[MD] Quick one: causation

[MarshaV]

At 07:19 PM 1/13/2009, you wrote:
>Hello Marsha;
>Thanks for responding to a newbe.

Greetings David,

I apologize for not welcoming you to this forum.  Welcome!  It is 
always nice to have new people participate in this adventure.

>Re your assertion that words must be mental phenomena: I
>remind you that Plato invented the mental category from
>imaginary cloth because he noticed that universals are always
>perfect (another physical characteristic of minds).

Would you like to state that words are not a mental 
phenomenon?   Plato is not an authority for me, and I do not find his 
invention true to my experience.  I have no perfect mental image of a 
bed, or a horse.  And if I did, I do not know how that would 
translate to anything physical.


>  I seem to recall something about a perfect (unbuildable)
>bed that was the model for every bed and a perfect horse
>that never got sick or aged.  He said that they exist only
>in the mind.

What bed?  What horse?  Plato's explanation was a mental process.


>And that is correct,

I don't think so.


>but if the mind is physical the bed and the horse have to
>be physical too.

How did you get to the mind is physical?


>(A science of psychology makes no sense unless they are
>physical.)

Defending science is not one of my goals.  Science is a workable 
method for manipulating the conventional world when it produces 
positive benefits.  It is based on a provisional truth, not an 
absolute truth.


>If you can accept that the electrical energy measurable
>as it varies in nerve cells and the mechanical energy measurable
>as it travels through air or some other medium are physical, then
>the words that are the effect of these energies on ear
>drums are as physical as rocks and trees.

I can and do accept this as a conventional truth.


>I'm trying to stay as close as possible to Chris's original question about
>the possibility of a physical explanation for actions, and I still maintain
>that it's theoretically possible if you'll entertain the possibility that
>mind, meaning and knowledge are physical things.

I do not accept, except when convenient, that mind, meaning and 
knowledge are physical things.


>By the way, Quality is also a physical thing and a central
>part of mind, meaning and knowledge. In fact, Quality makes
>the rest possible.

"Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that 
there is a knower and a known."

I understand static patterns of value representing conventional 
truth, and the 'indivisible, undefinable and unknowable' presenting 
the ultimate truth.  The spovs seem to be critical to human survival, 
but are interdependent, interrelated, interconnected, ever-changing 
patterns, NOT independent things.


>Oh, and thanks for the defense, Ham, my dancing is
>lousy

LIfe is a dance.  And I bet you are good at it.


>and all please excuse my Canadian spelling - david swift

Welcome aboard.  But please delete all extraneous "stuff" off the end 
of your posts.


