On Tues 21 August 2007 7:45:15 AM Ron writes to Dan [Ron] <snip> The greeks invented a metaphysics in which to interpret s/o distinction and thus shaped our perception of it but To me, saying the greeks invented s/o distinction is like saying they created the universe.
If anyone hung in there and read all this, I appreciate it. Hi Ron, Dan and all, Great post! For background I quote from TE Wed 15 August 2007 4:55:08 AM: "Joe, Ron, Ham and anyone else that took part in the "Metaphysics, substance, intellect" string, "I would like to put forth a new, more refined version of the same contemplation I previously interjected. "My intent is to spark a discussion about philosophy and method. [(tangent) imagine instead of "MetaPhysics of quality", "Method of Quality"] "(i think) Pirsig, did somthing amazing. He qualified the "mysical" as a higher (broader) order of thought than the scientific; many people have proclamed this before; but Pirsig, in my opinion, succeeds at making an argument within a logic structure that when contemplated using the scientific method one could only agree with his conclusion, without understanding it. "I am fascinated by the fact that the proceeding was written or' one hundred years ago. ""Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all these drift boulders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years, every brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation,- Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,- is some reader of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer." "From "Plato; or, the Philosopher" Lecture "does any one know for a fact that pirsig read and was influenced and inspired to fullfill emersons work?" [Joe] IMO Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle faced a big question: How do I know? Socrates answered by: questioning people who say they know. Plato answered by: there is a world of ideas we connect with. Aristotle answered by: abstracting the essence from an image in the imagination and giving it intentional existence in the mind. Only from Aristotle’s answer comes SOM. It is not hard for dogma to develop from a clever-not-necessarily-true idea. IMO SOM metaphysics is based on the dogma of intentional existence creating a mind/body S/O division. It ignores the undefined mystical of evolution. As I question S/O, it seems to me it is based on two streams of evolution: Cosmic/O and Conscious/ S evolution. IMO Evolution of consciousness (metaphysics) goes beyond Cosmic (objective) force of gravity. An order of conscious evolution in esoteric literature proposes seven levels. There are subjective arts of movement, of sound, of color, codes of art. Enlightenment suggests subjective (conscious) levels for higher social and higher intellectual evolution. Joe Dan: Subjects and objects are intellectual patterns of values... ideas. So it seems pretty simple to see that ideas come before matter, which Mr. Pirsig has said numerous times: Ron: Dan, I re-read "Clash of the Pragmatists by David Buchanan last night, I hope he does not mind my reproducing a snip from it to post here. "For Rorty, "nothing pre-linguistic is conceivable" (Hildebrand 2003, 186). He shares the view with many that the world as we know it is "text all the way down". Interpretation is bottomless, so to speak. But that is exactly what Dewey and the radical empiricists are willing to defy. It hardly matters whether we call it "pure experience" as James did, the "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" as Northrop did, the "whole situation" as Dewey did or the "primary empirical reality" as Pirsig does. A rose is a rose. The idea is simply that everything follows from that first and most basic experience. All the conceptual distinctions are secondary to that, are derived from that. We are not talking about some other realm or any kind of thing. And this is not meant to suggest that the world as we know it suddenly pops into existence the moment a subject conceptualizes it. We are simply talking about experience before one has a chance to think about it, before it has been interpreted by our conceptual schemes. This pre-linguistic moment of experience has gone unnoticed as James says, because only "only new born babes" and people in extraordinary circumstances have access to pure experience (James 1912, 93). The infant also appears as an example in Pirsig's explanations (Pirsig 1991, 118-9). The "unverbalized sensations" of experience are "identified and fixed and abstracted" into the shapes we recognize as the world of things (James 1912, 94). For adults, arguably like myself, these abstractions have been fixed for so long and are used so automatically and habitually that they are invisible. This habits of mind have developed and evolved over long periods and are inherited by us from the culture in the normal maturation processes, in the process of acquiring language in childhood. I think this explains why SOM has assumed such a powerful role in Western conceptions of reality. The radical empiricists are saying they are not reality, that SOM is a theory that doesn't look like a theory. Its a metaphysical abstraction so old and pervasive that it has become common sense." Ron: I think perhaps where we are missing each other is my lack of describing of where my main focus is on in this concept. For me, The idea that what is being reffered to as "pure experience" as James terms it in refference to a infant, is presented as objects to the subject, even if in a purely spacial relational way (ie. object is close to me, or object is far from me.) when DMB quoted James as saying ""only new born babes and people in extraordinary circumstances have access to pure experience (James 1912, 93). I agree and this is where I say changing this spacial awareness of objects is difficult (unless you consider a full frontal lobotomy easy also and I'm still projecting my own difficulties). I understand your point that all one can ever really know about objective reality is our own ideas about it, I think most of us here can agree to that much. But to say strictly that ideas are the genesis of reality is a reversion to a kind of MOQ Solopsism. I understand Mr. Buchanan, James and Pirsig as saying that ultimatly it is both subjective ideas and objective matter which form the reality we experience. When james gets to the root of this process of culture and knowledge in his description of the infant and "extra ordinary" people, he interpolates a "pure experience" and this is where my focus is on. My argument lies within the projection of pure experience, that even this is subject/object spacial-relationaly based. I think it is important to take note that objectively, we posess many brains within our heads.The autonomic nervouse systen at the spinal chord, the medula oblongota, cerebellum and the several lobes which control the senses not to mention the over develeoped cerebral cortex which some may argue ultimately defines human beings, which is also divided into two lobes. Subjectivly, the brain is just as complex. When it comes down to brass tacks, our brains create the world we live in utilizing a combination of pure objective sensory data and subjectivly recalled stored data of the same source. The brain exaggerates and simplifies stored data for easier recall and compression. Now there are two limits, that of limited memory recall and that of limited sensory data reception, which both play a role in the creation of the universe we commonly percieve. I maintain that sensory limits preceed recall limits. I also maintain that sensory data ultimately preceeds recall data. (otherwise what would we be recalling). This is where I make the distinction between stored preconception and pure objective experience. I maintain that Pure objective experience is s/o sensed for purposes of basic spacial relation before it is relegated to conception and memory recall therefore I see the process as a continuous mixture of objective sense with memory recall then a recommitment to memory stored, feeding back into itself moment by moment. This is why I think Ham and Bo have a point with differing levels of s/o distinction and this is where I base my comments of S/O perception being buried deeper than just the intellectually conscious level first questioned by the greeks. I see the greeks forming a rigid metaphysics based on this intellection whereas eastern cultures veered from this sort of intellectual construct choosing to form a more loosly based s/o metaphysics of oneness not unlike Pirsigs. This is why I comment that dropping s/o distinction is not as easy as dosing and zazen. This is why Ham maintains that the only way to sense reality is relational from data to the data receptor or what he calls value sensability. The Quality moment. to talk of Quality objectivly is projecting a subjectivity on the objective. Quality only has meaning in relation to a subject. I think this is what Bohr was driving at, the fact that absolutly isolating the objective is ultimately meaningless. The greeks invented a metaphysics in which to interpret s/o distinction and thus shaped our perception of it but To me, saying the greeks invented s/o distinction is like saying they created the universe. If anyone hung in there and read all this, I appreciate it. -Thanks Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
