[MD] Julian Baggini: This is what the clash of civilisations is really about

[John Carl]

> >> Dan:
> >> I know there is a line in Lila about living beings reacting to Dynamic
> >> Quality, but that doesn't translate into the individual.
> >>
> >>
> > Jc:  I may be confused.  It just stuck in my head somehow as "orthodoxy".
>
> Dan:
> I don't think so but it's something to consider.



Jc:  there is a logic to the fact that the only way to intellectually
resist social pressure is individually.  If you just prefer the
beliefs of one group as opposed to another, you're taking sides in a
social conflict but you're not really thinking for yourself and the
distinction between social patterns and intellectual ones would be
meaningless.


>
>
> >
> >> Jc:  I don't think individual competition is a good analogy for evolution.
> >> > That's for sure.  Co-Evolution, is a better explanation of what goes on
> >> at
> >> > the biological level.  Everything that lives, serves some life, in some
> >> > way.  The more life you have, the more life you have.  the organic matrix
> >> > is illimitable and fascinating and humanistic science wants to cut it all
> >> > up into manageable bits, but it doesn't work very well at the ultimate
> >> > levels.  Makes many ontological errors, as any MoQist
> >> > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0waMBY3qEA4> is aware.
> >>
> >> Dan:
> >> Science is in the business of defining our representation of reality.
> >> You can't define reality in its entirety. It's too overwhelming. You
> >> can only take bits and pieces at a time
> >>
> >>
> >
> > Jc:  It's a useful category tho.  Without a firm grasp of what is real
> > versus what is imaginary, our proverbial ancestors woulda been screwed.
>
> Dan:
> That's an interesting theory. Were they screwed because they once
> thought the sun revolved around the earth? Or that they thought the
> earth was flat? To them, that was real. To us, imaginary. How much do
> we take as real today that our descendants will laugh at?
>

Jc:  And how fast is the change occurring?  The

>
> >
> >
> >> Jc:  The individual vs. the community is always an important and ongoing
> >> creative conflict.  You can't have a good community without good
> >> individuals and you can't have good individuals without good community.
> >> The way intellectual evolution fits into all this, is that it seems to
> >> attach to the individual's efforts to solve a social conflict - which
> >> creates the need for new formulations of ideas.     Which boils down to...
> >> respect your degenerates?
> >
> > Dan:
> >> The individual is a high quality idea, just like subjects and objects.
> >> But I think the MOQ would say that's all it is.
> >>
> >
> > Jc:  Well.. that's saying a lot, eh?  From an MoQ perspective, that's all
> > ANYthing is.
>
> Dan:
> I'm not sure about that. Ideas arise from social patterns, which in
> turn arise from biological patterns, which arise from inorganic
> patterns. So no, ideas are not all there is. If so, we could turn a
> fistful of dirt into gold by just thinking it. No?
>

Jc:  Maybe I should have said "from an idealistic perspective"  but

>
> >
> >
> >
> >>
> >> >JC:
> >> > May be.  I think in a video of a speech by Hilary Putnam, he said
> >> something
> >> > very much like that.  The importance of heeding the minority complaint,
> >> or
> >> > something along those lines.
> >>
> >> Dan:
> >> Oh no... it was James T. Kirk. Remember? As he lay dying Spock told
> >> him that, logically, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the
> >> one. But Jim showed Spock that, sometimes, illogical as it may sound,
> >> the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.
> >>
> >>
> > Jc:  I guess it depends upon the one.   and the many.
>
> Dan:
> I was being a little goofy but at the same time I think this is
> important to understand. In a democracy, the majority rules. But the
> minority still has a voice. In fact, there are times when the needs of
> the few outweigh the needs of the many. Take this week, for example,
> and the SCOTUS rulings here in the States.

Jc:  Yes.  Scott Adams make this point in his Native Pragmatism, how
the Haudenosee had stories of inviting one's enemies - the cannibal -
into camp and feeding him.  It gives a whole new meaning to the
Thanksgiving story, eh?
>


> >> Dan:
> >> I think we do ourselves a disservice by clinging to one or the other.
> >> Pragmatically, there's got to be some middle ground that falls
> >> somewhere between the absolute and relativism. Or perhaps we can meld
> >> the two together and come up with more than the sum of the whole.
> >>
> >
> >
> > Jc:  I think that's what is meant by  -- hold your absolutes lightly, as
> > useful ideals, rather than ontological categories.
>
> Dan:
> Why not do away with them all together?


Jc:  because they are foundational for math, science and rationality
itself.  They function as foundations for thought.  They don't exist
before thought, generating reflection.  That's not what I'm saying.
They are intellectual derived foundations to further thought,
irreducible or definable.    Royce made the argument for the absolute
existence of possible error, for instance.  If you think about it,
it's this possibility which drives science and rationality and truth.
But really, why should it exist at all?  As Socrates asked Thaetatus.

A sort of koan, I'd say.




>
> Dan:
>
> I'm pretty sure the uncertainty principle eliminates the possibility
> of absolutes in mathematics. No system can prove itself due to
> fundamental limits.


