Hey Dan, Matt, Abbot, Costello and all:
How about if I push the reset button? Scratch Don's dog dish and the
hypothetical tree. Let's talk about the nature of objects less complex than New
York City. Let's look at the formation of objects and the idea of object
permanence as it relates to empirical reality. Let's get back to MOQ basics and
otherwise take a couple of baby steps.
"“If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated that
he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to Dynamic
Quality [the primary empirical reality] he will soon begin to notice
differences and then correlations between the differences and then repetitive
patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months
old that he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously
complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an object
to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It
will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience."
dmb comments:
The object is derived from what we notice in experience, especially the
similarities and distinctions that repeatedly appear. We learn to deal with
empirical reality by way of these derived objects even before we can speak. And
because they're so basic and because these "objects" are taken from and married
to what we notice in experience, it's tempting to confuse the object with the
empirical reality itself. That's what SOM does. It says subjects and objects
are the causes or conditions that have to exist for experience to arise in
first place. Pirsig's baby illustrates the reverse idea, that experience comes
first and objects are secondary formations. Objects are produced by a chain of
deductions, he says.
"Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values called an object and found
this pattern to work well he quickly develops a skill and speed at jumping
through the chain of deductions that produced it, as though it were a single
jump…in a very short time it becomes so swift one doesn’t even think about
it….only when an “object” turns out to be an illusion is one forced to become
aware of the deductive process. …In this way static patterns of value become
the universe of distinguishable things. Elementary static distinctions between
such entities as “before” and “after” and between “like” and “unlike” grow into
enormously complex patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation
to generation as the mythos, the culture in which we live.”
dmb comments:
Please notice that these deductions, these objects, are based immediate
experience of the kind that can be had even by an infant. The idea of objects
works so unproblematically and so automatically that we don't even think of it
as a deduction. It is derived from experience and it operates in experience and
that's what I mean by saying the concept is "married" to empirical reality.
That when an idea agrees with reality in the MOQ's sense, as opposed to
subject-object agreement, which is otherwise known as the correspondence
theory. As the mythos grows, of course, our ideas might not be so concrete, so
married to empirical reality. Ideas that work at a practical level can cause
big problems when they are elevated and used abstractly. That's how the simple
idea of an object gets way out of hand and becomes metaphysical, becomes a
fixed and eternal objective universe. That's a more fitting candidate for the
label "illusion". But basic objects, the one's you deal with in your own
experience, are empirically based and that's why they work. The MOQ has some
realism in it has no quarrel with empirical science as such.
“The Metaphysics of Quality agrees with scientific realism that these inorganic
patterns are completely real, ...but it says that this reality is ultimately a
deduction made in the first months of an infant's life and supported by the
culture in which the infant grows up.” SODV
The MOQ has a dispute with the metaphysical assumptions of empirical science
but it is based on experience and that's what makes it work. As a radical
empiricist, one cannot reject the empirical data. In that sense, the MOQ
retains an element of realism. We carve out everything, as James says. We sort
experience into all kinds of concepts but experience itself does not bend to
our will. Experience as it is immediately felt and lived in the concrete comes
with real resistances against which we must struggle and we don't always win.
Empirical reality pushes back such that concepts like sharpness, heaviness, and
redness can be put to use in experience without any problems for a whole
lifetime. That resistance is what gives rise to concepts about objects in the
first place. I'm the kind of realist who sometimes burns his hands on the oven
and I do not think it was an illusion when the broken drinking glass nearly
sliced my pinky off. "Red" might be a deduced concepts that only has meaning in
relation to human eyes, but the redness of the blood was real enough for me.
Such concepts are pragmatically true rather than objectively true. Again, the
pragmatic truth is one that agrees with empirical reality in the sense that it
successfully operates within experience, not in the sense that it corresponds
to an objective world of physical things in themselves or an ideal world of
eternal Forms or anything like that.
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