Steve said to dmb:
...From the dynamic perspective, it is impossible to be out of touch with DQ
since DQ is the very ground of being. To not be in touch with it would be to
cease to exist. We can't be _ontologically_ out of touch with DQ.
dmb says:
Ontology deals with what entities exist. DQ is not an entity or a thing. It is
an event, an experience. The MOQ rejects the metaphysics of substance, both
mental and physical. As James and Pirsig say together, pure experience is
neither mental nor physical because, as James says, inner and outer are
conceptual categories into which we sort experience, not the starting points of
reality, not the ontological realities that make experience possible. I think
you and Matt tend to misread Platonism into the MOQ because you're taking DQ as
some kind of external reality. As you put it, DQ begins where we end. That's
the wrong idea. The right idea is more along the lines of "Thou Art That". Like
I said, "to say one is out of touch with DQ is to say we should be more
sensitive and more responsive to experience as it's felt and lived through, as
opposed to our thoughts ABOUT and interpretations OF experience.
Steve said:
Sure, but surely you don't mean that someone is _literally_ living in the past
and therefore not in touch with the present. The person isn't not feeling her
feelings but only giving them a bad interpretation. So this isn't an answer to
a question about metaphysics. It is an answer to a question about whether or
not we have good concepts, and that question has nothing to do with our
metaphysical relation to DQ which is what it is regardless of what we think
about about it. This is a question about our relationship with "DQ" (the
concept) rather than with DQ (reality).
dmb says:
I disagree. The question is very much about bad interpretations; It's all about
whether or not we have good concepts. This is the point and purpose of
replacing Platonism in general and SOM in particular with the MOQ. The culture
hands us a set of conceptual glasses with which we interpret experience and
those glasses have a blind spot with respect to DQ. Those are the glasses that
produce attitudes of objectivity. That is the set of interpretive concepts that
tell us 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. Not feeling our
feelings has everything to do with it. James and Pirsig are totally sympatico
on this point too. 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 natu
re's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further 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." James says he could never
be a Hegelian precisely because they insist "that FEELING has nothing to do
with the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute REASON". He says that
the one fundamental quarrel with them is their "repudiation of the personal and
aesthetic factors in the construction of philosophy". James thinks it's
impossible to deny that these factors "may be as prophetic and anticipatory of
truth as anything else we have" and that our truest and best philosophies will
be derived by using "ALL our faculties, emotional as well as logical". 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 w
e 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 SOM and the MOQ are rival sets of glasses and the
whole idea is to replace the one that largely ignores and excludes DQ with the
one that puts DQ at the center. The problem (SOM) is being out of touch with DQ
and the MOQ is the solution to that problem. Like I said, those SOM glasses are
the problem; that's what creates the blind-spot to DQ. 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.
Steve said to dmb:
Metaphysically, according to Pirsig you are a collection of static patterns
left in the wake of DQ. That is all I mean in saying that you begin where DQ
ends. ...DQ is primary experience as Pirsig defines it, but DQ can't be _your
own_ primary experience since it precedes "you." You are a collection of static
patterns left in it's wake. It is only after the fact that we infer that there
was a "you" having experience. This is Pirsig's Copernican shift. "You" can't
be out of touch with DQ since it is constantly being created by it.
dmb says:
I see several major mistakes here. You've construed the MOQ's self as separate
from DQ. You have conflated the cultural evolutionary process with the
cognitive process of the individual. And "you" have - once again - spun the use
of a personal pronoun into a metaphysical claim involving the Cartesian self or
the self as a pre-existing ontological entity. These mistakes produce a very
abstract, unrealistic (even bizarre) understanding of what "you" are and of
what "left in the wake" means.
When Hume famously said that he looked for the self and found none, he was
talking about the soul. It's no accident that Descartes got himself out of the
demon's vat only with God's help, you know? And as James opened his attack on
the Cartesian self, on consciousness as an entity, he noted that this
conception of the self was already disappearing from the scene. But there is a
tendency around here to suppose that rejecting the Cartesian conception of the
self is the same thing as denying ANY conception of the self. This is a case
where people get a lot of fancy reasons to go around denying that people exist,
which logically impossible and just plain silly. The MOQ is about people and
how people wrongly tend to think of themselves as something set over against
reality. as separate from reality. That's your first mistake. To say we begin
where DQ ends is to unsolve that part of the problem, to re-assert a very
SOMish distinction in exactly the place where we are trying to get
rid of it. The idea here is to get over the Platonic notion that the real
reality is something outside of us or beyond our experience.
The glasses you wear are a product of evolutionary history. They don't suddenly
pop into existence at each moment of experience. They are old ghosts, a
mile-long chain of boxcars full of inherited creations. Yes, your personal
history will effect the ways in which you take these cultural forms and you'll
add static patterns from your own experience but the forest of static patterns
of which you are composed has been growing and evolving for a very long time.
It grows and you grow dynamically. DQ is the engine that drives the
evolutionary process and this happens bit by bit, as "spur of the moment
decisions" are taken on the basis of DQ. The ability to respond to DQ goes all
the way down to atoms, as you'll recall from the free will debates. But
Poincare and the Zuni Brujo could do it too. This is also how he describes
Lila, whose battle is parable for everybody's battle. Look, DQ is definitely
part of the equation, part of the self....
""If you compare the levels of static patterns that compose a HUMAN BEING to
the ecology of a forest, and if you see the different patterns sometimes in
competition with each other, sometimes in symbiotic support of each other, but
always in a kind of tension that will shift one way or the other, depending on
EVOLVING circumstances, then you can also see that EVOLUTION doesn't take place
only within societies, it takes place within INDIVIDUALS too. It's possible to
see Lila as something much greater than a customary sociological or
anthropological description would have her be. Lila then becomes a complex
ecology of patterns moving toward Dynamic Quality. Lila individually, herself,
is in an EVOLUTIONARY BATTLE AGAINST the static patterns of her own life."
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."
That's why he attacks those SOM glasses and why he keeps hammering away at the
DQ they filter out. See? To the extent that it's not on the conceptual map,
people will tend to reject the experience and stick to the map.
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