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

[John Carl]

Dan,

My two remaining girls are home for the summer.  My idyllic days of sipping
coffee at the computer in the morning are at an end. I grab what time I
can...



> Jc:  No.  But maybe you could :)  I think it was a comment in Lila's
> > Child.  Too bad Platt's gone.  He always used to chime in with the
> correct
> > attribution.  I rely on my aging memory, but if it's in there, I take it
> as
> > a sign of significance, and its in there.
>
> 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".

> 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.


> 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.



>
> >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.




> > Jc:  I think we treat certain concepts *as* absolute.  That it's more
> > pragmatic to consider truth as an absolute, rather than something
> > relative.  As Royce put it:
> >
> > "For in case I say to you: 'The sole ground for my assertions is this,
> that
> > I please to make them,' — well, at once I am defining exactly the
> attitude
> > which we all alike regard as the  attitude of one who chooses *not* to
> tell
> > the truth.
> >
> > And if, hereupon, I offer a theory of truth upon generalizing such an
> > assertion, — well, I am defining as truth-telling precisely that
> well-known
> > practical attitude which is the contradictory of the truth-telling
> > attitude. The contrast is not one between intellectualism and pragmatism.
> > It is the  contrast between two well-known attitudes of will, — the will
> > that is loyal to truth as an universal ideal, and the will that is
> > concerned with its own passing caprices."
>
> 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.


>
> > Jc:  No, not really.  The fact that observation has a creative relation
> to
> > matter, confirms idealism rather than not.  But what Royce was getting at
> > was absolutizing truth from within a given system.  I think what most
> > people hear when they hear the term is some sort of absolute that is
> > outside of any system and Royce didn't preach that.  His fictional
> ontology
> > makes this point clearly.
>
> Dan:
> In the MOQ, the idea of matter comes before matter.



Jc:  Really?  Comes before in what way?  Chronologically?  There seems to
be an implicit chronological evolutionary structrure, going from the
inorganic to the intellectual so it seems to me that from a hierarchical
moq-view, matter comes before everything.  The big bang is all that matters.


Dan:


> But the idea that
> matter comes first is a high quality idea. The MOQ marries idealism
> and materialism. They are both right in their own limited fashion.
>
>

Jc:  Well I think  agree with you there.  The work to be done is defining
those limits.


Dan:

As I understand it, and to put it simply, the uncertainty principle
> deals with fundamental limits in mathematics. Therefore, to use
> mathematics to demonstrate absolute truth is impossible.
>
>

Jc:  I think the uncertainty principle has more to do with reality, rather
than math.  Math is predicated upon certainty.  The necessity of absolute
truth- relative to math, is what proves the necessity of allowing the
existence of absolutes.


> Dan:
> Well, yes. That's one reason why conforming to some sort of absolute
> seems outdated. I could of course be wrong but I thought that was a
> big part of the MOQ, to show people the fallacy of absolute thinking,
> like subjects and objects being all there is.
>
>
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.  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:
> Disagree. Ants and bees are purely biological. They may seem to
> represent some sort of social structure, but they do not value social
> patterns like human beings. We simply overlay our own attitude on them
> and say it is so.
>
>

Jc:  Absolutely.  And why do we assert so confidently this fact?  Because
the organizations of ants and bees is completely anti-indiidualistic.  The
members aren't individuals, they're more like parts of a machine.  A real
society is one made of up individuals.  Individuals that can choose to be
part of the group, or not.

Dan:
> Speaking of Platt, I remember him saying how the eye cannot see
> itself. Philosophy isn't so much a study of culture as it is the
> regurgitation of dead white men's ideas. Unless of course a person
> actually has something to say that is original and new. Unlikely, but
> possible.
>


discovering something original is exciting, but I get more enthusiastic
over finding perennial connections - that is, the battles that human
societies fight over and over again.

Sorry I'm so late responding!

John