[MD] Is this the inadequacy of the MOQ?

[John Carl]

tim and alex,

Adrie and Mark mentioned:


>
> > **Alexander**
> >
> > But what, then, is the interpreter?
>
> [Tim]
> right!  If I could have answered that I would have told you that I have
> THE metaphysics... and probably also the Physics to back it up.
>


john:

I just read something apropos, along these lines.  "the" interpreter is
different, but 'your' interpreter depends upon your perspective.  From the
perspective of earth, heaven interprets.  From the perspective of heaven, it
is the Way that interprets.  And from the perspective of the way (tao), it
is nature that interprets.

and yeah, I think I got the physics to back it up.... The Tao of Physics.




>
> I was talking with Marsh about ultimate truth, and I argued that it is
> 'a thing, qua thing."  then I saw a post from John Carl, titled
> something about 'pragmatism', oh yea, and the plains indians; he re-drew
> my attention to the end of 'Lila', last paragraph, "good is a noun".
> maybe there is something here...
>

john:

"something" indeed, tim.  I agree completely.  Something very slippery to
grasp, however.  An idea worthy of mediation and meditation's goal.
Definitely a "something".

as opposed to, a ... well I'll be a gentlemen and refrain from ornery
contrariness.


> > [Alexander] I wrote in an offshoot from this
> > discussion about the difference between consciousness and conscious
> > experience.  "Cogito ergo sum" is invalid, because consciousness isn't
> > what
> > thinks, but what listens to the thought.
>
> [Tim]
> I think you are onto something here.  And I also think that if we
> 'follow our noses' (like a math teacher once used to say) we might get
> somewhere.  (It is often what we 'know' beyond our nose that causes us
> to veer too soon.)
>
>

john;  ok, I'm starting to really like you. We knows our nose, indeed.  What
our knows, knows, however, is a different question.  Nice catch!




> > [Alexander] So this thought which says "I
> > think, thus I am" is an intellectual pattern of experience - quality if
> > you
> > like.
> > But you can't really say what this consciousness is, because it seem
> > somehow
> > to be generated by the central nervous system.
>
>
john:

Krimel would be proud.  I'm a bit embarrassed.




> [Tim]
> perhaps I have a different perspective on mind/matter here.  When I
> think of a CNS, I am thinking, at least at the moment, of a composite of
> two intertwined patterns.  There is a material pattern, and a mental map
> (it is the intertwining of these by the, or into the, faithful I, that
> seems to be progress for me, now).


john:  Is this the same thing that Mark and Ham were on about?  A koncept
and a conceptualization?  Marks point really clicked home because of the
contrast between an image and the word, but over all  that idea of the
bifurcated brain has really grabbed me lately, with a nod towards a
philosopher chick I recently experienced via the magic of internet.  Here's
her link <http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/30995713?ref=nf>, which is pretty
cool, (long tho!)  You'll have to wade through about an hour of her
relating  her passion for W. James and Josiah Royce, but it was her later
foray into Epistemological Feminism that intrigued me, and sorta kicked my
head regarding some thinking with Mark along these lines that I never quite
got around to explicating... but it involves the impossibility of intellect
knowing itself.  Who was it that described our brains as being divided?  The
corpus colosum? and all that?  The Door?

We find our being in that door, because it enables us to see ourselves.  We
have differing perspectives in us, the romantic and classic.  Intellect and
Art.  Heart as well as mind, but like John Dewey and Platt say, Art should
be aknowledged as the leader in this dance, and not as an afterthought.

Is stuff I've been thinking in my chit'shat fashion.



> Anyway, I am thinking of the
> patterns of the MoQ this way.  Specifically, the inorganic and
> biological here, have a material AND a mental component (the brain
> itself is material).  In speaking with Marsha I have used the word
> miracle.



Marsha hates all that miracle talk.  Even tho she is one.



