Hi Matt
I needed to digest your questions for a while before tackling them. Some
very profound ones, indeed. Thanks for taking the time.
Matt:
> 1) Metaphysics is the general framework, or understanding, or set of
> assumptions, that people unconsciously (with various degrees of
> self-consciousness) interpret, or see, or live in the world. As an
> activity, it is the attempt to make the unconscious self-conscious
> (this activity is also known in some circles as "philosophy").
>
> 2) Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to display
> the basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings of reality (this
> activity is also sometimes known in some circles as "Platonism," and
> in a few circles the acronymic "SOM").
>
> Magnus said: First, I'd like to remove the SOM from your 2nd
> definition above. SOM is just one of many different such
> underpinnings of reality (in which the S/O division is primary), and
> one which I as a Pirsigian think is incorrect. Not sure if
> "Platomism" would follow.?
>
> Matt: No dice. One of our disagreements, then, is that you think M2
> is a branch of philosophy that you can do without being a target of
> Pirsig's critique in ZMM. I think that, while technically true
> there's more than one way to be a Platonist, Pirsig's journey in ZMM
> was from the contemporary S/O dilemma to the more deeply rooted
> problem of dialectic, "the parvenu." I think SOM is paradigmatic of
> modern (post-Cartesian) philosophy, but that it has first been
> infected by the larger problem of the Platonic search for basic,
> universal, ahistorical underpinnings to reality-as-such, a search
> that given the production of individual disciplines of inquiry into
> how stuff in reality works (physics, psychology, history, etc.) will
> naturally give way to the production of a method--the dialectic.
> This is Pirsig's enemy in ZMM, and it is an enemy that is
> multifaceted in intellectual history.
>
> So, I suppose, if you'd like, you can be a Platonist without being a
> SOMist (though Whitehead would've thought that was a step back). But
> as a Pirsigian you should avoid the whole thing.
I'm a bit unused to changing world views back and forth, I have to
re-read both M1 and M2 now and then to re-grasp what they were.
You say that SOM is more or less implied by M2, and I would still
disagree, but that may be me failing to remember Pirsig's critique in
ZMM sufficiently. Are you saying that, given the "scientific method"
from ZMM, you *will* end up with SOM?
I realize that the scientific method would hardly produce something like
the MoQ, not at first anyway. But hasn't the scientific community
already realized that SOM is K-O:d and past the count of 10 by now? It
hasn't yet come up with anything like the MoQ, but after following
Marsha's great advice and saw Mindwalk, what was called the "systems
view" towards the end of the movie sounded suspiciously like the social
level of the MoQ. So I'm not convinced the scientific method will never
get there.
> Magnus said: First of all, it does seem very logical to assert what
> you say "that if you can't give a physical description of a thing, it
> doesn't exist". However, the very word "metaphysics" somehow escapes
> that assertion with its meta prefix. .. Now, here's where my version
> of metaphysics comes in. These different universes have different
> laws of physics. However, they would all have the same metaphysics.
> The most important split of each universe is the DQ/SQ split, i.e.
> the division of what's always changing and what's static. They would
> also have the same static levels as we see here (which is why I
> persist using so generic definitions of them).
>
> Matt: Sure, the "meta" certainly does seem to imply something before
> physics--but I can still give a physical description of all the
> utterances/inscriptions you use to describe how metaphysics is
> outside physics. Why do I point out this obvious-hood? Because your
> version of metaphysics sounds pretty much like Kant's transformation
> of Platonism--trying to find the transcendental outlines of
> existence. In trying to circumvent all the speculative, metaphysical
> nonsense of preceding generations, Kant said that, rather than
> explain kinds of existence (rather more poorly than other disciplines
> like the New Science), philosophy needed to show what was needed for
> existence to exist: what are the underpinnings, the structure on
> which this house exists?
>
> There are a few problems with transcendental philosophy, but the
> broad thought--what _has_ to exist for us to be able to do all of the
> things we are doing--is largely something that can be done. But
> there is an infinite regress problem that arises if you aren't
> careful: unless you are going to posit a non-physical kind of
> existence--which is a dangerous proposition--when somebody asks you
> what kind of existence the DQ/SQ split has, one of the few routes
> people feel comfortable anymore with is "it has the existence of a
> metaphysical proposition," i.e. it's something stated by people
> (which is Pirsig's answer with "Western ghosts"). This, it is true,
> creates a circle that some people think is damaging--people need to
> exist for metaphysics to exist, which needs to exist for physics to
> exist, which needs to exist for people to exist--but some of us think
> that the circle becomes damaging and silly in equal measure: only by
> taking it too seriously. Part of what the word "univers e" means is
> "that which would exist whether people do or not" and the only sense
> in which the universe is dependent on people is the sense in which
> "universe" is a word, and only people use words.
