Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id IAA26876 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 3 Aug 2001 08:09:26 +0100 From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 20:40:13 -0500 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Macguffin Message-ID: <3B69BAAD.17027.25F6BFF@localhost> In-reply-to: <3B69FA0E.369E2D80@pacbell.net> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 2 Aug 2001, at 18:10, Bill Spight wrote:
> Dear Joe,
>
> > > > Neither is the word "giraffe" really a tall, long-necked,
> > > > four-legged, leaf-eating african denizen, but the word stands
> > > > for, that is, symbolically represents, its referent, as does the
> > > > personal pronoun.
> > >
> > > And what, pray tell, is the referent for that "I"?
> > >
> > For you, it is that dynamically recursive conscious self-awareness,
> > that emerged from your material substrate brain as you developed
> > from infancy, which asked that question. For me, it is the one that
> > answered it.
>
> But that "I", for me, depends on my brain, and could not have been a
> giraffe. That's the illusion I was referring to.
>
The fact that the self depends upon its material substrate brain for
its existence is a point in favor of the existence of the self, not an
argument against it.
But your existence is not an illusion, for existence is an a priori of
efficacy. To do, one must be. You could not have chosen to ask
an intentional, self-referent question coded in a symbol system,
and then actually done so, without existing as an intentional, self-
consciously aware, symbolizing entity with free choice possessed
of a modicum of causal efficacy. Not only that, but let's look at the
statement "the idea that there is a self is a delusion". Well, either
there is a self or therer isn't. If there is a self, then the statement is
true, and there is no delusion, If there isn't a self, however, there
would be no one to be deluded, and delusion requiring a deludee to
exist as delusion, once again, there could be no delusion. There is
no wriggle room between the absurdity-killing horns of this viciously
lethal logical dilemma. Some people maintain that the self is a
construct people may use in some situations and not in others,
without coming to grips with the consequences of the answer to
the question of who constructed the construct, and who chooses to
or not to use it in particular situations. Then there are those selves
who self-contradictorally deny that selves - including their own self -
exist, and therefore not only display incoherence (for when one
rejects logic, as one does when one insists that the insister
doesn't exist - the very definition of self-contradiction - one cannot
even argue a position, for one would have to use the selfsame logic
one has already rejected in order to do that), but in addition display
their ignorance of their own incoherence; in other words, not only
are they nonsensical, but they are oblivious to this fact. Most of
these people, who reject the evidence of their own senses and
cognitions to assert what cannot be if they are even able to choose
to accept or reject such apodictically self-evident evidence, are in
memebotic thrall to an eastern religious meme which imposes its
own filters to logic, reason and rationality, much as a certain
western religious meme imposes the same filters regarding
evidence for evolution. Such people, even more self-
contradictorally, are emotionally atteched to the delusion that they
do not exist; in other words, they have bizarrely bound up their self-
esteem, their self-concept, even their sense of self-worth, with the
religios dogma-based fantasy that they, as selves, do not and
cannot exist. All one can do when one confronts such people, who
are actually self-deluded enough to spend their selves in the
service of denying that they even possess them, is to sadly shake
one's head and walk away, consoling oneself with the thought that
dinosaurs could not survive a novel physical environment, and that
perhaps ideas which confront evolving knowledge, such as
nonselfism and creationism, will mercifully (for the sake of those
who would otherwise become infected and inflicted by such
transparent fallacies) follow the same course.
> Best,
>
> Bill
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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