> What permits a will of the faithful I to animate matter?
>


You say "miracle", I can't disagree.  Pirsig calls it DQ, and I like that
term because it contains within it the idea of further evolution.  It seems
that any conceptualization that is created, puts one in a new reality - DQ
becomes sq and if this has "mind over matter" connotations, so be it!  It's
true!

Within the context of this new reality, one needs new terms to conceputalize
that which places us in context.  That "in which we live and move and have
our being".  Thus DQ, representing ineffability is not a concept (nor, Ham,
a conceptualization) but a description of a process.

The preceding *feels* pretty good, but I'll have to let it stew and simmer a
bit.  It  might be half-baked.



> Anyway, I see a 'process', wherein, for instance, the thinking I (with
> his mental map) will consider and decide ... and the material I will be
> compelled to movement.  This is so whether it is inorganic
> mental/material patterns, or biological, or other. Granted, those
> 'lower' are mainly 'sub-conscious', but this just suggests strength in
> the idea of some 'interpreter'.  The process could go the other way,
> from material to mental.  But that the process works is the
> extraordinary part - to me.
>
>

Yes!  That the process works, IS the miracle.  I agree completely.  It's
extraordinary on different levels and from different directions.  I just got
a book back from a friend that I loaned him, so was able to read an old
favorite of mine, Demon Box, An Essay, by Ken Kesey.  I found a lot of great
new perspectives, which I started in response to adrie's very astute posting
from ZAMM, where the shadowy figure by the door prevents father and son from
reuniting.  It really rang my bell, because Kesey's essay mirrored so much
of that dream, starting with a strong sense that came to him, while sitting
in the lobby of a mental institution - the same one he'd worked at, ten
years earlier and where he'd come across lsd, and the idea for his cuckoo's
nest novel... anyway, I don't want to get into all that at the moment, but I
just want to relate the analogy of the Interpreter, and Maxwell's Demon,
which the essay is based upon.

"Over a hundred years ago there lived a British physicist name James Clerk
Maxwell.  Entropy fascinated him also.  As a physicist he had great
affection for the wonder of our physical universe, and it seemed to him too
cruel that all the moving things of our world, all the marvelous, spinning,
humming, ticking breathing things, should be doomed to run down and die.
 Was there no remedy to this unfair fate?  The problem gnawed at him and in
British bulldog fashion, he gnawed back.  At length he felt he had devised a
solution, a loophole around one of the bleakest laws on the books.  What he
did was.... he devised this."

And then Perls goes on to describe the demon, the interpreter of hot and
cold, and how he works.  And how subsequent thinking has shown that the
demon actually uses more energy than he "creates" so no, the loophole
doesn't quite fly.

"The upshot?  After a century of theoretical analysis, the world of physics
reached a very distressing conclusion:  that Maxwell's little mechanism will
not only consume more energy than it produces and cost more than it can ever
make, it will continue to do so in increase!"

But then, Perls brings the analogy home to roost:

" Now.  Imagine again, please, that this box" he bent again over the picture
with his ballpoint, changing the H (for heat) into a G - "represents the
cognitive process of Modern civilization.  Eh?  And that this side, let's
say, represents 'Good.'  This other side, 'bad."

He changed the C (for Cold) into an ornate B, then waggled the picture at us
through the steam.

"Our divided mind! in all its doomed glory!  And ensconced right in the
middles is this medieval slavey, under orders to sort through the whirling
blizzard of experience and separate the grain from the chaff.  He must
deliberate over *EVERYTHING*, and to what end?  Purportedly to further us in
some way, eh?  Get us an edge in wheat futures, a master's degree, another
rung up the ladder of elephant shit. *Glorious* rewards supposedly await us
if our slave piles up enough 'good'.  But he must accomplish this before he
bankrupts us, is the catch.  Und all this deliberating, it makes him hungry.
 He needs more energy.  *Such* an appetite.

Our accounts begin to sink into the red.  We have to float loans from the
future.  At the wheel we sense something dreadfully wrong.  We are losing
way....