>
> So, Magnus, the question that will help elucidate what you think
> metaphysics is is: what kind of existence does the metaphysical
> distinction DQ/SQ have?
Ouch! That was a big one. First of all, I certainly do *not* think it's
just what people feel comfortable with, "a metaphysical proposition".
I think it's very much like "Gravity" vs "the law of gravity". "The law
of gravity" is what people have stated to be able to transfer the
physical "Gravity" into their models, i.e. representations of the
physical world.
In the same way, the DQ/SQ distinction has two forms, one as a
metaphysical proposition to enable us to discuss it, and one as the
primary existence, independent of people.
Not sure if this tells you anything interesting about my thoughts about
metaphysics. However, the question sparks much more thoughts than this.
To find out what kind of existence the DQ/SQ split has, I'm trying to
imagine different kinds of universes.
The first that comes to mind is ours right after the big bang.
Gazillions of particles, not yet cool enough to form atoms, just bounce
around and everything that is created, is immediately destroyed again.
In this existence, there's actually not much of a DQ/SQ distinction,
because it seems it's *only* DQ. However, to start dividing things into
subjects and objects makes much less sense. And at a 2nd glance, you can
see that the "stuff" follows very static rules, the physical laws of
this existence.
After this, imagine the existence in a computer, and to start at the
beginning, let's imagine a computer with just memory and CPU. There's no
disk, network or other connections with the outside world. This CPU
reads instructions from the memory and executes those instructions, in
turn changing the memory. So the entire existence in this universe can
be described by the state of the memory and the rules of the CPU. If we
look at this universe in terms of the DQ/SQ division, we see that it's
extremely static. There's only one thing happening at any one time, the
interaction between different "stuff" (memory cells) are very limited.
The reasoning about the DQ/SQ is here quite similar, i.e. you can only
see one of them, but this time we can only see SQ, mostly because the
very idea with a computer is that it should be reliable. The
constructors have made their best to exclude DQ from the computer.
Comparing these two universes, and thinking aloud while I'm doing it,
I'm trying to answer your original question: What kind of existence does
the DQ/SQ distinction have? Well, I'm still not sure, or lack the
knowledge to express it, but the first that comes to mind is rather
another question: Why is it (the DQ/SQ split) important? What makes one
universe better than the other, and better at *what*?
Answering that question leads me to the "evolutionary path" I coined in
my essay ~10 years ago, but I've seen it used somewhere else as well. An
evolutionary path is something that may (and probably will) lead to
something we would call life. And at the base of that path, there's a
"suitable" mix of DQ and SQ. It must be dynamic enough to grow, and at
the same time static enough to last.
So, why is the DQ/SQ split important? Because the existence of an
evolutionary path depends on that split being suitable.
But that just leaves the original question hanging. What kind of
existence does it have? I really can't imagine an existence without it,
can you? I mean, anything that *exists* can either continue to exist,
seize to exist, or transform into something else. Isn't that implicit in
what we mean by the word "existence"?
So, I guess my final answer would be:
It's implicit in any existence, but doesn't exist outside existence.
Hmmm... I guess this would be true for the S/O split as well, and any
other split imaginable (which may take me to M1?). But the DQ/DQ is
still the most important one with regards to evolutionary paths.
> Matt said: Does it work because it is true, or is it true because it
> works? Pragmatists think that's a pointless question, but it is
> basically what Platonism, over the historical dialectic of two and a
> half millennia, has reduced to.
>
> Why is it pointless? Because _how would you tell the difference_?
>
> Magnus said: I would say the MoQ answer to that is to ruthlessly
> demote what philosophers are currently doing to "philosophology",
> i.e. to discuss different philosophies. It simply realizes that it
> takes a leap of faith to embrace any metaphysics, regardless of
> whether it's SOM, the MoQ, or the logical land where philosophers
> discuss philosophies.
>
> However, it's still not possible to tell if it's the correct
> blueprint. As in science, it's only possible to reject a
> hypothesis/metaphysics, which is probably why we here at MD too often
> end up pointing fingers and stating how wrong others' points of view
> are.
>
> Matt: Sure, it is easy to make fun of academic philosophers for their
> vices, and in fact it makes great rhetorical sense to make fun of
> them because Pirsig does. Unfortunately, the demotion doesn't pass
> muster with me as I've worked quite hard to pinpoint that exact area
> in Pirsig's writing as his weakest. (Particularly in
> "Philosophologology" in the MoQ Forum.) I won't go on one of my
> little "Save the Academics" rants here since we all know, like
> appearances and whales, they do need to be saved. But what I would
> like you to notice is how little the one has to do with the other in
> the movement of your line of thought: what does the difficulty of
> answering the question "Does it work because it is true, or is it
> true because it works?" have to do with philosophers discussing
> different philosophies? The question is one that you could pop on
> anyone at almost any time to make them stutter, with no utter
> connection to whether the person was preoccupied with the
> philosophies of their predecessors (Pirsig's
> philosophy-reduced-to-philosophology, which more showed how little
> Pirsig knew of the anglophone academic scene). You wouldn't need to
> know anything about Plato or Kant or the history of philosophy, you
> wouldn't need any historical sense at all to understand the question
> and be able to struggle with it.
