Started that I started the beginning of the class

three months ago talking to you about

What it what the problem was that I was trying to address?

and

The fundamental problem was the problem of belief systems

and

the issue is was

what precisely constitutes a belief system and

Then a secondary question was why are people so inclined to

even engage in conflict to Maintain and Expand their belief systems

and then maybe a sub question of that and is there an alternative to conflict with regards to belief systems and

then the last issue

Was something like well. Is there a way of judging the relative quality of belief systems?

And so those are all very very complicated questions, I

mean the first one is something like

How is it possible to understand the structures by which we orient ourselves in the world the second one is something like

What's the pSychological significance?

Precisely of those systems. What role does it play in?

psychological health and maybe also in Social health

the next one is

can you make a [non] [relativistic] case when you assess an array of different value systems and

then link to that is is it possible to

hierarchically organized value systems in

The manner that's justifiable, so that something can be reasonably considered in

a superior or subordinate position

now the last question

Drew my attention because because of the implications of the first set and the last

question drew my attention because I

Was trying to sort out the metaphysics in some sense of the cold war?

the question was was this just a battleground between

two hypothetically equally

appropriate belief systems which would could be a morally immoral relativistic perspective right it's belief systems are arbitrary and

So combat between them is in some sense inevitable and even more to the point there isn't any other way

around the

discontinuity in some sense other than

combat or

subordination because there's no way of

adjudicating a

Victor because there's no such thing as victory if there's no way of ranking value systems. It's arbitrary

As a frightening prospect because it means that if you have a value system, and I have a value system

And they're different and they're different

[I] mean we can talk or you can subordinate yourself, or I could do the same

But there's also no [reason] why we shouldn't just engage in Flat-out

Conflict

now it's complicated in the modern world obviously by the fact that conflict can become so

[untraveled] that it risks destroying everything and that doesn't seem necessarily to be in anyone's best interest unless

Your interest haps happens to be in destroying everything and certainly there are no shortage of people whose interests tilt in that direction

Alright, so the first question was well. What does it mean to have a belief [system] and

That's a very complicated problem, and I think

It's a subset of the question of being

Maybe you can break the question of being into two

domains

Which we've done in this class, and you could say well, you can assess being

From the perspective of what exists and then you can assess being from the perspective of how?

You ought to act?

so it's like you walk into a room and you can describe the furniture or

You can determine how your going to conduct yourself in the room

Maybe it's the difference between a play and the stage setting for a play now

the Modernist

Perspectives Roughly speaking is that the fundamental reality is to be found in the description of the furniture?

So to speak in the description of what is that's the scientific?

process

[and] the scientific process seems to involve

the stripping off of the subjective

from perception and to some degree from action and

the extraction of the commonalities across

perception as a means of

delineating the Nature of reality

Now obviously that's a [very] powerful

process, and it has many advantages, but exactly what it is that

science is doing is not precisely clear one perspective might be is that

we are

genuinely

Discovering the Nature of objective reality [and] perhaps even the nature of reality itself

but

There are some problems with that perspective

one of them being that

The scientific process seems to strip the subjective from the phenomena. It does that technically right?

I mean you have [a] hypothesis about what something is and you have a hypothesis about what something is and you have [a]

hypothesis [about] some [what] something is and we undertake a number of procedures to assess what the

Fundamental phenomena is and then we look across our perceptual set and we extract out the commonalities

And we dispense with everything that is superfluous everything that's merely subjective

So what you feel about the chair is not relevant to the objective existence of the chair and so it

eradicate subjectivity, and that's a very useful process because it does seem to enable us to

Grasp reality in a fundamental sense more profoundly, but it leaves the subjective behind and maybe that's a problem

Because it annoys okay, okay? Thank you. [what] [if] I just didn't alright appreciate it, so

so then the issue might [be] well is something you retrieve ibly lost if you dispense with this objective and and

also, how

Deep a hole do you dig when you dispense with this objective?

and

I think that that's

intrinsically

associated with the

Problem of the relationship between is [an] [dot]

because

That's an old

Philosophical conundrum, I think first put forth by D. David hume

Who made the claim that?

No matter how much you know about something from an empirical perspective?

You cannot use that as an unerring guide to action in relationship to that?

To that empirical object or set of empirical objects and people it's a tricky [issue]. You know because obviously you can use empirical

information to inform your decisions

But I think

But the problem is is that there's multiple pathways of action that are implied by any set of data that seems to be the fundamental

Problem, it's something like that. Is that you can't draw a one-To-one

Specification between the empirical district description and what you should do about that and like maybe an [example] is

But you can gather a lot of information about aids

and you can gather a lot of information about cancer and you can gather a lot of information about educational outcomes and

Economic outcomes and so forth but it isn't obvious. How you then use that?

empirical information

For example how to guide policy decisions because you might say well, how much money should we spend on education?

compared to cancer prevention and how much money should be spent on cancer prevention compared to curing aids and or

Addressing disease in the third-world country what happens is that the set of variables that you?

