Hi Dan,
Matt said:
I tried to consolidate what I thought about NYC and dog dishes, but
your response confused me. You insist that you have better
assurance of NYC's existence then a dog dish in your own kitchen.
(If you even say you don't have a dog dish in your kitchen, you
should just stop reading now and we can call this conversation
quits.)
Dan said:
Now... see... I have problems not responding to something like this...
and yes I can respond to the whole post holistically as you request
but this is silly. I thought we moved past the silliness that
characterized some of the other contributors to this thread...
Matt:
Yeah, that was my frustration boiling over, but I can't see it as
terribly silly. As far as I can tell, you had at one point been
responding to my thought-experiment about Don and the Dog Dish as
if the evidence you had of Don was based on hearsay because you
heard about Don from me. That would be like treating Descartes'
Demon as hearsay. It doesn't make sense based on what the
purpose of a thought-experiment is. And then, when I asked if you
could put yourself in Don's shoes for the purpose of a
thought-experiment, you say, "No, how could I?" and defended that
response by saying, "Our life histories are completely different."
My frustration at this response is because I have no idea why you
would construe "putting yourself in someone else's shoes" as
demanding so much. I have no idea why a professed writer of fiction
would have trouble seeing that one needs a lot less, and that it is the
imagination--which the writer has been extolling--that bridges each
individual's completely different life history. I have no idea why you
would _even imply a whole life history_ to Don: his _only_ existence
is in the terms of the thought-experiment. That's why
thought-experiments are useful fictions: they isolate a single strand
of life and allow us to bombard it with different considerations.
What I haven't been able to understand is how your considerations
have been useful. The above two examples of how you've, rightly or
wrongly, generated my frustration seem to me the work of a willful
contrarian. I don't think you _are_, in fact, intentionally being as
irreverently contrarian as I perceive some of your responses, and
I've been trying to treat your responses and claims as genuine and
sincere and coherent but I haven't been able to figure how to grasp
your remarks other than as just contrary. (Can't find that center of
gravity.) You at one point said you like throwing sand in the gears as
a justification, and Pirsig describes the utility of a contrarian in Lila
(410-11). Throwing wrenches into the gears and sand into the eyes
can have its uses. (Marsha quoted a few days ago a passage from
ZMM describing it, too.) My problem is that I can't see it. One can't
will oneself, after all, to see the light. The ultimate suspicion I've
stated about the wrench your line of dialectical response represents
is that I find it hard to see how it will lead to DQ, i.e. a new
alternative to the static patterns we've been using (or rather, are).
I've suggested it's one we've seen before in Descartes; that breaking
the static pattern at the point you've been breaking it seems to lead
to a static pattern we're already familiar with: philosophical SOM.
Does that make you a SOMist? No, I don't believe it does. At most,
all I'd want to claim about what I've seen in your habit of dialectical
response is that you have a few SOM-like habits that come out
periodically but never lead anywhere more than back to Pirsig's
philosophy.
Dan said:
I did offer an explanation centered around high quality social patterns
(NYC) vs. low quality social patterns (Don's dog dish, unicorns) and
how the former is founded upon overwhelming circumstantial
evidence while the latter is founded upon hypotheses contrary to fact.
I don't know of a better explanation at the moment nor have I heard
you offer one other than the concept of object permanence...
imagination, albeit rigorous imagination.
Matt:
I still don't understand why you think the existence of the stuff in your
own kitchen is a low quality social pattern while the existence of the
stuff in New York is high. That's what never made sense. And not
an interesting, philosophical "that runs contrary to common sense"
way, only yet in "why would say that?" way. I also find it curious that
while New York and Don's dog dish get stated in MoQ terms, the
"concept of object permanence" doesn't.
The last section of your post on imagination I don't think went
anywhere. I asked for how you were going to use "imagination," and
instead of giving me one sense we could both use, you list 5 from the
dictionary. I don't think not using the dictionary will lead to chaos
(just look at Pirsig), but I also asked for _one_ so we could stop
talking past each other with different implicit definitions.
In order to wipe our minds of the past month and a half, I'm going to
start a new thread that begins by going back to the source of the Dog
Dish Thought-Experiment.
Matt
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