>
> However, there is a connection between the impassibility of the
> question and your "leap of faith." That connection, however,
> requires you to think that the question is forced on us by something,
> like reality itself. It requires one to think that the question is
> deep and real and forced, which when one finally capitulates to the
> impossibility of its answering, requires one to start talking about
> "leaps of faith."
>
> As I understand it, leaps of faith are things taken where there are
> no lines of reasoning linking a section of professed beliefs to the
> rest of your beliefs--it's a chasm the yawns before the intrepid
> explorer of background assumptions, or foundations to reality, one
> that cannot ever be explained without falling into its depths, ne'er
> to return. I, however, don't think there are many real leaps of
> faith, fewer still philosophical or metaphysical ones. The ones I'm
> acquainted with all have to do with love, divine or fallen, and
> rarely do we find a person Greek enough to fall in love with wisdom
> anymore (which in the Greek is divine and unknowable).
>
> I think most philosophical exhortations of "leaps of faith" stem from
> a confusion, or rather conflation, of the intractability of a problem
> or question with its depth in the human condition, its "forcedness."
> I don't think there are any natural questions because I think people
> are the only ones who can ask questions and people were the ones who
> created language, which means that we were the ones that created the
> questions. If we created them, then we created them for specific
> reasons. If we learn those reasons (through a sense of history),
> then we might loosen the hold of the questions if we also come to
> understand that we live in a different context, one that doesn't find
> those reasons persuasive. It is no "leap of faith" on the part of
> those philosophers who choose to steep themselves in intellectual
> history--they are searching for something just as surely as those who
> don't, but they have been led, for various reasons of which the above
> is only one example, to think th at an historical sense will help
> them.
>
> So, Magnus, my question would be, why do you think we need any leap
> of faith at all? I see an intractable question and think it stupid
> and withdraw it. You see an intractable question and think it
> powerful and producing of blind stabbings in the dark. If it is
> impossible to know a piece of universal, reality-scaffolding when you
> see it, then why do we need to look for them if we have all the
> regular pieces of reality that we need? Is it just because you'd be
> bored if you didn't? It's fine if that's true, but that isn't a
> compelling reason for others. ("Well, I finished putting in 10 hours
> at the steel plant. Time to do some metaphysical speculation because
> if I don't, Magnus will get bored.")
I think I know what you mean by intractable questions. My student
friends used to come up with various such "constructed contradictions"
that were pointless because they were impossible to appear in our
reality anyway.
And ruthlessly demoting philosophers may not be correct wording for what
I meant. What I meant is that we're all sitting in different boats. We
MoQers are sitting in the MoQ boat and are looking at the world from our
point of view, philosophers are sitting in their boat and most of them
are digging in intellectual history to make their boat bigger and better
suited to withstand storms.
However, I get the feeling some philosophers think they're on terra
firma when they ask questions. I guess this is what you meant by your
language paragraph above? Such people don't think they need any leap of
faith.
But, when we realize there is no terra firma, the original question
loses its meaning, because there is no way to assert the correctness of
any of the boats rocking in the ocean. However, it does make a leap of
faith necessary.
> Magnus said: 2. The first definition either assumes that metaphysics
> as an activity is a personal endeavor, or that all people share the
> same unconscious assumptions about our reality. The former doesn't
> sound as something we should (nor could) discuss with other people,
> and it doesn't take much reading here on MD to realize that the
> latter is false.
>
> Matt: Yeah, endlessly repeating the definitions at the head of each
> post has made me realize that I forgot an important function to the
> activity of philosophy/metaphysics-1: the changing of the general
> framework, or understanding, or set of assumptions that we interpret,
> or see, or live in the world.
>
> All people certainly do not share the same assumptions, unconscious
> or not, about reality (though, I would hasten to add, most of our
> assumptions are the same). That is certainly not the case. I think
> there is an important point in saying that metaphysics _is_ a
> personal endeavor, and the most important counter-example to your
> pessimism about that is, first and foremost, Pirsig: what else was he
> doing in ZMM? And second, and more generally, Socrates: "know
> thyself;" "the unexamined life is not worth living." The first
> definition was simply to recall the Socratic impulse to philosophy,
> which itself had a strong reformist ring to it: in the communication
> of how we think to both others and ourselves, we shall change how we
> think as those ways hazard up against other, possibly better, ways.
So, if I do subscribe to M1, I can continue trying to convince other
people about the correctness of my position? I could live with that. :)
Magnus
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