[MD] Dawkins quotes RMP on religion.

[Ham Priday]

Bo, Platt, Arlo, All --

On 3-22 at 8:26 AM Bo writes:
> Ham obviously doesn't understand MOQ's "level principle"
> and claims that his "Essentialism" says the same as the MOQ,
> only better.

I have never claimed that Essentialism "says the same as the MOQ", nor that 
it says it "better".
Instead I maintain that Essentialism is a metaphysical concept which has a 
certain advantage over euphemistic paradigms of existence as perceived.

[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.

[Bo]:
> 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.

Even if "intellectual" is conceived to be the last (highest?) in a sequence 
of levels, there is no "role" for intellect other than the S/O role. 
Intellection is a faculty of cognitive awareness which is the individual's 
proprietary sense of being.  Intellect interprets experience objectively, as 
the relations of phenomena in a space/time universe.

[Bo]:
> 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".

Pirsig says that experience is "the cutting edge of reality", which to me 
implies that the conscious observer delineates or configures the universe in 
terms of its perceived attributes.  I mention this only because it would 
seem to support an ontogeny similar to my own.  However, if I my 
interpretation of Pirsig's statement is wrong, I'll gladly withdraw it from 
the discussion

[Bo]:
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
 > 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...

Spare me the embrace, Bo ;-).  I can understand why the Anthropic Principle 
seems radical in an age of objective materialism where it's assumed that 
reality is physical and the psychic nature of man is mythical.  But in no 
way can I accept your view that gravity didn't exist before Newton, that the 
universe was not relative before Einstein, or that man was not intellectual 
before the Enlightenment.  Such historical literalism takes radicalism to 
new heights and makes Pirsig's tetra-level hierarchy even less credible.

I admire your perspicacity, Bo, but I fear your ideas on the intellect will 
never be comprehensible until you acknowledge that it is man himself, not 
the universe, who does the intellectualizing.

Essentially yours,
Ham