MoQer and All who might be interested, Dave accuses me of "reductionism" as though it was some evil spirit. He invents this Darth Vader version of systems theory, slashes it with light saber wit and has the nerve to summon Pirsig to his aid in the battle against the imagined demons of reduction.
First of all just because you say systems theory is a form of reductionism doesn't make it so. The Wiki on reductionism lists it as an alternative to reduction. Secondly it is absurd to claim that even you are against "reductionism" as a blanket term. Conversation, the use of words, reduces experience into language. I mean I know you aren't terribly good at it but are you actually against it? This is just your usual use of labels instead of reason. I guess you either got tired of calling me SOM and this is your new blanket for condemning things you either don't understand, don't like or just can figure out anything meaningful to counter with. You are using your usual caricature of greedy reductionism despite being shown several times how lame that is. You summon Pirsig to help you presumably because in your confusion you somehow equate reductionism with SOM. But Pirsig only speaks of reductionism once and only in Lila. He is talking about various approaches to anthropological theory in the period before the 1970's. Here is what he says: ------------------------------------------------------------ "What many were trying to do, evidently, was get out of all these metaphysical quarrels by condemning all theory, by agreeing not to even talk about such theoretical reductionist things as what savages do in general. They restricted themselves to what their particular savage happened to do on Wednesday. That was scientifically safe all right - and scientifically useless. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. wrote, 'The very term "universal" has a negative connotation in this field because it suggests the search for broad generalization that has virtually been declared unscientific by twentieth-century academic, particularistic American anthropology.' Phaedrus guessed anthropologists thought they had kept the field 'scientifically pure' by this method, but the purity was so constrictive it had all but strangled the field. If you can't generalize from data there's nothing else you can do with it either. A science without generalization is no science at all. Imagine someone telling Einstein, You can't say "E=mc2." It's too general, too reductionist. We just want the facts of physics, not all this high-flown theory.' Cuckoo. Yet, that's what they were saying in anthropology. Data without generalization is just gossip." ------------------------------------------------------------------ He seems to be condemning exactly what you are doing. But stick with anthropology for a moment during the time Pirsig is writing about, the view was that all human behavior was learned. It was Lockean tabula rasa stuff. Meade claimed that culture was chalk scribbling on upon all of us, blank slates. What was written was somewhat arbitrary. What we become is largely a matter of custom. But custom is just something everyone around us agrees to agree about. What Pirsig is talking about with regards to field research in anthropology needs to be understood in terms of what they were actually trying to accomplish. In order for there to be meaningful theory in any field there has to be a common data set or an agreed upon way to look at the data. The field at the time is talks about was struggling to bring order and commonality to field investigation. What broke anthropology and the other social sciences out of this funk wasn't mysticism it was evolutionary and systems theory. Eckman resurrected Darwin with his demonstration that emotional communication is a universal language that utterly transcends culture. Rituals, marriage, dominance hierarchies, sexual roles, even mythological themes can be seen in a variety of forms in all cultures. It is one thing to note that all cultures produce these things but this leads to the question, why? The answer that Dawkins and Wilson give is that they result from an interaction between our genetic predispositions and our interactions with the world that we find ourselves in. In other words biology plays a role in the forms and structures of human culture. Generalizations can be made and how do we account for them? That is the business of the theoreticians in any field. The attempt to collect field data in a particular way was really just a way of trying to have a common language for theorizing. It boils down to this: field data is perception. Theory is conception. Understanding grows out of the interaction between perception and conception. In the case of theories about emotional communication it was shown that an evolutionary model works better than a cultural model. This is the point where you accuse me of explaining you objection to reduction away with a reductionist argument. But as always to would be missing the point. Conception is derived from and secondary to perception. Concepts are the intellectual level. Perception is mainly physiological. Leonardo's early top down driven drawings of the brain were concept driven just as his later drawing were drawn from the bottom up and more faithful to his perception. I don't think that it is possible or desirable to have either concepts without perception or perception without concepts. The first is just fantasy and the second a blooming buzzing confusion. I was going to pass on your road trip nonsense but it's like you almost get it when you say, "The mechanic and operator are just two perspectives, not necessarily two different people, and they are best when integrated." Which is exactly what I have been trying to tell you. You make this extraordinarily lame point that the narrator in ZMM is a literary devise. Perhaps but have you been reading Strauss or something. Like the book is code and sometimes it means what it says and sometimes it doesn't. Are we now to start looking for hidden messages and determining that for more than half of ZMM Pirsig is talking backward talk? If on the other hand your point is that Pirsig is a clever user of literary forms, perhaps that would account for why he is more revered in literature departments than in philosophy departments. But that really doesn't help your case much. My point has always been that it is harder for romantics to get with the program because their objections to classic thinking are aesthetic. You, gav Platt and Marsha are great examples of this. Not only are your objections to the classical view purely aesthetic, they make the use of reason futile. For example you say this, "Human perception is reduced to transduced energy. It's all about functioning parts." That is almost what I said and almost my actual position but what is missing is critical. If you have been paying attention you would notice that I have insisted all along that "sensation" is transduction or encoding of physical energy into neural impulses. Perception is the synthesis of the parallel process of sensation and memory. Awareness and perception are properties that emerge from the parallel processes that give rise to them. This is in fact what William James claims. Concepts depend on percepts but are not confined to them or necessarily limited by them. Perception depends on sensation but is like wise not necessarily confined or limited by them. Furthermore these processes interact in strange ways. Our concepts can override perception as in the case of Leonardo's early drawings. Our perception can override sensation so that we see the world right side up instead of up side down as it appears on our retinas or we see a whole visual field instead of a visual field with two big holes in it. Obviously, you are pandering to the Aw Gis. Their sycophantic founder seems to see your attempt to talk sensibly as an excuse for gushing romantic clown talk and pretending it's wisdom. But here is a genuine question for you. What exactly do you think "pre-intellectual" means? Is this a state you think would be desirable? Would it be desirable to be in this state all the time or is this a sort of conscious vacation spot where one drops in for the occasional quickie? Krimel 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/