Marsha






>-----Original Message-----
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>Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: David Hildebrand's Dewey (david buchanan)
>    2. Re: Quick one: causation (craigerb at comcast.net)
>    3. Re: David Hildebrand's Dewey (Case)
>    4. Re: Quick one: causation (Ham Priday)
>    5. Re: Quick one: causation (skutvik at online.no)
>    6. Re: David Hildebrand's Dewey (Steve Peterson)
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Message: 1
>Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:03:47 -0700
>From: david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
>Subject: Re: [MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey
>To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
>Message-ID: <BLU146-W26CEC7B457643BD4CDBA6ADAD90 at phx.gbl>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
>
>
>"How would a pragmatist argue that religion isn't a good tool?" Good
>question, Steve. I guess that the first thing to do is get a lot more
>specific about what we mean exactly by the term "religion". Despite the
>pragmatic theory of truth, the MOQ rejects beliefs based on faith, tradition
>and authority and yet, in another sense of the word, there is an important
>"religious" element. In other words, the mysticism of the MOQ is very
>different from the conventional forms of theism, to which the vast majority
>of today's Christians subscribe, and yet they can both count as religious in
>some sense. The there is the matter of what makes a good tool? If we take it
>to mean anything that helps us cope or makes us feel better then we can get
>into some very hot water. Among psychologist and sociologists there is a
>thing called the deprivation theory of religion, which claims that religion
>caters to those who have been deprived of certain emotional and
>psychological needs. You know, the sig
>
>  h of the oppressed, the opiate of he masses, the expression of infantile
>wishes and the fear of death and, less grandly, people who just need love,
>acceptance, certainty and a sense of meaning or purpose. I don't think the
>deprivation theory of religion explains everything but it pretty well
>describes the psychological motives of many, if not most, religious people.
>The Christian myth no longer functions the way it is supposed to. The
>symbols have been literalized, concretized and have lost their meaning AS
>symbols. So the people who continue to subscribe, for the most part, have
>more or less agreed to believe lots of things that just aren't believable,
>actual virgin births and literally coming back from the dead, etc. And these
>are the people that the New Atheists are talking about. Sadly, they take the
>symbols literally too and fail to understand that "the promised land is not
>about real estate", as Campbell puts it, anymore than the fundamentalists
>do. Sam Harris is my fa
>
>  vorite of the new atheists because he does not dismiss the value or
>validity of meditation or of religious experience per se, as you know. Carl
>Jung disagreed with Freud almost entirely. Where Freud thought that
>religious belief indicated an unhealthy mind, Jung thought spiritual
>development was essential to human health. (Campbell was mostly a Jungian
>but he takes Freud and other psychologists on board as well.) At the same
>time, however, Jung saw a serious failure in the conventional forms of
>Christianity such as in his own father's church. Even as a child, he saw
>that his father and uncles preached sermons without having any actual
>religious experience. He could see that they didn't know what they were
>talking about and that they only believed on basis of faith rather than
>knowing from their own experience. In that sense, he thought, religion often
>prevents spiritual development. His stance was empirical in a way that is
>similar to radical empiricism. He considered religi
>
>  ous experience to be a psychological fact. His religious claims begin and
>end with those facts and he insists we can't go beyond that to assert
>supernatural entities as the cause of such experience. The archetypal images
>that present themselves in such experience will always to images that the
>experiencer can relate to, depending on one's particular context, but this
>is not taken as proof of anything beyond the experience itself. I mean, it
>doesn't matter if you have a vision of Jesus, Buddha or Bob. The hero can
>wear any number of a thousand different faces but it's essentially the same
>vision, the same experience and is not taken as a legitimate reason to make
>any ontological claims. And the test of the "truth" of these kinds of
>experiences comes in subsequent experience. Did the experience result in
>some kind of growth or transformation of consciousness? Does this change
>lead to a difference in the quality of life? I think these sorts of
>questions are a better way to get
>
>  at what it means to have a good tool, a belief that proves to be good in
>terms of how we live with it as opposed to a more casual, hey, whatever
>works for you kind of thing. Otherwise people who fit the deprivation theory
>can say religion "works" for them simply because it provides emotional
>comfort. Opium feels good but it will take over your life and eventually
>kill you.
>_________________________________________________________________
>Windows Live?: Keep your life in sync.
>http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_explore_012009
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 2
>Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:16:50 +0000
>From: craigerb at comcast.net
>Subject: Re: [MD] Quick one: causation
>To: moq_discuss at lists.moqtalk.org
>Message-ID:
>
><011320092016.26047.496CF6B200001B5F000065BF22007614380D9D0A09070E9D0C at comca
>st.net>
>
>
>[ian]
> > Many things that can be fully explained only in hindsight
>
>Take a game of pool or pocket billiards.
>One can explain the 8-ball going in the side pocket by saying it bounced off
>the side rail
>or explain the 8-ball going in the corner pocket by saying it bounced off
>the end rail.  Both
>explanations can be given before the event occurs, but the CORRECT
>explanation of what
>ACTUALLY occurs might not be KNOWN until afterwards.
>Is this what you had in mind?  Or do you think some events can be explained
>either before
>or after they happen, while other events can only be explained afterwards.
>If the latter, what would be an example?
>
>[ian]
> > There are two-way causal processes between the lower and higher
> > levels, and it is not helpful to think of these effects as
> > "causation" in the traditional sense
>
>When someone has had too much alcohol, their thinking becomes muddled.
>When someone is frightened, they think they see things in shaddows.
>Why is it not helpful to think of these effects as causationin the
>traditional sense?
>Craig
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 3
>Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:35:25 -0500
>From: "Case" <Case at iSpots.com>
>Subject: Re: [MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey
>To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
>Message-ID: <DC1A23361910401AA4016CE180C3C8ED at HPLaptop>
>Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"
>
>[Case]
>Dave?
>Communication's a tricky thing
> >From Akron, to Jakarta on to Darjeeling
>Readers, when they're reading,
>Have their eyes at stake
>Would it hurt to hit return?
>Give your paragraphs a break.
>
>You said this:
>http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2009-January/0321
>39.html
>
>Did you intend to say something more like this:
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>"How would a pragmatist argue that religion isn't a good tool?"
>
>Good question, Steve. I guess that the first thing to do is get a lot more
>specific about what we mean exactly by the term "religion". Despite the
>pragmatic theory of truth, the MOQ rejects beliefs based on faith, tradition
>and authority and yet, in another sense of the word, there is an important
>"religious" element. In other words, the mysticism of the MOQ is very
>different from the conventional forms of theism, to which the vast majority
>of today's Christians subscribe, and yet they can both count as religious in
>some sense. The there is the matter of what makes a good tool? If we take it
>to mean anything that helps us cope or makes us feel better then we can get
>into some very hot water.
>
>Among psychologist and sociologists there is a thing called the deprivation
>theory of religion, which claims that religion caters to those who have been
>deprived of certain emotional and psychological needs. You know, the sigh of
>the oppressed, the opiate of he masses, the expression of infantile wishes
>and the fear of death and, less grandly, people who just need love,
>acceptance, certainty and a sense of meaning or purpose.
>
>I don't think the deprivation theory of religion explains everything but it
>pretty well describes the psychological motives of many, if not most,
>religious people. The Christian myth no longer functions the way it is
>supposed to. The symbols have been literalized, concretized and have lost
>their meaning AS symbols. So the people who continue to subscribe, for the
>most part, have more or less agreed to believe lots of things that just
>aren't believable, actual virgin births and literally coming back from the
>dead, etc. And these are the people that the New Atheists are talking about.
>
>
>Sadly, they take the symbols literally too and fail to understand that "the
>promised land is not about real estate", as Campbell puts it, anymore than
>the fundamentalists do. Sam Harris is my favorite of the new atheists
>because he does not dismiss the value or validity of meditation or of
>religious experience per se, as you know. Carl Jung disagreed with Freud
>almost entirely. Where Freud thought that religious belief indicated an
>unhealthy mind, Jung thought spiritual development was essential to human
>health. (Campbell was mostly a Jungian but he takes Freud and other
>psychologists on board as well.)
>
>At the same time, however, Jung saw a serious failure in the conventional
>forms of Christianity such as in his own father's church. Even as a child,
>he saw that his father and uncles preached sermons without having any actual
>religious experience. He could see that they didn't know what they were
>talking about and that they only believed on basis of faith rather than
>knowing from their own experience.
>
>In that sense, he thought, religion often prevents spiritual development.
>His stance was empirical in a way that is similar to radical empiricism. He
>considered religious experience to be a psychological fact. His religious
>claims begin and end with those facts and he insists we can't go beyond that
>to assert supernatural entities as the cause of such experience. The
>archetypal images that present themselves in such experience will always to
>images that the experiencer can relate to, depending on one's particular
