[MD] Discrete & Dependent

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb
...Dawkins is saying that we have the capacity to understand our genetic inheritance and to act according to other interests. Our genes "want" us to reproduce but we may decide that having children is not in our economic interest. In fact he was saying the exact opposite of how you portray his views.

dmb says:
Well, that how de Wall portrays his views. He sees Dawkins as a proponent of the veneer theory of morality. This also happens to be how Dawkins's defenders portray his views as well. Dawkins in defended by Peter Singer in a later section of the same book. But Singer doesn't defend him by denying the veneer theory. He defends him by qualifying or softening the veneer theory. Singer says, "the issue, then, is not so much whether we accept the veneer theory of morality, but rather how much of morality is veneer, and how much is underlying structure" (151).

Krimel said:
The problem here for the MoQ is that Pirsig denies the importance of any species but humans at the social level.

dmb says:
No, the problem here for you is that want to equate human societies with their biological antecedents. Drawing a distinction between the two is not the same as saying that animals don't function well in groups or that this is unimportant. Pirsig denies social level values to the animal world simply because that what the term means in the MOQ. To insist that social values exist among animals is simply shows that you're confused about what the term refers to. Believe me, I understand that there are many other ways to use the term but that's just not how its used in the MOQ. I think one would have to be a reductionists to say that "separating out human social behavior from biology is artificial" as you just did. In any case, you're simply denying the distinction. 

Krimel said:
What you are highlighting and appear to love is the emergence of one level out of the other. Reduction as I see it is just reversing the process. Reduction provides a feel for the constraints that shape the emergent level.

dmb says:
No, reduction reduces. It says that emergent levels are nothing more than the sum of their parts. It oversimplifies by understanding complex phenomena in terms of the simpler components from which they emerged. On this view, there is no real distinction between the simple and the complex except for the complexity itself, which is quickly broken down and thereby virtually ignored. By contrast, the MOQ says yea sure, you can't have the social level without also having the simpler biological and inorganic components but the social goes beyond them. That's what it means to include and transcend. The social level maintains its antecedents in the biological but it also exceeds them. The reductionist doesn't explain anything interesting so much as he explains it AWAY. Like Krimel, for example...

Krimel said:
No experience, mysticism is JUST another kind of experience, can be understood as purely a brain function but no understanding of experience that excludes brain function should be taken seriously. Emotions, those areas of experience most highlighted in the mystical experience, are more primitive than intellectual experiences. I suspect that we share many emotional experiences in common with other primates but there is almost no overlap in intellectual functioning. And yet despite Wilber, intellectual functioning does not transcend emotional responses. It may give account of them but it does not transcend and include them. There are feedback loops in our neural networks that attach emotion to our thoughts and influence how we think feel and act.

dmb says:
Are you making a case that mystical experience is made of primate emotions? Mystical monkeys. But more seriously, if we share emotions with primates but there is almost no overlap in intellectual functioning, then why are you denying that intellect includes and transcends emotions? That's exactly what the phrase means. 

Krimel said:
...This speaks directly to Pirsig's claim that scientists seek to make valueless claims. It is the fact that scientists do have values that allows them to make any claims at all. The emotional experience of "rightness," as you described it yourself not long ago, is what drives the pursuit of knowledge in all its forms. It is a heritage humans derived from our distant ancestors.

dmb says:
Well, yea. The scientists can't function at all without her ancestral inheritance, both distant and near. Again, the search for intellectual truth includes the social and biological and yet those structures have been tweaked, modified and set to intellectual purposes that transcend them.

Krimel said:
...Michael Shermer's evopsych book "The Science of Good and Evil". He claims that in more primitive times there was no need for formal social codes. How each individual responded to each other individual was a matter of personal acquaintance. He claims that formal moral codes, that is, social interaction intellectualized, arose when social groups began to exceed 150 people with the development of agriculture and cities. With groups larger than 150 many of the people we encounter are "strangers" and we needed rules to make our interactions with strangers predictable.

dmb says:
That sounds about right and de Wall basically says the same thing. It occurs to me now that the development of agriculture and the rise of civilization must have included all kinds of outrageous violations of our natural morality. If rats and monkeys refuse to torture their fellow creatures and if monkeys have a sense of fairness, then how much did it trouble the people who became slaves or held slaves? It seems to me that social level values have a lot of work to do in terms of keeping a whole lot of animal anger at bay.  On top of that, the social level values had been evolving for tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of years in a relatively intimate and small-scale situation. (There was a population bottle neck about 75,000 years ago so I'd guess things really took off socially at that point.) I mean, it was not just a matter of getting more abstract as things got bigger and more complicated but also, in a sense, altering humanity to fit this new situation. Adaptation and evolution had to deal with a kind of cognitive dissonance. De Wall speculated that war, ironically, was the midwife of morality. There is something about threats from outsiders that helps to define and unify the insiders and most human morality, sadly, is all about the insiders. The circle of morality widens as cognitive skills and capacities increase. You could say morality gets less selfish through the evolutionary process, but, he points out, morality extended to a global level such as we see in the Geneva conventions tends to be very new and very fragile. Dubya would be exhibit "A" in that case. This sort of international law is mocked with refrains of "kum by yah" by the knuckle draggers. Dubya's lawyer said they were "quaint". 

I suppose that's a pretty good way to draw a line between social and intellectual level morals. The point and purpose of social level values is support and maintain society itself so the insider morality fits quite nicely on the third level. You know, thou shalt not kill except if you're in uniform. In that sense, cops and armies are all about protecting the insiders from the outsiders even if the outsiders come from within. So they end up killing the criminals and the Saints, eliminating those who can't achieve normality and those who go beyond it. 

Intellectual level morality, we hope, is a bit more principled than that. In some cases, it actually protects the non-conformist explicitly by law. In some cases, the laws are followed a caveat saying the law applies to each and every one regardless of race, gender, creed and other terms that might define who's an insider or an outsider. 

And then there's that whole thing about having compassion for all living creatures but fuck that. I'm hungry.

 
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