[MD] The MoQ agency problem

[Ham Priday]

MoQers All --


A recent exchange between Krimel and DMB triggered my epistemology alarm.


 Krimel said:
> I don't think the cogito moves us anywhere near a subject or objects.
> I just used "subject" because the statement contains some "I"s.
> All it says is that I know that I exist in virtue of my thoughts.
> I cannot seriously doubt that I am having thoughts but that says
> buttkiss about what thoughts are, where they come from,
> what my relationship to them is or anything whatever about the "I"
> that is having them. Most of the "problems" associated with Descartes
> come from his own elaborations of the cogito and from the
> elaborations of his commentators.

David said:
> Well, there is some truth to the idea that subsequent commentators
> gave shape to Descartes ideas. But it's also true that Descartes is the
> father of SOM. In fact the subjective side of SOM is what we'd call
> the Cartesian self.  For Renee the mind was an unextended substance
> and matter was extended substance and the connection between
> these two categories is THEE problem of Modern epistemology.
> Before Descartes the word "mind" was not used as a noun, was not
> conceived as a thing. It was just a verb, as in "mind your manners".
> William James's ESSAYS ON RADICAL EMPIRICISM begins
> with the essay titled "Does Consciousness Exist?". He answers in the
> negative. He says that consciousness is not a thing but rather a function,
> a verb.. . .
> Nietzsche had said the same thing in his own pithy way. He said
> statements like "I think" are misleading insofar as the "I" is conceived
> as the thing that does the thinking. Compare that statement to
> statements like "it is raining". Do we imagine there actually is an "it"
> that does the raining?  No. The rain is all there is to raining.
> When thunder rolls there is no thunderer that performs the task.

Maybe so, David.  But only the observing subject KNOWS it is raining and is 
aware that he is experiencing the storm.  Without that experience "thunder 
and rain" would never be known, either as a concept or as a reality.  So 
which do you believe to be primary in this example: the phenomenon "raining" 
or the subjective experience of it?

Shortly before this, Bodvar was talking about levels as if they were 
conspiring to take over civilization:
> Then the intellectual - Logos - level that took leave from  the social -
> Mythos - parent level in the known Q fashion and started to debunk its
> parent by way of its rational, scientific means. . . .
> Intellect wants by all means to keep the MOQ an intellectual pattern
> as such safely inside its domain and you - intellect's henchmen - have
> already given us a show of its methods no less fierce than the social-
> intellect struggle which is waged on society's home turf - violence.
> The intellect vs MOQ will be with intellect's non-lethal weapons,
> but no less effective. . . .
> Anyway it's not the intellectual level that scoffs at biology,
> it is the social that wants to organize biology's proliferation,
> consummation ..etc., into socially approved institutions.

Do you catch the drift here?  Subjects are no longer human beings who think 
and act for themselves; they are functions of inanimate "agencies" that 
compete with each other for world domination.  Is this where Pirsig's 
elimination of subjects and objects is leading us?  Have we totally 
dysfunctionalized the cognizant agent once thought to be the choice-maker of 
the universe?

Perhaps it is high time to refresh our understanding of what an "agent" is.

"Agency is a concept used in philosophy and sociology to refer to the 
capacity of an agent to act in a world.  In philosophy, the agency is 
considered as belonging to that agent even if that agent represents a 
fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity.

"The capacity of a human to act as an agent is personal to that human, 
though considerations of the outcomes flowing from particular acts of human 
agency for us and others can then be thought to invest a moral component 
into a given situation wherein an agent has acted, and thus to involve moral 
agency.  If a situation is the consequence of human decision making, persons 
may be under a duty to apply value judgments to the consequences of their 
decisions, and held to be responsible for those decisions.  Human agency 
entitles the observer to ask should this have occurred? in a way that would 
be nonsensical in circumstances lacking human decisions-makers, for example, 
the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter."        --[Wikipedia: Agent, 
in philosophy]

If man is not the free agent of value, experiential existence is unaccounted 
for and cognitive life is meaningless.  I don't know about you folks, but I 
find it hard to believe that this is what MoQ's author had in mind.

Respectfully submitted,
Ham