Bob, Is this an example of what you were talking about in Ant's video? Dave here coming back and really nailing his points home? Is this what gives you confidence that the MoQ is in good hands? I know you think he is championing your cause and all but surely you can see this isn't helping. Maybe you could give him a little kibitz or something from the sidelines because this really is weak. It begins with taking what I said out of context, and progresses into a the usual romantic rant that doesn't address the points raised. It is full of Dave signature moves and it is weak. I think you deserve better. Krimel p.s. Still waiting for your e-mail. But it keeps getting eaten by my spam filter. Try "Hey Krimel, you big square Muggle" in the subject line.
---------------------------------------------------------- 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] Ok first you left this out: "It is a particular characterization on Descartes' Mind/Body problem." It is one of the basic problems of philosophy. I think I was pretty clear that SOM, as a statement of the problem, was invented by Pirsig. James argued the same problem stated as rationalism versus empiricism. It is also the argument over materialism versus idealism. What I said was that it is the way Pirsig phrases the argument, as subject/object, that frames the problem badly and creates its own platypi in need of slaying. We've been through this several times so you know quite well that I do not think subjects and objects are metaphysically fundamental. In fact I think that they are points of view, that is, completely relative terms. 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] Come on Dave, this is just a rhetorical tactic. It is what you say when you can't really articulate an argument. What have I misunderstood? What is superior in your understanding? I have not now nor have I ever said that subjects and objects are starting points. What I have said is that subjects and objects are not even good terms to use. What Pirsig offers is a first metaphysical cutting of the undefined into Static and Dynamic. This division really does put the MoQ in the position of clarifying the metaphysical foundation of the western world. But rather than advance that cause you want to use it as a tool to regress into superstition. Smugness, clueless, frustrating, hilarious... Jesus, I'm rubber you're glue... Real classy, it certainly arouses the romantic peanut gallery but... As I have said before you can do better and Pirsig deserves better. Krimel said (simplified version): What is it exactly that you think can be gleaned from "mystical" experience? How can some kind of undetectable all pervading awareness is not be supernatural? 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. [Krimel] Are you being intentionally evasive or are you just unable to answer? Even gav should be able to see that this is a really lame response. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] This is exactly what I mean my unfortunate use of the wrong terms. Subject and object are relative terms that describe to points of view. The humans have the option of understanding their interior private states as subjective or they can view themselves as objects interacting in the world. We can tell a first person story like ZMM or we become objects in a third person narrative. This is not metaphysics nor does it imply a particular metaphysical stance. More importantly to point you are skating past is the any set of terms are "just concepts." Pure experience is just a concept. Feeling at one with the universe is just a concept. If we can get clear on this we can possibly begin to start figuring out how to distinguish between good 'uns and bad 'uns. It is not a mater of to conceive or not to conceive it is a matter of how we conceive and how we value our concepts. I think what you have done throughout this post is exactly what James warns against which is confuse concepts and percepts. Are you seriously saying that within the MoQ there is no pre-existing anything? That the world of experience pops out of nowhere instant to instant and without reference to anything preceding, sorts itself into this and that? [dmb] 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. [Krimel] I have expressed a willingness to use something like this as a starting point in the same way James does when he contrasts perception with conception. I think these are fundamental distinctions worth getting clear about. But first you have to understand that James states unequivocally that he begins with parts and works toward wholes. He states unequivocally that perception is the summation of sensory experience. In Bolte-Taylors terms, which you profess to understand, perception is the synthesis of parallel processing. But even if we are together on this point, you are missing something very important. This particular kind of pure experience you keep talking about is not and cannot be what you say it is. While one might have such a pure unclassified experience whatever you say it is, however you describe it, that's not it. Whatever you say about it is a conceptualization of it. Pirsig is pretty clear about this when he goes over the reasons mystics would object to his program. You aren't overcoming the mystics' objections you are just calling the trap you've step into, home. It is simply no good to talk about a world without conception. We can talk about the relative merits of concepts but we cannot talk without them. Concepts are, as James says, a method for making continuous experience discrete. It is making dynamic quality static. As I was staying earlier to John, conceptualization allows us to see static quality as foreground against the background of dynamic quality. It is how we actively make order out of chaos. Individual experiences allow us to detect dynamic quality or change as foreground against a static background of perception. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] Here you seem to be moving albeit unwittingly toward the position that cause and effect are just statements of probability. You retain the romantic need to personify but you are getting closer. The point you seem to miss is that the simplistic view of cause and effect you are beating up on has been dead for 50 years. Only you seem to have the need to resurrect it as a strawman or as a caricature of a position you have not quite figured out yet. But let me add that the day you actually begin to deal with data will be your first step on a journey away from the valley of the shadow of idealism. Because then you will have to show how your assumptions actually amount to anything. How they demand a different interpretation of the data or how they have any effect whatever on current interpretations of data. I think that day will demand an new revelation for you [dmb] 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". [Krimel] I would like to make clear that the chief "scientific" point I have always made is that it is important that any conceptual system retain at its root a level of skepticism. A twinge of self doubt that demands constant re-evaluation. That is the quality that is inherent in science that I find utterly lacking in your position. It is the I think you want to take a set of experience that you call mystical and treat them at face value as indicators of some higher order of metaphysical reality without any skepticism at all. Nevermind that these states can be induced by seizures, strokes, head trauma, psychoactive plants, mental gymnastics and religious observance. Nevermind that those who claim to have them offer very difference explanations of their cause, effect and meaning. In the process of all that neverminding, you wind up embracing and justifying the mindless. 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/
