[MD] The Dynamics of Value

[John Carl]

Ok Ham,

I'll try again.  My response was bounced so I have to either trim a lot out,
or cut it up into little pieces.  I've been trying to decide what is the
best solution.  So forgive what might seem excessive editorial snippage in
my ongoing attempt to focus upon the heart of our dialogic differences.


"Theoretically speaking, I cannot find or even define the truth in terms of
my individual experience, without taking account of my relation to the
community of those who know. This community, then, is real whatever is
real."

That's reality, Ham.  The only real one you'll ever know.  As Descartes
famously should have said, "I think, therefore 16th century French Culture
and I exist."

Ham:

 A "majority consensus" is achieved when a quorum of individuals negotiate
> and agree on the values they want to share with each other.


John:

Right.  But whence come the values they "share"?  The values  come before
the meetings and can only arise through the interaction of the individual
with their environment.  THEN consensus is sought in meetings and
adjustments are made.


Ham:

  I  maintain that thinking (conceptualizing) is a process proprietary to
> human individuals.
>
>
John:

 When a dog barks, its more than a simple stimulus response.  The dog has a
concept of "stranger", which is at play in it's behavioral displays.  It's
impossible to think of any creature acting consistently without
conceptualization to drive the action.  I've observed dogs display evidence
of concepts such as guilt, affection and fear.  I've had enough interactions
with both horses and dogs (the most social my animal acquaintances) that I
believe firmly that the patterns of thinking they display are close enough
to those I experience in my self and observe in my fellow humans that I can
intuit another mind - another being which has concepts for itself and for
other things as well.   We conceptualize our emotional reactions and so do
the animals.  In fact, this is the one thing it seems that computer
intelligence will never be able to do and what distinguishes what we term
"living intelligence" vs. "artificial intelligence".

I agree that there is an order of conceptualization which we term
"intellect", which is above mere animal intelligence. So perhaps our
difference on this question has to do with how we define concept.  I say
that concepts are discrete mental patterns meant to represent some "thing"
either internal or external, and since I  also can't preclude  the question
of the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence,  for those two
reasons, I can't go along with the extreme anthropocentricism of your view.


Ham:


> What are "the signs of reality", and why are they not as individually
> discernable as any experiential phenomenon?
>
>
and later:

 They've penetrated otherness --  even broken it down into quantum particles
> they can only theorize because they're too small to identify or measure.
>  Unless the "essence" they're looking for is energy or mass, they haven't
> found it.
>
>
John:

If you are arguing that the search for Essence is futile, then I'd agree.
There is no Essence, only relations - or as my friend Royce calls them
"interpretations" or as my friend Wallace terms them "entanglements
between", or as my friend Pirsig puts it, "Quality".


Ham:


>  If reality reduces to individuals and social patterns, then you don't need
> anything more.  You can extrapolate "quality" from social patterns,



John:

Exactly.  However, in this case, I do view "social patterns" as more than
human-to-human interactions.  They are the description of interrelations
between all beings. As Thomas W. Price puts it quite elegantly in his thesis
- The Appreciation of Natural Beings and the Finitude of Consciousness:

"The use of the term “social”  is meant to indicate not so much the shared
experience of  nature among ourselves, which to Royce’s mind is an
epistemological issue, but refers rather to our appreciative, interactive,
and  possibly communicative relations with natural beings as  other minds-a
metaphysical issue.... According to Royce,  nature is the expression of
mental life such that individual natural beings  have internal meaning and,
therefore, conscious unity of  purpose and drive  to fulfill ideals. Given
that nature-life is extended in time and struggles as we  do to realize
purpose, then natural beings have an undeniable right to express  themselves
and not be harnessed and transformed into commodities to  service human
meanings and their fetishes even if that is our way of  expressing meaning."



Ham:


>  Of course. the reality you are conceptualizing by this logic is the
> physical universe which has been well mapped by objective science.  I'm not
> sure whether this approach to understanding can be called Philosophy, but it
> certainly doesn't pass as Metaphysics.
>
>
John:

I don't comprehend how you can say that.  I disagree with "well mapped" for
one thing.

Ham:


> What Socrates understood was that we desire what we ourselves neither are
> nor possess.  That's another way of explaining "positive" Value.


John:

I deeply desire life, and I have life.  At the same time, there are lots of
things that I am not, that I have no desire for.

Ham:


> But we polarize Value when we differentiate it; meaning that, like Quality,
> the range of values extends from negative to positive, bad to good, ugly to
> beautiful, repulsive to desirable, prosaic to magnificent, etc.  And the
> individual (anthropocentrically) stands smack in the middle of this
> valuistic balance.  This affords him the capacity to discriminate, morally
> and aesthetically, and to rationalize his decisions accordingly.
>
>
John:

I understand your point about the individual's freedom to choose and draw
lines wherever he/she will.  But I think you go too far when deriving the
meaningfulness of the individual's choice from himself, rather than where it
rightly belongs - on the entanglement between. On the correspondence of
choice with reality.   That our choices have relative consequences in the
world and this interpretation of our choice is the real fundament of our
choice and our being.  We do tend to reify our value choices, but not
necessarily so.  Wisdom is possible.  Holding our discriminations lightly,
is possible.

Ham:

It should be clear to you that I do not reject Value.  What I reject is the
> idea that Value (or Quality) is a universal force or entity that exists
> independently of man.



John:

This is why I like to emphasize "co-dependency".  For of course I agree that
if man were independent of Quality (the source of things) then he would
cease to exist.  So I reject "independent existence" as well.  But I do
believe that Quality is more than is encapsulated by Man's intellect, for
very good metaphysical reasons.


"Despite my frequent mention of differences, there is one respect in which I
am in full agreement with the spirit of pragmatism, as James defined it. Any
metaphysical thesis, if it has a meaning at all, is the expression of an
attitude of the will of the one who asserts this thesis."

Royce
Hoping this gets through,

John