>context, but this is not taken as proof of anything beyond the experience
>itself.
>
>I mean, it doesn't matter if you have a vision of Jesus, Buddha or Bob. The
>hero can wear any number of a thousand different faces but it's essentially
>the same vision, the same experience and is not taken as a legitimate reason
>to make any ontological claims. And the test of the "truth" of these kinds
>of experiences comes in subsequent experience. Did the experience result in
>some kind of growth or transformation of consciousness? Does this change
>lead to a difference in the quality of life?
>
>I think these sorts of questions are a better way to get at what it means to
>have a good tool, a belief that proves to be good in terms of how we live
>with it as opposed to a more casual, hey, whatever works for you kind of
>thing. Otherwise people who fit the deprivation theory can say religion
>"works" for them simply because it provides emotional comfort. Opium feels
>good but it will take over your life and eventually kill you.
>
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 4
>Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:46:13 -0500
>From: "Ham Priday" <hampday1 at verizon.net>
>Subject: Re: [MD] Quick one: causation
>To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
>Message-ID: <2EACF1C4D7414752A7C95F9F230C8FA5 at hamPC>
>Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=iso-8859-1;
>         reply-type=original
>
>
>Bo, Chris, Marsha --
>
>
>Here's the gist of what Pisig says about causation in LILA:
>
>    "The only difference between causation and value is that
>     the word 'cause' implies absolute certainty whereas the
>     implied meaning of "value" is one of preference."
>
>I would suggest that there is another difference: the passage of time.
>Without the temporal dimension (of human experience), causation as the
>direct result of a prior action or event would be impossible.  If time is
>the mode of experience, rather than an inherent property of existence, Value
>
>is "causative" non-sequentially, while "preference" remains the property of
>the observing subject.  Creation then becomes a differentiated product of
>experience with Value as its source.  I define the subject of existence as
>value-sensibility, and the "actualized" world of experience as its creation.
>
>This avoids the necessity of chicken-and-egg, cause-and-effect scenarios and
>
>the "forests of pulpwood" which Pirsig laments being sacrificed to debate
>the issue.
>
>Marsha says to David Swift:
> > I hope that your strictly physical performance is some kind of
> > interpretative dance, because if you are going to use words to
> > explain it will have a mental component.
>
>That's a red herring, Marsha.  There is no alternative to words for
>explication, which is why we have philosophy.
>
>Bo says to Chris:
> > As you will see this is the "ordinary" - in SOM-speak - physical
> > causation Pirsig talks about, iron filings caused into a particular
> > pattern by a magnet, and although his observation may be
> > philosophically valid it sounds a bit contrived -- No causation
> > because ...."we don't see it, touch it, hear it or feel it".  By such
> > criterions a lot of phenomena become paradoxical.
>
>I agree.  Iron filings "preferring" attachment to a magnet is a contrivance
>by any standard and is epistemologically unsound.  Preference requires
>sensibility, for one thing, and by what neuro-physiological principle does
>the author ascribe sensibility to an inert scrap of iron?  Clearly, desire
>and preference are exclusive to psycho-emotional subjectivity.  And, Bo, as
>I've said before, when you reject subjects and objects, you eliminate Value.
>[Bo, continues]:
> > As said I don't believe that value versions of the scientific
> > disciplines (f.ex. a Q-physics where "B values precondition A")
> > has a future. The SOL presents a more elegant solution by saying
> > that intellect's S/O has created all paradoxes (while SOM) as
> > MOQ's 4th. static level they all dissolve witout a trace.
>
>Yes, but it isn't "intellect's S/O", it's the INDIVIDUAL's experiential S/O.
>
>Intellect is the cognitive capacity of a human being, not a level of Value.
>Difference is derived from the primary split between Sensibility and
>objective Otherness.  That's how we become individuated beings who
>differentiate Value into the multifold objects of our experiential reality.
>
>Pirsig also asks something else that is controversial in a later paragraph
>(Chpt. 8) than the one quoted above:
>
>     "But if there is no substance, it must be asked, why isn't
>     everything chaotic?  Why do our experiences _act_ as if
>     they inhere in something?  When you pick up a glass of water,
>     why don't the properties of that glass go flying off in all directions?"
>
>In point of fact, they do.  Hydrogen and oxygen atoms diffuse into the
>atmosphere, photons are reflected from the glass, and thermal energy from
>your hand is transferred to the water.  It just so happens that we don't
>experience these properties, just as we don't experience being bombarded
>constantly by x-rays, rf waves, and variations in atmospheric pressure and
>electro-magnetic fields.  I dare say, if we were able to experience
>everything going on in the cosmos, it WOULD be "chaotic".  Fortunately, we
>are designed to experience only a finite fraction of these happenings, and
>we intellectualize only the sensible events as "physical reality", negating
>all the rest as "nothigness".  That's the selective process by which human
>beings make order and continuity out of non-symmetry and chaos.
