Krimel said: Subject/Object metaphysics is as far as I can tell something made up entirely by Pirsig.
dmb says:Made up by Pirsig!? Dude, you're responding to a post in which I tried to explain how YOU are operating within subject/object metaphysics. Thus, your denial of it's existence is hilarious. This non-existent metaphysical framework was also the target of James's radical empiricism. John Dewey was also a radical empiricist. I've already quoted a wide variety of sources on this point. Pirsig, James, Dewey, Rosenthal, Stuhr, etc. I mean, the problem of SOM is no mystery to contemporary philosophers, especially not to pragmatists. But you fail to comprehend radical empiricism in James for exactly the same reason that you fail to comprehend Pirsig's version of it. As I've been trying to explain, you're getting confused because you want to understand Pirsig's explanations in terms of the very thing being rejected. You insist on understanding the solution in terms of the problem. To make matters worse, you deny the very existence of the framework you're using. For example... Krimel said: When Pirsig says in the annotation, "...Subjects and objects are intellectual terms referring to matter and nonmatter." It is a statement loaded with problems. First and I can't stress this enough, to make the term subject plural is to misunderstand the problem completely. There cannot be multiple subjects. "I" am the only subject in "my" experience. I make inferences about the nature of others but I can never experience them as subjects they are always and forever objects in "my" experience. "I" can on the other hand experience my "self" as an object. Idealism is clinging to the idea that because all of one's experience as located within the self subjectivity is all there is. It is a regression into solipsism. But matter and nonmatter aren't really issues at all. dmb says:You've missed the point entirely here. When Pirsig says "subject and objects are intellectual terms" he is talking about their secondary, conceptual nature as opposed to subjects and objects as the starting points of reality, the conditions which make experience possible. Radical empiricism says subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience but rather they are derived from experience. They're ideas that follow from experience. You've responded to Pirsig's rejection of SOM as if Pirsig would benefit from a big dose of SOM. It's very frustrating to watch this total lack of understanding parade before my eyes. It's also pretty damn funny. When your smugness is added to this cluelessness, it's downright hilarious. Krimel said: In the ongoing effort to make some sense out of what you are saying, I will ask one more time: What is it exactly that you think can be gleaned from "mystical" experience? I see all kinds of health benefits from meditation, prayer even regular church attendance but I don't think any of these offer insight into how the world works. You claim that consciousness is not emerging from the organic processes found in this time and this place but rather that they are somehow an ever present feature of the cosmos. Please, I am begging you, explain to me how some kind of undetectable all pervading awareness is not supernatural. But my guess is you will do what you usually do, act like Platt and Ham and clam up or disappear. dmb says:Your questions don't make much sense for the same reason, they're being asked from within the assumptions of SOM. The claims being made are being assessed from within SOM and are misunderstood as a result. If subjects and objects are just concepts derived from experience, then what sense does it make to claim that the objective cosmos has awareness. It doesn't make sense and that is NOT the claim. In the MOQ, there is no pre-existing objective cosmos. That's what it means to say that "objects" are just ideas rather than things in themselves, rather than the conditions which make experience possible. These claims can't rightly be understood as solipsism because that position is also predicated on the pre-existing subject, who is then trapped within his own experience. I don't have any doubt that the mystical experience can be good for you but in terms of this explanation, that's not quite relevant. It works in the context of this explanation because it is the moment of pure experience, of pure Quality, prior to the conceptualizations and distinctions imposed on that experience. It is that moment of undivided experience prior to the differentiations such as between mind and matter, subject and object, mental and physical. Since this moment is prior to those distinctions, it makes no sense to ask if it's one or the other. It's neither. In terms of pushing "preferences" all the way down, you have to remember that according to the MOQ, reality is the mythos, an elaborate net of analogies derived from Quality, derived from the primary empirical reality and not a physical stage on which events occur. So the idea is not a claim as to the "real" and objective properties of the physical universe. But the experience from which this scientific picture has been generated is not something a radical empiricist can deny or ignore. But he can look at the data and the facts so gathered and reinterpret them in terms of an alternative set of assumptions, in terms of a non-SOM set of premises. In that sense, the known scientific data is unaltered. It is merely explained differently, understood differently. But the empirical facts remain just that. From the perspective of ordinary scientific materialism the events are said to be a matter of cause and effect while in the MOQ the appearance of cause and effect is the result of an extremely persistent pattern of preferences, extremely persistent patterns of inorganic behavior. This is not to say that subatomic particles have anything like self-conscious awareness or that they make deliberate choices. It's just a way to describe what they do when we're watching. Its just an alternative way to coherently arrange the observed facts. Of course this clashes with the standard picture painted by scientific materialism. That's the whole point. And yet you repeatedly and smugly attempt to counter that point with that very same standard scientific picture. That's like telling a Protestant that he's not a good Catholic. Yea, I know, he'll say. Not being Catholic is the whole point of being Protestant. The root word is "protest". Thanks for asking. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has a new way to see what's up with your friends. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/WhatsNew?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_WhatsNew1_052009 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/
