dmb, Outrageous moral nightmare? Self is a static pattern, a useful illusion. How about answering a question: tell me if for you, RMP, or the MoQ, the sense-of-self is anything more than a persistent pattern? Please explain???
Marsha On Apr 11, 2011, at 3:12 PM, david buchanan wrote: > > Horse said to Marsha: > I think Pirsig is using the term 'fiction' here in the same way that one > would use the term 'illusion'. An illusion is real enough in that we don't > have to see it as something that doesn't exist - it just doesn't exist in the > way we think it does. The 'I' is illusory, not fictitious. Big difference. > > dmb says: > Right, Marsha is reading the rejection of the Cartesian conception of self as > a rejection of ANY conception of the self. This rejection is part of > rejecting subject-object metaphysics. Sometimes Pirsig calls this the > metaphysics of substance because Descartes had divided all of reality into > mental substance and physical substance. These are metaphysical posits and > that's what is being rejected, the notion that there is some kind of entity > behind thoughts and things. > But that doesn't mean that Robert Pirsig is a fiction. It just means that he > is made of the same stuff the rest of reality is made of and better conceived > as a complex ecology of processes rather than some essential thing. Like > Nietzsche and James, Pirsig is saying that there is no distinction between > consciousness and content, that there is no entity that does the thinking or > rather that the thinking itself is the thinker. When we say "it rains" we > don't really mean to suggest that some entity separate from the rain preforms > the task of raining. The rain itself is the only "it". And so it is with > thinking. When we say "I think", it's just a figure of speech. It's just > about the grammatical rules of English. > In James's 1904 essay titled "Does Consciousness Exist?", he answers the > title question in the negative. No, as an entity there is no such thing, he > said. Consciousness is a function, a process. Whitehead described this as a > direct attack on the Cartesian self. Bertrand Russell said James's essay > "startled the world" for the same reason. > > But to simply say that Pirsig and you and me and everyone else is just a > fiction not only misses the whole point of what is being rejected, it also > leads to a rather vacuous nihilism. One might as well say that the bombs that > dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima with just fictions and so were the hundreds > of thousand so dead. In a world of pure fiction nothing is right and nothing > is wrong. Shall we say that genocide and mass murder is "not this and not > that"? What would be the consequences if we acted as if that idea were true? > Or, what if we read the MOQ as saying that reality - including ourselves - is > made of values all the way down? What if we acted as if that were true > instead? Should we treat the world and ourselves as static patterns of VALUE > or as a fiction? Do you suppose Marsha's nihilistic reading would have better > consequences? Not me, brother. Even if it did make sense, which it doesn't, I > think that reading is an outrageous moral nightmare. > > > 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 ___ 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
