Hello everyone On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 12:06 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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.
Dan: You may be right but for precision I think it is better to say these objects are based on a chain of deductions, not on immediate experience. Dynamic Quality, or immediate experience, is what gives rise to the deductions which then give rise to these objects and other complex patterns of knowledge. dmb: The idea of objects works so unproblematically and so automatically that we don't even think of it as a deduction. Dan: Yes, that is the difficulty I seem to be running against in discussions with Matt and yourself. dmb: 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. Dan: The MOQ marries scientific materialism and philosophic idealism by stating in a value-centered metaphysics, ideas are as real as matter. Inorganic and biological patterns of quality are physical. We can examine them under a microscope. Social and intellectual patterns are non-physical. We cannot examine them. >dmb: > > “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. Dan: The MOQ says Dynamic Quality is the cutting edge of experience and produces ideas that come before matter. dmb: 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. Dan: This seems a good summary of the materialistic side of the MOQ. And now I feel we need to grow the discussion into the idealistic side... the ghosts of reason: "Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.'' [ZMM] Dan comments: The MOQ states these ghosts are social and intellectual patterns that make up the mythos of our 21st century culture. These were the patterns (I think) that the discussion Matt and I were having was focusing upon... the philosophic idealism side of the MOQ and how one defends it against the critics who say: the MOQ is solipsistic. If there is a better way to do that, I would love to hear it. So far, all I've heard is we're supposed to suspend disbelief and assume the patterns of value we discuss like dog dishes and trees falling in forests are real just because someone says so. I don't think that's right. Thank you, Dan 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
