[MD] Catching up to Pirsig

[Ham Priday]

Krimel (insinuating that I don't read the articles I publish on my website):


> Ham,
>
> Did you actually read the article? The thrust of it is that
> morality and our sense of beauty arise from our evolutionary
> heritage. We are biologically hardwired to sense some things
> as good and some things as bad. Reason is a capacity in
> humans that evolved much later and it serves primarily to
> clarify the built in heuristics that emotions provide.

That's not my interpretation of Brooks and his quoted sources.  The only 
reference to
"evolution" relates to morality in the social order.  Brooks: "The question 
then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place?  The answer has 
long been evolution, but in recent years there's an increasing appreciation 
that evolution isn't just about competition.  It's also about cooperation 
within groups.  Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their 
ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of 
common threats. ..."

"Moral judgments," he says, are " ...rapid intuitive decisions and involve 
the emotion-processing parts of the brain.  Reasoning comes later, and is 
often guided by the emotions that preceded it."  Clearly, he doesn't mean 
later in evolution, but later in the individual's reasoning process.  This 
statement, incidentally, supports Pirsig's assertion that value is 
"pre-intellectual" experience.  It's also why I distinguish 
value-sensibility (psycho-emotional awareness) from experience (intellectual 
cognizance).

The idea that humans are "hardwired to sense some things as good and some as 
bad" contradicts the principle of free choice.  The brain's wiring 
facilitates the integration of sensory information, not our realization of 
value.  What Brooks is saying is that we form "an implicit preference" for 
everything we look at.  Although the brain is an evolutionary development, 
"...what our brain has evolved for is to find what is of value in our 
environment."

If we were hardwired to sense things as either good or bad, there would be 
no need to "find our values" but instead would all agree on what is good. 
In that case, human behavior would be uniform and developing a collective 
morality system would be superfluous.

--Ham