Ian and Andre, I am convinced. On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 10:09 PM, Andre Broersen <[email protected]>wrote:
> Ian to dmb: > > I'm not convinced that Pirsig's replacement of causation between > objects with patterns of preference involving conceptual patterns > actually makes the explanation of causation any easier. > > I came across this problem my freshman year of high school. I wrote about it as a subject for an English class, and sort of expected some interest or intrigue from my teacher over what I termed "the fallacy of cause and effect". All he wrote on the top of my paper was that my "Hume-ian stance wouldn't get me very far if I was ever brought up before a judge for "causing" an accident. Damn pragmatists. I'd never even heard of David Hume yet. But basically, any deemed effect has an infinite number of causes. For any given effect, we can postulate all of cosmic history as a cause. Our intuition tells us the most important aspect of a cause to assign, but there's no reasonable way to rigorously define what is in fact, a Quality judgement. It was only when I encountered Pirsig's thinking that I saw a way out of this logical conundrum, and felt somewhat proud that I'd stumbled across the same problem he did with his infinite regress of hypothesis. For what is a hypothesis but a theoretical cause? All this to say that I am satisfied that the MoQ solves this problem in broad outline, but for a rigorous metaphysical solution I think we need to add Peirce and Royce's philosophy of a triadic interpretation. > Andre: > This is interesting Ian. Now you are trying to use the MOQ's 'patterns > of preference' to keep on explaining causation. Pirsig suggested to 'strike > 'cause' from the language and substitute 'value'[then] you are not only > replacing > an empirically meaningless term with a meaningful one;you are using a term > that is more appropriate to actual observation'(LILA,p107) > > Mr. Pirsig is exactly addressing that which you are unclear about. As you > state in > your next paragraph when you keep on saying 'that causation isn't itself > very clear'. > It seems that you are unclear about it because you 'never experience it in > any way'. > (LILA,p106). > > I agree Andre. > Ian: > Paul Turner wrote some good stuff on this from a Buddhist perspective - > causation as > dependent arising. I must dig it up. > > Andre: > Yeah, Paul is a clever young man. A nice place to start is the second verse > of the Tao > Te Ching. > > One line I'd like to take out as it nicely ties in with dmb's response to > John about > 'the Giant': "Therefore having and not having arise together'. It is a > no-two dualism. > > Now there I'm a little confused. Would you mind explaining a "no-two dualism"? John 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/md/archives.html
