[MD] Philosophy and Philosophology

[skutvik at online.no]

John 

9 Aug. you wrote:

> And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight, that science has
> not confronted the one thing that is at once most familiar and most
> mysterious - consciousness.  As Emerson wrote in "Experience," an
> essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: "We have
> learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have
> no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we
> are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these
> subject-lenses have a creative power; *perhaps there are no objects*."

"Consciousness" is another SOM-generated platypus, the biggest of 
them all. Pirsig did not include it in his list of such that the MOQ is 
supposed to resolve, why he omitted it is, as always, his faulty 
method of subsuming SOM (inorganic and biology= objects-objective, 
social and intellect = subjects/subjective) this cumbersome exercise 
will no more explain consciousness than it explains its source: the 
mind/matter enigma.  

> Consciousness is not just an issue for biologists; it´s a problem for
> physics. There is nothing in modern physics that explains how a group
> of molecules in a brain creates consciousness. The beauty of a sunset,
> the taste of a delicious meal, these are all mysteries to science -
> which can sometimes pin down where in the brain the sensations arise,
> but not how and why there is any subjective personal experience to
> begin with. And, what´s worse, nothing in science can explain how
> consciousness arose from matter. Our understanding of this most basic
> phenomenon is virtually nil. Interestingly, most models of physics do
> not even recognize this as a problem.

The mind/matter paradox were "revealed" by the empiricists back in 
the seventeenth century, refined by Hume and cemented by Kant, 
and after him no one has questioned it, but like Emerson just wringing 
hands over the mystery. This is what the MOQ dis-solves by its 
change of metaphysical premises and making SOM into its own 
intellectual level. We could have taught this true (SOL) MOQ that 
ZAMM hinted to hadn't it been for LILA's pulling the rug from under 
this achievement and the "academics" presenting this impotent quasi-
moq as the real thing.   

Bodvar