David M said to Krimel and dmb:
Yes concepts and thinking are based on analogies, but analogies of what?
dmb says:
Krimel might share his ideas but he doesn't yet understand the basic terms of
the MOQ and has no idea what Pirsig saying, do I wouldn't put too much stock in
anything he says.
To put it simply, concepts are not based on analogies so much as the ARE
analogies; they are analogies for experience. We invent these analogies (static
quality, a.k.a words, concepts, ideas, abstractions, generalizations, etc) in
response to the primary empirical reality (Quality or DQ). They are analogues
of previous experience.
David M asked:
Where do analogies start, how do they get going? Do we not discover
regularities in experience before concepts?
dmb quotes Pirsig:
"Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to
intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The
names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality.
They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our
memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our
previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our
language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of
these analogues. . ."
"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and
heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy,
engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And
they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing
that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into
an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality.
Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create
the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."
David M asked:
Regularities like hot? Is not hotness a form of quality, a static quality we
understand long before -as a species- we get to language and concepts. And long
before we get to analogies about really 'hot' looking girls? You know whatever
happened to those hot stove static qualities of value?
dmb says:
There is an unstated premise at work behind your question, I think, and that
premise is false. I take your question to be something like this: "Didn't
hotness exist way back in time before humans came along and developed language?
Our pre-human ancestors had enough sentience to detect heat long before we
formed any concepts of it, right?" The false premise here, in a word, is
realism. You're treating static patterns as if they were just another name for
physical substances, as if they are the pre-existing objective realities of
subject-object metaphysics. The MOQ doesn't exactly reject the scientific
worldview insofar as the concepts can rightly be consider true in the pragmatic
sense, i.e. they are empirically based and they work quite well when you're
doing science. So in some situations it does make sense to think of the
evolutionary history of static patterns as happening in time and before we came
along, but ultimately static patterns aren't really like that. They are al
l just concepts and ideas and words.
Pirsig says:
"The MOQ does not deny the traditional scientific view of reality as composed
of material substance and independent of us. It says it is an extremely high
quality idea. We should follow it whenever it is practical to do so. But the
MOQ, like philosophic idealism, says this scientific view of reality is still
an idea. If it were not an idea, then that 'independent scientific material
reality' would not be able to change as new scientific discoveries come in."
[LILA'S CHILD, Annotation 4]
"The MOQ says that Quality comes first, which produces ideas, which produce
what we know as matter. The scientific community that has produced
Complementarity almost invariably presumes that matter comes first and produces
ideas. However, as if to further the confusion, the MOQ says that the idea
that matter comes first is a high quality idea!" [LILA'S CHILD, Annotation 67]
"It is important for an understanding of the MOQ to see that although 'common
sense' dictates that inorganic nature came first, actually 'common sense' which
is a set of ideas, has to come first. This 'common sense' is arrived at
through a huge web of socially approved evaluations of various alternatives.
The key term here is "evaluation," i.e., quality decisions. The fundamental
reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws approved of by common
sense but the approval itself and the quality that leads to it." [LILA'S CHILD,
Annotation 97]
dmb resumes:
Again, to understand the world as an inherited pile of analogies is to
understand that we created this world, that we carved it out, that it is far
more plastic and malleable than the realists can imagine. When the oceans,
earth, and sky are understood as analogies, as concepts, then the world of
understanding loses its foundational status, its ontological primacy and is
instead seen as an elaborate set of human concepts.
Think of those ZAMM scenes in the Chicago classroom, where Phaedrus says, "Of
course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't
know that." Likewise, his reply to the Chairman ("This entire description is
just an analogy.") connects quite neatly with his earlier explanation of the
world as "an invention" made up of "many marvelous analogues". And maybe it
goes without saying but the scope and reach of this claim is consistent,
simple, and clear. In Bozeman he says, "All of it. Every last bit of it." This
is what I mean when I say that MOQ is a giant anti-reification program. The
whole of reality as we understand it conceptually is an elaborate system of
analogies that we invented collectively. There are no pre-existing material
realities as such. That is the view we call SOM and that is the view that the
MOQ is supposed to replace. None of this can be said about DQ itself, which is
the primary empirical reality itself and the source of all these a
nalogues, the mother of all static patterns.
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