic realm of physics you
> are into  a whole different ball game -- the game of life. How did it
> begin? I like Pirsig's explanation. What's your theory?  

Agree and thanks for holding the fort Platt. Ham obviously 
doesn't understand MOQ's "level principle" and claims that his 
"Essentialism" says the same as the MOQ, only better. Like 
below.

Ham before:
> > The universe is a valuistic PRODUCT of human experience.  It isn't
> > as if matter and energy conspired to create man, or that after an
> > infinite number of possible interactions, one of them miraculously
> > produced man.  Man produces the universe.  That's the anthropic
> > principle in four simple words.

Platt:
> Hard for me to believe that the universe didn't exist before we humans
> arrived on the scene . . . if that's what you mean. 

Again agreement, although I wish you would have said the 
inorganic, biological and social levels came before the 
intellectual, but I guess it's the "essence" ;-) Regarding  Ham's 
claim that "Man produces the universe" is the Anthropic Principle 
may be correct in the sense that both emerge from intellect (in its 
SOM role). The objective part (science) says that the universe is 
fine-tuned to produce consciousness while Ham (and other 
subjectivists) say that the universe is a product of (our) fine-tuned 
consciousness.  But the subject/object is an aggregate, neither 
can do without the other, the universe depends on conscious and 
consciousness without an universe is nothing. 

In the next post Ham says 

> Didn't Pirsig somewhere say experience creates the world?  I do know he
> said that what we don't value doesn't exist.  This is either a euphemism
> or a truth.  If it's true, what exists is what we intellectualize from
> value as being,  The universe exists by the same principle.

Pirsig does not say that experience creates the world, rather that 
Quality creates the world, its first creation the static inorganic 
level, its last the intellectual ditto. Nothing about "us valuating" or 
other "human consciousness creating the world". 

> I maintain that you folks--apparently "you people" isn't politically
> correct--have it all backwards.  As is typical of existentialists, you are
> persuaded that "existence precedes essence," that things (matter, being)
> give rise to experience (awareness), whereas the opposite is true.  

Ham is solidly lodged in intellect as SOM where the 
existence/essence is another offshoot. But I must add that I find 
Arlo's and Platt's rejection equally SOM-based and glib.  

> How else can you explain that Reality is derived from Quality?   If
> Quality (i.e., Value) is our pre-intellectual sensibility, as Pirsig
> says, than what we intellectualize as a physical world is constructed
> of Value, not the other way around. 

However I have a certain sympathy for Ham's about "common 
sense" and in his belief that the MOQ also is an "upside down" 
concept of reality" and that the MOQ encouraged him in coming 
out of the locker.(see below). 

> Undoubtedly this "upside down" concept of reality defies common sense,
> and I've avoided emphasizing it in my writing for that reason.  I
> confess it was hard for me to swallow, until I began to take Pirsig's
> statements seriously. But there is nothing sacred or profound about
> common sense, and 2000 years of it hasn't illuminated us as to how the
> universe came to be 

Yet, Ham is mistaken in believing that the MOQ says that our 
consciousness creates the world, it rather says that any big theory 
changes our way of perceiving reality (ref. the Newton example in 
ZAMM) and that a metaphysics in the original "no-one living in an 
ordered universe can avoid metaphysics" sense changes it 
fundamentally. And this argument is patent, Gravity came to be 
with Newton and Quality came to be with Pirsig, but once inside 
The Quality Universe existence is ordered the known way, there 
is no mind or consciousness  that perceives a world. and if Ham 
would recognize this and realize that his Essentialism is a 
budding MOQ then I'll embrace him ...after taking a shower, now 
I'm sweaty from laboring with this post.

Bo