Jc:  Using a term like "absolute" is a tricky business.  As Pirsig
pointed out in that quote I shared, it has many connotations and
requires some work to come to an agreed-upon definition.   But I think
the work is fruitful and resolving the conflicts brings new light to
old problems.  Even good ol' William had his moments of realizing
this.

James: Not only the absolute is its own other, but the simplest bits
of immediate experience are their own others, if that Hegelian phrase
be once for all allowed. The concrete pulses of experience appear pent
in by no such definite limits as our conceptual substitutes for them
are confined by. They run into one another continuously and seem to
interpenetrate.... My present field of consciousness is a centre
surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious
more. I use three separate terms here to describe this fact; but I
might as well use three hundred, for the fact is all shades and no
boundaries. Which part of it properly is in my consciousness, which
out? If I name what is out, it already has come in. The centre works
in one way while the margins work in another, and presently overpower
the centre and are central themselves. What we conceptually identify
ourselves with and say we are thinking of at any time is the centre;
but our full self is the whole field, with all those indefinitely
radiating subconscious possibilities of increase that we can only feel
without conceiving, and can hardly begin to analyze."

> >>
> > Jc:  Here's the thing, you can't absolutely say that absolutes can't
> > exist.  Because to do so would be to admit the existence of an absolute.
> > Platt made that point, and Royce and Peirce argued it with James also.
>
> Dan:
> I see that as a limitation of language, not an admission of an absolute.
>

Jc:  I'm not certain what the limitations of language are.
Intellectual patterns have no upper limit that I can deduce.   One can
always re-conceptualize more and if we both go "aha", over the same
conceptualisation, then however it happens, language succeeds.   The
term "absolute" is just a sign, like any other.  What it points to, is
the question.


> JC:
> > But
> > Pirsig's MoQ makes it much clearer by explicating LEVELS of experience and
> > it's only in the real of analytic intellect that any absolute has meaning
> > or existence.  It's a conceptual abstraction that serves a function on the
> > 4th level, that's all.
>
> Dan:
> So any absolute is a high quality idea. Is that what you're saying?
>

Jc:   No, I'd say that the term itself can be used in quality ways -
To construct rational systems.  Believing in one's own creation is the
problematic area that science fights and common sense admonishes us to
avoid.  There are big problems with absolutism.  I agree with James
and so does Royce.

"James remains painfully conscious of the rootlessness, loneliness,
and fragmentation of modern life. He thinks the Absolute idealists'
proffered cure for this is as bad as the disease: their attempt to
show that the fragmentation of the sensuous and natural-scientific
life is knit up in an Absolute Mind that subsumes all finite points of
view and connects all things in its battery of universal ideas. For
James this is a monstrous abstraction that conceals the wound it
cannot heal."

What James is fighting against is nothing less than intellectual
arrogance which permeates the halls of power and academia.  A worthy
fight!  Nevertheless, as Wilshire goes on to explain:

"Nevertheless, James feels intensely the disease of alienation and
world-loss, and our yearning, "our persistent inner turning toward
divine companionship."" A hopeful remedy he finds in the panpsychic
world vision of the German polymath, Gustav Fechner. If Absolute
idealism is egregiously thin, Fechner's view is very very thick.
Fechner writes of plant-souls, animal-souls, indeed, Earth-soul. Now
what on earth are scientists like James and Fechner doing speaking
this way? Because they are also philosophical, and they realize that
stock scientific materialism cheats at the start: supposes that Earth
and its members are discrete, inert, or mechanical bodies 'out there.'

Such objectification emerges from, abstracts from, a primal
involvement with things: a being-along-with-fellow-members of the
earth, and it forgets its abstraction and what it abstracts from.
James and Fechner will not forget. They develop a clue in
Aristotle-and in much indigenous and aboriginal thought as well: human
soul is not some nonmaterial entity or spiritual force, but is just
all that the body does. The body not only eats, excretes, copulates,
but it breathes as well, and this breathing is a bridging into the
thinking and feeling that it also does. The Aristotelian formula is:
Soul is to body as sight is to the eye. And there are bodies other
than human ones; in fact, Earth itself is a body."

 The more I read of these progenitors of pragmatism, the more I like
and the more I agree that Pirsig is in the same philosophical boat.
This connection with primal american thought at the basis of American
Pragmatism has been very enlightening to me. Tying William James to WJ
Siddis and thence RMP is a fascinating move.


> Dan:
> Well, again, you seem to be conflating a society with social patterns.
> That's not what the MOQ is on about. While a society is a collection
> of people, social patterns are not.
>

Jc:  If you're just talking about abstract intellectual categories,
you're not talking about the concrete.  We abstract social patterns
from intellectual ones, in order to get a better handle on both, but
we can only talk in the context of the actually lived -  societies.
The social patterns that bind a society together are religiously held.
In the latin roots of the term - re - ligere.  I'm not sure then, how
I can conflate social patterns (religion) with collections of people
since the distinction is very clear in my mind.

> Dan:
> As Rodney King once opined... can we all just get along?


I believe so, yes.  We can.  Whether we will or not is an open question.

Take care,

John