O, my sailors, what I say is sad but true-- our brave new boat is sinking.
 Every day finds more of drowning in depression, or drifting aimlessly in a
sea of antidepressants, or grasping at such straws as psychodrama and
regression catharsis.  Fah!  The problem does not lie in poo-poo fantasies
from our past.  It is this mistake we have programmed into the machinery of
our present that has scuttled us!"


Now I'm shifting my attention away from Kesey's tale, (and it's a real
fascinating one, I highly recommend) we come back to Phaedrus's dream - the
shadowy figure by the door preventing Phaedrus from leaving, who does that
turn out to be?  Himself!  Of course, but a part of himself, no?  That cold
and calculating intellectual side, that he pursued and overcame heroically.
The ghost of rationality, which he thoroughly thrashed.  But I'd say
"intellect" rather than "rationality", because it is this mind without
heart, that is the death of us all.  As Fredrich Perls put it, "It is this
mistake we have programmed into the machinery of our present that has
scuttled us!"





> I have thought of this analogy, for what I am terming, at least for now,
> the faithful I, the mental I, and the material I.  From the MoQ the
> mental I and the material I are considered illusions...



Let us say dreams, rather than illusions.  For illusions are lies, but
dreams can be true.




> and the faithful
> I is not to be explained, it is, maybe, the I which partakes in DQ.
>


where dreams come true.

The following, btw, is *very* good.


Anyway, the analogy: imagine getting ready for work every morning, or
> similar.  Imagine that you cannot use a mirror (and that you are
> terrible at it, haven't done it yourself much, it is a new thing).  The
> I getting ready is teh faithful I.  But it has no awareness of itself.
> It merely is.  It can track no changes.  Etc. and Etc
>
> Now, imagine that you can photograph
> yourself after you have gotten ready, but you cant use the photo until
> the next morning.  The second day, you still have no mirror, so you
> don't know what happens now, but you can look at the pic from the day
> before.  For the analogy, I call the you in teh pic the material I, and
> it is teh you thinking what you did to that material I that is the
> mental I.  Over many days, perhaps you can 'tune' the mental and
> material to produce (a highly adequate version of) the goal of the
> 'faithful I'.
>
>
When your dream comes true!  Exactly.


> It seems that reality might be very similar, except rather than waiting
> a day, you have only to wait a fraction of a fraction of  a fraction ...
> of a second - for the first parts of the image to arrive back (I am
> thinking more generally now; for the case of the getting ready in the
> mirror you get almost all the picture you care about at once, but the
> fall-out of most decisions comes back distributed over time).  DQ is not
> directly accessible because access implies process, and process implies
> ... (what happens if we follow our noses?)
>
>
Our dreams come true.  I know mine has in reading your words.



[Tim]
> I guess I just really struggle with the idea of 'society'.



I myself have no problems at all with the idea of society.  It's the
experience of society that gives me fits!  I'm waiting for my dreams to come
true on that one.



>  I understand
> the idea of another person, and I'm very much in favor of it, just to be
> sure.  Everything after this seems dangerous and harmful.  Well, maybe
> 'everything' is too strong.  If I think of an I, and I, let me take you,
> I can connect you with every other I, and I don't see how I can justify
> leaving anyone out.  I understand that if you could quantitatively
> correlate these connections, some would be very close and some would be
> quite distant.  I understand that this correlation might show features
> which might suggest 'level', but I don't see a discontinuity which would
> permit me to say this is my society, and this is not.  The closest I
> come is some sociopathic murderer, or the like, who must be locked up;
> but still, that doesn't destroy the societal bond.
> --
>

Well I offer you Perls wisdom, I guess it was a big thing in the 60's and
70's, tho to tell the truth, I'd never heard of it before yesterday, looking
up Fritz on wiki.

The Gestalt Prayer:

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's
beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

deal with it.

(ok, that last one was my own addendum :)

Thanks for dealing with it, Tim,

John