[MD] Through a glass darkly

[ADRIE KINTZIGER]

re , need to study this presented work.
But part of my answer is in my posting of 3 min ago.
thx David.(been reading in the pluralistic universe yesterday,superb
material)
ps, he really coined it in, the many worlds approach.


2011/2/19 david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>

>
> Ham said to Adrie:
> ....I realize that my hypothesis is often regarded as "uncommon" sense.
>  Indeed, if common sense could provide the solution to our enigma, we would
> have had it by now.  Forgive me for injecting what may appear to be a
> "theistic" thought here, but it is my suspicion that we were "not meant to
> know" the truth about reality.   ...Unlike scientific theories, metaphysical
> hypotheses cannot be made subject to "fallibility testing", and I would be
> foolish to claim empirical proof for my ontology.
>
>
> dmb says:
> I think Ham's position is profoundly anti-pragmatic. It is the kind of
> Platonism or "vicious intellectualism" against which James and Pirsig are
> diametrically opposed. As they see it, common sense is a vast collection of
> concepts invented by our ancestors and handed down to us as we learn the
> language and become a part of the culture. Common sense is made up of those
> static patterns that work so unproblematically that they larger go
> unexamined. But when common sense concepts are taken up by more abstract
> intellectual pursuits like science and philosophy all sorts of problems seem
> to emerge.
>
> Chief among these problems is reification, the error of treating an
> abstract concept as if it were an actual entity. Plato's forms are the
> classic example and that's why they call it Platonism. For Plato, you'll
> remember, the beautiful things and good things in this dirty old world
> aren't really real. What's real it Beauty and Goodness itself but most
> humans live their lives down in a dark cave, believing mere shadows are the
> real world. If that sounds a bit too lofty and otherworldly, that's only
> because it's too lofty and otherworldly. It's a world-hating, life-negating,
> logic-confounding mistake.
>
> And James and Pirsig also say that subject-object metaphysics makes exactly
> the same mistake. It takes practical, common sense concepts out of their
> context and then treats these abstractions as if they were the very
> structure of reality, as if they were the real stuff behind our experience.
>
> Instead of confusing ourselves with abstract notions of Truth and Reality,
> let's remember that concepts are only be called true to the extent that they
> can be used in our experience right here on earth. Ideas, they insist, are
> human inventions and they're supposed to serve human needs. Why should
> reality be something only a hand full of geniuses can understand? What good
> is philosophy if it doesn't help actual people in their actual lives? As
> health is a biological good and wealth is a social good, truth is a species
> of the good. It is a high quality concept, not the answer to the riddle of
> the universe. That sort of quest only makes sense if you believe that the
> intellect has divine powers but James and Pirsig are looking at these issues
> with the assumption that the human powers of intellect are a product of
> evolution. As the James scholar Charlene Seigfried points out,
> intellectualism had become vicious already with Plato and Socrates because
> they deified the intellect and
>  denigrated the flux of life from which are concepts originate.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>



-- 
parser