Encounter while trying to make your empirical calculation get to be so massive so rapidly that there doesn't seem to be any

Logical way of linking them to a behavioral outcome now. It's kind of associated with the postmodern conundrum as well

Which is well if you have a set of data, and it could be a literary work without better

There's a very large number of interpretations that you can derive from [that] set of data

And there's no simple way of deciding which one is going to be canonical

and so it isn't it I think the reason that you can't derive a naught from an is is because you run into something like

Combinatorial explosion it's like you have an infinite [number] of facts at your disposal

Roughly speaking and then another infinite number of ways that you can organize those facts and that

massive array of facts and and

[Andrey] categorized facts doesn't tell you what to do in a given situation

and so maybe the question of what to do in a given situation is a different domain of question and

I believe that to be the [case]. I think it was Stephen Jay gould who talked about religion and science as

- I think he called them different

Magisterium to different fundamental domains that and that each had their realm of operation and one was the

description of the objective world obviously that's on the scientific end and the other was the realm of ethics and so you could put

Religion Mythology narrative the humanities all of that history even for that matter to some degree into the into the

ethics

Category and

because I don't see a

[straightforward] way of

Taking a set of facts and then transforming them into a behavioral compulsion

then I do think that these two [things] are reasonably regarded as overlapping and

intrinsically

associated but

But technically and philosophically

separable

[alright], so then then the next question emerges well if they're separable if there has to be a

domain of inquiry into the structure of [values]

What might that look like?

like how is it that you would understand the

psychological and sociological

phenomena that are associated with a Moral stance

[Howhow] would you understand the details of that and then even more to the point is there any way of

subjecting different sets of ethical interpretation to

Testing so that you can judge their comparative validity because that's sort of the way out of Moral relativism

Roughly speaking. It's like

First you make the proposition that there are value structures and that they're independent from empirical investigation

and then the next is that you investigate the possibility that you can compare and contrast different structures of ethics and

Draw some sort of conclusion. That's not merely arbitrary

Now it might be turtles all the way down. That's how the old joke goes right, but

But maybe not then I was interested in that again because I thought well are we fighting the cold war

merely because we're having an argument or

is

there some

Manner in which one of these systems can be just determined to be wrong and of course

There was more weight behind that query

because

The soviet system and the maoist system and and the system. That's in place in North Korea

were not only

Predicated on different assumptions than in the western system, but they were also extraordinarily murderous and so that seemed to add additional

Weight [to] the to the sequence of questions

so

I was reading young at the time and young was carl young was

fundamentally I would say a psychologist of narrative of story and

and

He he outlined this

He outlined the idea for me that

people inhabited Stories Roughly speaking

He said actually they inhabited myths and even more to the point whether they knew it or not

They inhabited archetypal myths or even that they were possessed by them

And so it was the first time I'd really come into contact with the idea directly put that

there was a direct relationship between the

structures that you use to orient yourself in the world and

stories, and so then I started to

assess

the fundamental elements of stories what what - story looked like and

while I was doing that that was informed by a number of other things that I was reading about including a

set of I

Read the Neuroscience literature with regards to information processing fairly extensively

And that introduced me [into] a whole set of other ideas including cybernetic ideas which have been incorporated into what I was

describing to you, and this basic cybernetic system is a

system [that] has [a] starting point in a system that [has] an [endpoint] and

A system that has a subsystem that monitors progress or deviation from progress

Along the pathway to the endpoint, and I thought well [that] looks a lot like a story

Or a map that's another way of thinking about it, and I thought okay

Well that's where the overlap is and the fundamental story is something like it's very [straightforward]. It's

it's also the frame that you inhabit when you conceptualize the world and narrow and

Narrow and simplify the world which you have to do because it's so complex because you have this infinite number of facts that

Are laying around you well so what are you doing? Well? You're a mobile creature a living creature not a static information processor and

You're targeted you're a targeted creature, and otherwise you wouldn't move

Right to move is to be a targeted creature because you have to move towards something or away from something so the targeting is built

Right into the fact that you're a mobile creature, and then you might say well

What do you target [and] answer to that is well, you target?

Target you could say you target what you aim for but?

Then you could say well you you aim for what you want you target your desires

And then that leads you into a discussion of the underlying neurobiology essentially you bring to the table a set of inbuilt

desires and

the targets that you pick

Have to address the fact that those desires exist and the desires are actually grounded in Necessity

and this is this is a sidebar, but this is where I think piaget theory is weaker than it should be because

piaget and you know I'm a great admirer of piaget believed that the

Human infant came into the world with a fairly primordial set of reflexes mostly sensory motor reflexes and then bootstrapped

Him or herself up on the basis of those reflexes in the sociological in