Marsha asked how patterns and objects differ.
dmb says:
Previously, I noticed that you've used (or rather misused) the word
"reification" to make the same objectionable point, namely that static patterns
are ever-changing and amorphous. Reification is a fallacy, a conceptual error
wherein abstractions are mistaken for real things. You could call it the
thingification of ideas. Plato's forms would be the classic example but this is
also what James and Pirsig are saying about subjects and objects. When they say
that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience but rather
concepts derived from experience, they are saying that subjects and objects
have been reified. They are concepts mistaken for ontological realities, for
real substances.
To say that objects are patterns of inorganic quality is to say that they
aren't pre-existing material realities but rather they are among the many
marvelous analogues we've created in response to DQ. Man is the measure of all
things, not the measurer. That is to say we invented reality and so it's not
pre-existing. Man is a participant in the creation of all things. Every last
bit of it, he says.
Now the experience from which we derive ideas such a rocks is quite real. That
experience is what makes our reality seem so substantial and the idea of
substance works quite well in many situations. But it's still just a secondary
reality, a tool we invented to deal with experience. So is the so-called
physical universe. It's just a very grand and elaborate analogue. Pirsig
reminds us that "substance" or "matter" was invented by the ancient
philosophers. He reminds us that the existence of such a thing is really just
inferred from experience. It's a theoretical entity that is supposed to explain
how the particular qualities set of qualities that make up a rock all stick
together or inhere. Its roundness, heaviness, greyness or whatever are supposed
to be features of a thing, then the thing in itself becomes more real than the
experiences from which they were derived, the original experience that produced
the "thing" in the first place is relegated to "merely" a subjective imp
ression. James and Pirsig are flipping this idea upside down and that's their
Copernican revolution.
And that's how patterns are different from things. See?
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