dmb said to John: In the MOQ, there is always a discrepancy between concepts and reality.
John replied: ALWAYS a discrepancy between concepts and reality? ALWAYS??? How do you know this? What possible proof could you offer to make such a statement? I mean, if we all, every person on the planet, just spent all our time conceptualizing every waking moment (in fact, I guess we do) then wouldn't the bare fact of probability offer the possibility that every once in a while, somebody got it right? If so, it would be very difficult to prove, but obversely, it is also impossible to prove contrary. How would you know? dmb says:It seems that you're trying to understand this discrepancy between concepts and reality in terms of the correspondence theory of truth, where concepts are subjective understandings and reality is an external physical structure. Pirsig means something different. In the MOQ, reality is that primary empirical reality, which is to say pure experience. It is that undifferentiated, unpatterned, unstructured flux of experience. Or as the quote puts it, "reality itself" is "ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way". (near the end of chapter 29 of ZAMM) The discrepancy between concepts and reality is predicated on the distinction between them and what's being distinquished are two different types of experience or ways of "knowing". In that sense, concepts and reality are not things we demonstrate through logical proofs or fancy arguments. Those terms refer to categories of experience that we already know. I mean, how do you provide empirical evidence for experience itself? The experience IS the evidence, the fact under discussion. If I said there was a discrepancy between dreaming life and waking life, by analogy, this would be a claim about the qualitative difference inherent to those two states. In this case, we're talking about the inherent difference between the dynamic, rich, overflowing nature of reality and the stable, fixed definitions that are derived from it. The difference between Dynamic and static is also one of scope and size so that the static patterns derived from the richness and thickness of reality will always be a fragment or portion of all that is experienced dynamically. Concepts are "takings" and there are an endless number of possibilities. Rosenthal uses Dewey's example of a college courtyard. Imagine a range of people sitting there thinking about the courtyard and the people walking by. Let's says there is a campus security guard, an architect, a professor of sociology, a young student who just arrived from far, and a 6th year senior known around school as "the thing that wouldn't leave". They sit on a bench together an examine the place. Because of their various perspectives, each of them will "take" something different from the scene. You can imagine how they would see things differently, I suppose, so I won't belabor the point. So whose right? Which perspective is the "right" one or the best one? They're all right and what's "best" depends only on what your goals and purposes would be. In that case, one of them might be the most appropriate but there no real reason to favor one kind of perspective over the others and maybe the best thing to do if you're looking for truth would be to add them up. But even if you spent decades adding up all the possible perspectives, all the concepts that would apply, you'd still never exhaust the dynamic reality itself. You could say reality is much, much bigger than concepts and could never fit into a concept. That's why there's always a discrepancy. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_BR_life_in_synch_062009 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/
