dmb, What you offer up is an impressive bit of philosophology about which I have very little to say other than I plan to listen to the Dreyfus lectures as soon as time allows. And I did seek them out based on the earlier discussions you mention.
I will concentrate instead on what I take to be the critical aspects of your commentary. As you say, I do indeed think that mind arises from matter. I regard life as an emergent property of matter. I regard "mind" as an emergent property of life. As I have stated so many times that I am perfectly willing to call my personal acceptance of this view a "skip of faith". It is a primary assumption; a starting point. It is, I would argue, an assumption held tentatively and subject to change. It says nothing at all really about the nature of matter or material substance. It is merely the conviction that some form of reality exists independent of my ideas about it. I believe that this independent reality is orderly. I believe that humans arise as a product of this reality prepared to detect that order, to see patterns in that order and to use those patterns to reduce uncertainty. That is, we create knowledge and meaning in such a way as to increase the likelihood of replicating ourselves. And by this I mean creating others like us both physically and socially. I fully realize that there is a long history and present flurry of debate into the nuances of these assumptions. While this is all very stimulating, entertaining and amusing is does little to seriously challenge these assumption or to detract from the benefits of making them. If I were pressed to advance a rationalization for making these assumptions I would say, because they stir in me an emotional and asthetic feeling of rightness. I see within them a coherence that is appealing both rationally and empirically. If I were pressed on why I would accept these assumption of over some others I would say because the first argument in the MoQ is over monism versus dualism. The MoQ sides with monism. You suggest some implied dualism when you say, "The dualism exists here in the form of the source of the sense data and the physiological transduction of the data. In other words, the objective reality and the reception of it by the subject." But what is happening is that energy from the environment, (thermal energy, light, chemical energy, etc) is being transduced into electro-chemical energy. Energy changing form is not dualistic. Even matter or the dreaded "material substance" is a form of energy. I would say that materialism, in a broad sense of the term, provides a monism that, as it is being pursued by science, offers a fairly comprehensive view of the life the universe and everything. Thousands of the brightest and best in a wide variety of disciplines over the past 400 years have united in the task of providing explanations of how and why we are here. I see no serious flaws in either the approaches being used, the assumptions being made or the results that poor forth from them. Nor do I think the MoQ is in conflict with this view. In fact I would say the MoQ supports and enhances it. Consider even the secondary issue of levels in the MoQ. We begin as does science with the inorganic level. Within science this level of physics and chemistry was the first to yield its secrets and the best understood. This is so in part because the relationships at this level, inorganic patterns are the most static. Inorganic patterns and the laws that govern them exist in simpler, more stable patterns than at any other level. The inorganic moral order as far as we can tell is invariant. The forces and patterns of space/time and energy are fixed and/or predictable within a very narrow range of probability. At this particular space and time the arrangement of inorganic patterns is of the right mix of patterns and relationships to allow the existence of higher level patterns to emerge. Among these patterns would be the gravitational relationship of earth to the sun, moon and other planets, the mix of chemical elements present on the surface and atmosphere of the planet and a temperature that allows those elements to exist in the three of the different states of matter, solid, liquid and gas. Biological patterns depend upon stability at the inorganic level. While those inorganic patterns do not specify precisely the pattern of emergent biological organisms, they do establish a limit on the range of possibility at the biological level. This is the value of reductionism. It is not that understanding the laws of physics predicts the rules of chess. But the rules of chess are constrained by the laws of physics and biology. They set limits on the kinds of rules that are possible the materials that piece and board can be made of the complexity of the rules etc., etc. Biological patterns are more fluid, subject to change and are able to adapt to change within certain limits. In other words to biological level depends on stasis at the inorganic. We can say all kinds of things about biology without reference to physics or chemistry. But understand the laws of physics and chemistry greatly enhances our understanding of biology and the kinds organisms that can exist and the finds of relationships that can exist among them. I think the MoQ levels break down at this point because both social structure and intellect, even language appears in our species as biological adaptations. Not to mention the inability to define what the intellectual level even is. But nevertheless within the MoQ inorganic patterns are fundamental. You spend a lot of time talking about language related issues from a philosophological perspective. I think much of that debate is misguided. Language, as I just said is a biological adaptation. It allows members of our species to communication complex ideas. It facilitates the formation of complex ideas. But rather than limit the range of our perception, it vastly enhances them. Nor does language as such fix our perceptions into some rigid mold. Language changes and adapts to meet changes in our conception of the world. We add new words and phrases constantly. We change usages and the vary structure of the spoken word to accommodate new concepts. The spoken languages of the world are not so very dissimilar in structure from one another that translations can not be made and the concepts of one culture can be represented to members of another culture suggesting that structure of the spoken word is constrained not just by cultural factors but because the function of all languages is to affect a correspondence between individuals and their common experience of the external world. Much of the function of language centers on symbolic representation of such purely private experiences as emotional responses, sensory impressions and private reflections on past experiences. But humans across space, time and culture have contributed to the construction of a universal mathematical language that is devoid of emotional ambiguity or the confusion of disparate private experiences. It is a language that provides a rigorously thought out and tested description of much of the world we share in common as well as imaginary worlds that are outside of our experience. In the case of science one of its tasks to construct a language that provides ever more precise descriptions of the patterns that make up our shared experiences. Rather than being the kind of blinders you present it to be I think of it as the raw materials from which science and math are constructed. You seem to claim that somehow this view has crippling limitations that render it and those who advocate it blind to some larger truth. You seem to think that the scientific study of the brain for example has nothing of value to tell philosophers about our perceptions and how they are formed. And yet all you seem to offer in return is some vague nattering about esthetics of solitary feelings of oneness based on purely private experience. With regards to the slamming door I think you are missing a critical point. I suspect it is the same critical point that leads you to imagine that we can have experiences that do not depend on sense impressions. We can not. Whatever "perception" you have of the sound of slamming depends on the acoustic vibrations AND your history of past experiences. You can not imagine that anger or wind could be associated with similar sounds if you had not seen and heard those kinds of events paired with similar stimuli in the past. Our perception and our behavior are based on three factors: our biology, our history and the stimuli present at the moment. While this is particularly true of the slamming door example, Pirsig's hot stove a bit different. The perception of the slamming door depends in large measure of the history part of this equation. It depends upon our memory or internal representation of past events. Sitting on a hot stove emphasizes the biological aspects of the situation. Our perception of low quality does not depend so much on our personal memory but the genetic memory of mammals exposed to heat encoded in our genes. Finally with regard to the strawmen you invite me to put in my pipe I will wait until I am down to seeds and stems. In the mean time I would point out that none of those arguments were phrased in the over simplified language of the SOM strawman. The fact that you over simplify the arguments to fit the strawman does tend to argue in favor of your contention that language is little more than a set of intellectual blinders. But Pirsig does not stay that we are forced to wear any particular pair of such glasses. We can trade in one pair of specs for another. We can polish the lenses, wipe away the smudges. Even you with just a little effort can get a new pair. 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