>
> > This quandary will never be resolved from the premises that
> > S/O is reality's deepest split. MOQ's dynamic/static premises
> > must be applied and in this context all S/Os are STATIC
> > intellectual patterns - included psychological/physical - and
> > only valid at that level. No need to look for SOM problems
> > that have been solved by the MOQ.
>
>Again, "patterning" is the work of the human intellect.  Patterns themselves
>
>are not metaphysical reality; they are only intellectual projections of
>beingness that represent the values to which we subscribe.  The
>differentiated universe is our actualized world, a product of the
>sensibility/otherness dichotomy.  All the laws of cause-and-effect, logic,
>mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences are derived from human
>experience.  We depend upon them to survive and flourish as a value-sensible
>
>species.  But they are not innate or essential to ultimate reality.
>
>Essentially yours,
>Ham
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 5
>Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:02:18 +0100
>From: skutvik at online.no
>Subject: Re: [MD] Quick one: causation
>To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>Message-ID: <496D0F6A.22340.C8B69C2 at localhost>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>Hi David.
>
>Pleased to meet you (or have you been here before?).
>
>12 Jan. you  wrote:
>
> > Dear Chris
> > I have reasons for believing that a strictly physical explanation of a
> > performed action by an individual is possible. They start with Kant's
> > assertion that Quality is an a priori synthetic judgment and a
> > characteristic of mind just like time and space. They continue with
> > the realization that mind is not mental but rather physical,
> > biological, entity and therefore, intentionality can be explained by
> > the laws of physics. But the whole explanation cannot be done quickly
> > so I'll leave it here and get back to it as its own topic in future.
>
>Kant did not exactly speak about Quality in the MOQ sense, but to
>begin with a kind of the beginning.  Western philosophy has
>always had SOM as its premises,  but then came the discovery of
>the empiricists that all qualities, color, sound, taste,smell, touch
>were produced by the senses -  were subjective - Berkeley went as
>far as to claim that  there was nothing "out there". everything was
>subjective.
>
>Then Kant who set out to save reason from this mad "pure reason"
>and claimed  there were something he called "forms of perception"
>built into existence itself,  not learned FROM experience rather
>what experience was filtered through These were TIME, SPACE
>and CAUSATION that made up OUR experience "das Ding f?r
>Uns" (the world for us)  But note that Kant did not shake the
>foundations of SOM, the was still a world out there "das Ding an
>Sich" (the world in itself).
>
>But the MOQ has taken leave of SOM , so I'm a bit surprised that
>some of us keep speaking as if SOM's artificial problems  has any
>bearing inside the MOQ with statements like yours
>
> > ... "They continue with the realization that mind is not mental but
> > rather physical, biological, entity and therefore, intentionality can
> > be explained by the laws of physics".
>
>Yes, we know that the SOM struggles with such self-inflicted
>problems stemming from its faulty premises that the S/O split
>being existence's ground. The MOQ's premises however is the
>DQ/SQ split and then the static levels, the said S/O split is
>intellect's STATIC value. Kant's just cemented SOM, but has no
>bearing on the MOQ.
>
>Bo
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 6
>Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:10:46 -0500
>From: Steve Peterson <peterson.steve at gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: [MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey
>To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>Message-ID: <9d42bd75bbf86b8b94a1b71670470c67 at gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
>
>Hi DMB,
>
>Thanks for your response. A few more questions...
>
>I think what you are saying is that the pragmatists answer is simply to
>try to figure out what religion is supposed to do and see how well it
>does it. The tack that most people would like to take in conversations
>with theists is to argue that what theists believe just isn't true. I'm
>wondering if the pragmatist can argue in that vein or if he is
>constrained in such conversations by his use of the word "truth" or his
>denial of there being a way things really are. Though "the MOQ rejects
>beliefs based on faith, tradition and authority" it suggests that there
>is such a thing as intellectual quality that is independent of those
>things and has its own measures of goodness in terms of coherence with
>other beliefs, parsimony, and agreement with experience. Though
>pragmatists may agree that truth is what is good in terms of belief,
>pragmatists don't separate the terms by which beliefs should be
>evaluated from the terms by which social patterns should be evaluated
>(e.g. authority versus agreement with experience, coherence versus
>tradition). Could this explain James' and Dewey's ambivalence about
>religious dogma?
>
>Regards,
>Steve
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
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.
.
The Universe is uncaused, like a net of jewels in which each is a 
reflection of all the others in a fantastic, interrelated harmony without end.
.
.