[MD] The weak versus strong interpretation of Quality Metaphysics.

[skutvik at online.no]

Krimel, Platt, All.

17 July.

[Platt]
> Reason (SOM) expanded human understanding of levels 1 and 2, but in so
> doing left values in the dust and lost them there, going so far as to
> deny their existence. The MOQ takes humanity to a new promontory of
> understanding where 

"Reason" in the English seems to mean both thinking itself  
(intelligence) and rational thinking (rationality) 

> one can see, if he will only open his eyes, a new reality of Quality
> (values) whose structure makes reason (SOM) subordinate. 

And Platt sees rationality degraded from reality itself - SOM - to the 
static intellectual level. Good.  

[Krimel]
> Reason expands human understanding at all levels, 1, 2, 3, and 4. For
> example when we think about thinking it is called metacognition. Jonah
> Leher makes a big thing of this. He claims for example that meditation
> is a form of metacognition. In metacognative terms reason and emotion
> are often thought of as separate modes of thinking. 

Reason in the above Rationality-SOM sense does not expand anything 
at the 3 lower levels, they evolved and went about their business 
without the 4th. level's rationality, on the contrary its parent - the social 
level - hate the guts of rationality,  Pirsig says that all major conflicts 
stems from the social-intellectual struggle, nowadays known as the 
Islam vs West Muslim one.  

> Jung talked about intellect and intuition, for example. If we have been
> overzealous in sublimating emotion and values since the enlightenment,
> it is a sublimation that emotion and value richly deserved. 

Well, rationality (intellect) is a higher value level than emotion 
(society), but "sublimating emotion and values" sounds a bit odd. 
Value (quality) and emotion simply became irrational due to the 
intellectual level relegating such to its subjective realm, not a zeal to 
suppress them.   

> Humanity was governed by its emotional values for millennia. 

Right emotions are what intellect says characteizes the past (what the 
MOQ calls the social reality, the levels know no levels) and as intellect 
is the highest static stance it is right, we see how emotions are "on the 
sleeves" of the Muslim world with great show of grief and hatred, 
burning of flags and effigies, sound and fury.   

> If reason finally got a chance to take charge for a change I say, bully
> for it. And it has done a fairly nice job under the circumstances.

You keep re-inventing the wheel.

> Reason is the late arrival even in evolutionary terms. Man seems to be
> the only living thing we know to possess it. 

Now I believe reason as intelligence has entered your narrative but 
that's a different matter. Mankind has been as intelligent as ourselves 
for - say - fifty thousand years, but reason as rationality - as intellect, 
as MOQ's 4th. level -  arrived with the event presented in ZAMM's on 
the Greeks. 

> It also seems that the function of reason is inhibitory. It serves to
> override the emotions and stop us from acting on the immediate
> emotional "value" of the present. It helps us subordinate what feels
> good to what makes sense. 

Yes, reason as rationality does this and is expressed in MOQ terms as 
the intellectual level subduing its social parent - taking off on a purpose 
of its own. 

Bodvar