[MD] Spinning our Wheels, metaphorically speaking

[John Carl]

dave,

So, sure. Let the drunks have their 12-step programs. Let the former theist
> grow into philosophers. But the MOQ is a philosophy that knows it has not
> captured God in a bottle. The MOQ says, in fact, that it is immoral to do
> so. The code of art says, basically, that it is evil to suppress evolution
> or promote regression or put the higher levels in the service of the lower
> ones.
>
>
I like the part about "captured God in a bottle".  I agree it is immoral.
I'm unclear about the meaning of "code of art", a confusion I've suffered
for a while, but let's let that slide for now.

More troublesome is the statement "it is evil to put the higher levels in
the service of a lower one".

Is it really evil for a man to engage intellectually so that he can land a
good academic position and feed his wife and kids?

Because if so, you've got some explaining to do to Qualigod, as Arlo names
him.

And if not, then what do you really mean?

>
> But let us not reduce the MOQ to these former stages of development, to
> these cures, to these stepping stones. That would be a regression.


I agree.  In fact, I believe that was the very point of my metaphor of
leaving the rest stops behind.


DQ is not your higher power. DQ is not God. DQ is not the Absolute. It is
> not supernatural or transcendent and no faith is required. It's the primary
> empirical reality, the immediate flux of life, direct everyday experience
> and so you already know it by direct acquaintance. Let's keep it real, eh?
>

John:

I agree completely.  And what is "real" dave?  Is it only what you decide?
 Is it only what you experience?

Perhaps more words will help.  Very well, here they are.

"This is Berkeley's interpretation and extension of Locke's thought.  I
don't ask you to accept or reject it, I only ask you to see once more how it
holds together.  Let us review it.

My experience is a learning to read my world.  What is my world?  Merely the
sum total of my ideas, of my thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, colors,
tastes.  I read these when one of them becomes sign to me of otherness, when
the glow of the hot stove warns me of unfelt heat that is in store for me if
I approach.

My ideas, and their laws, this is all my reality.  But then surely I am not
the only existence there is.  No, indeed.  The things about me are indeed
only my ideas; but I am not the author of these ideas.  This language of
experience, those signs of the senses, which I decipher--I did not produce
them.  Who writes, then, this language?  Who forces on my mind the
succession of my ideas?  Who spreads out the scroll of those experiences
before me which in their totality constitute the choir of heaven and earth?

Berkeley responds readily.  The sources of my ideas are two: my
fellow-beings, who speak to me with the natural voice, and God, who talks to
me in the language of the sense."


So dave, this "God" as so described, is just a different name for reality,
for direct experience.  Does renaming this concept "DQ" or "pure experience"
or "God" really matter in a metaphysical sense?

I mean, I know all about your connotations.  But we're talking metaphysics
here, not psychological hangups.

I'll continue with Josiah:

"When', says Berkely, 'I deny sensible things an existence out of the mind,
I do not mean my mind in particular, but all minds.  Now it is plain they
have an existence exterior to my mind, since I find them by experience to be
independent of it.  There is some other mind wherein they exist, during the
intervals between time of my perceiving them, as likewise they did before my
birth, and would do after my death.  And the same is true with regard to all
other finite created spirits, it necessarily follows, there is an
omnipresent eternal mind, which knows and comprehends all things, and
exhibits them to our view in such a manner, and according to such rules
which are termed, "the laws of nature".

Ok, that's Berkeley's Famous Idealism.  As you read them unprepared you
first say, How wild a paradox!  How absurdly opposed to commons sense!
 Gasp!  The Connotations!

But if you persist you come to a different conception.  How plausible this
Berkeley is!  How charming his style! How clear he makes his paradoxes!
 Perhaps after all, they aren't paradoxes but "mere rewordings of what we
all mean.."

He knows a world of facts, too.  Nobody is surer of the truths of
experience, nobody is firmer in his convictions of an outer reality, that
Berkeley.  Only this outer reality--what is it but God directly talking to
us, directly impressing upon us these ideas of the Choir of heaven and
furniture of earth?"

In sense, in experience, we have God.  He is in matter.  Matter, in fact is
a part of his own self: it is his manifested will, his plan for our
education, his voice speaking to us, warning, instructing, guiding, amusing
and blessing with a series of orderly and significant experience.

Your mood shifts as you read Berkeley.  You are half-persuaded and then
suddenly, you do believe it, if only for an hour, and then, in a curious
fashion, the whole thing comes to look commonplace.  It is so obvious that
it was hardly worth while to write it down.  After all, this notion that we
know only our own ideas, everybody believes that!

As for the notion of God talking to us, through all our senses, that is very
pretty and poetical, but is there anything very novel about the notion?  It
is the old design argument over again.

So I say, your mood alters as you read Berkely.  The value of his doctrine,
lies in its place in the rediscovery of the inner life.  Of the truth of
Berkeley's doctrine I have nothing to say.  I am simply narrating Berkeley's
experience of spiritual things.  And his experience was this: that our
consciousness of outer reality is a more subtle and complex thing than the
previous age had suspected, so that the real world must be very different
from the assumed substantial and mathematical world of the seventeenth
century, and so that our inner life of sense and of reason needs yet a new
and deeper analysis."

Royce, The Rediscovery of the inner life,

And to which I only add, yay "new and deeper analysis", mr Pirsig, and yay
to the signs along the way.