Matt said to Dan:
The problem I was attempting to elucidate is whether or not a _particular_ set
of intellectual patterns can get in the way of Reality/DQ better or worse than
another. For example, it might be thought that SOM is worse than the MoQ
because the SOM gets in the way of DQ. (I have no idea if this _has_ been
thought, or assumed or elaborated, but it still might be important to reveal
why this may or may not be the case.) _All_ static patterns are, in the same
way, _not_ DQ, and thus a distance from it, which is the point you pressed with
"Intellectual patterns always get in the way of reality. That is the nature of
ideas." ...Your point about intellectual patterns always getting in the way
because of the nature of ideas flattens them out, and suggests that their worth
is all equidistant from DQ, and thus there's no point in distinguishing between
better and worse ideas.
dmb says:
I was covering this same ground with Steve, who was saying that DQ "is what it
is regardless of what we think about about it". But I think the issue is very
much about bad interpretations and whether or not we have good concepts. The
MOQ's point and purpose is to ditch Platonism in general and SOM in particular.
That's what we get in the conceptual glasses handed to us by the culture and
those glasses have a blind spot with respect to DQ. Those are the glasses that
produce attitudes of objectivity, that tell us truth and science should be
value-free, that reality is what it is regardless of how we feel about it and
morality is just a comforting fiction. The glasses we wear are formed by the
history of our culture. He's talking about those SOM glasses when he says,
"It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to REJECT THE PASSIONS,
the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of
nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to furth
er an understanding of nature's order by RE-ASSIMILATING THOSE PASSIONS which
were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of
man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The CENTRAL part." As
you might recall, the MOQ's central task is to expand rationality at its roots
so that even science is no longer to be value-free. As we see in the case of
Poincare, math and geometry have their own kind of aesthetic beauty and
intellectual creativity operates on the basis of intuitive leaps and felt
harmonies.
And THE POINT here is that the MOQ is a rival set of glasses, one that's meant
to replace SOM because of the way it largely ignores and excludes DQ. The
problem (SOM) is being out of touch with DQ and the MOQ is the solution to that
problem. The glasses we wear were forged by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and 25
centuries of Apollonian imbalance, as in Nietzsche's complaints. All of my
intellectual heros have identified this problem one way or another. It's a
cultural criticism that comes in many excellent flavors.
Remember the Cleveland Harbor effect? The SOM glasses are another version of
the static filters he talks about there in terms of maps and charts. The
conceptual filters are contrasted with experience as such, with the dismissed
"facts" and rejected "observations".
"It was a parable for students of scientific objectivity. Wherever the chart
disagreed with his observations he rejected the observation and followed the
chart. Because of what his mind thought it knew, it had built up a static
filter, an immune system, that was shutting out all information that did not
fit. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing."
"If this were just an individual phenomenon it would not be so serious. But it
is a huge cultural phenomenon too and it is very serious. We build up whole
cultural intellectual patterns based on past 'facts' which are extremely
selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don't
throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep
hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe
one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start
hammering on others for a long time before they see it too."
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