In the thread titled "Putting SOM back into the MOQ by excluding SQ, let's
not do that say some of us,"...
Arlo said to Ron:
I'm beginning to think that until people can show they understand the term
"SOM", posts where they use this term should be flagged. "SOM" refers to
pre-experiential existence; whether you call that which precedes experience
'objects' or 'patterns' does not matter, it is the PRE-EXPERIENTIAL assumption
that defines SOM, not the use of the word 'object'. We "sink back to SOM" when
we talk about pre-experiential existence. THAT is SOM. THAT is why the MOQ is
different, radically different, when it proposes that ALL static quality
("patterns") are POST-experiential. In "SOM", 'we' experience 'static quality'.
In the MOQ, 'static quality' emerges FROM experience. These are two radically
different views, and THIS is where the "Copernican" revolution of the MOQ is
found.
dmb says:
I think that's exactly right. Apparently, there are quite a few participants
who use the term "SOM" without understanding what it means or why it's a
problem. Since the MOQ is a solution to that problem, it's going to be very
difficult to understand the MOQ unless you have a good handle on the meaning of
SOM.
It's like that old riddle about the sound of unheard trees in the forest. In
order to determine if a tree can exist independently of the mind, we need to be
able to conceive of an unconceived tree. We have to image the sound of the
unheard, the sight of the unseen. Yet as soon as we try to think about this
tree, we have already moved over to the conceptual. So we have failed. To
believe that trees exist outside of the mind, is to say they exist
independently of our perceptions and conceptions, BUT these "objective"
trees-in-themselves, by definition, are impossible to know. Our subjective
ideas about trees are supposed to be true if and only if those ideas correspond
to the "real" trees that exist prior to anyone's experience OF them. This is
incoherent. Truth is what corresponds to realities that can never be thought,
to entities that can never seen or heard? How would that work? One can reject
SOM on the basis of this incoherence alone. Rejecting SOM is not the same as
embracing the MOQ. That rejection is a necessary first step in getting to the
MOQ position - but it's not enough all by itself.
The two Davids, Marsha, Krimel and lots of other people fall down on this
first, necessary step. They don't fail to grasp this rejection in exactly the
same ways, but in each case they are misusing a very key term. It's not exactly
clear what they have in mind when they use the term "SOM", but it's quite clear
that they don't have the right idea in mind. Morey, for example, shows this
with his contradictory phrase "pre-conceptual pattens", with which he has
attempted to construe static patterns as if they were the pre-existing
independent realities which we may or may not then perceive and conceptualize.
This mistake doesn't take the MOQ on board at all. There is no real conceptual
shift away from SOM but rather It's just a matter of re-naming the objective
realities of SOM. The "objects" of SOM are just called "static patterns"
instead but the problematic metaphysical assumptions remain unchanged. Marsha's
mistake is quite strange. Somehow, she has concluded that static patterns are
false, are illusions, phantoms, ghosts. Somehow she has misconstrued the
rejection of SOM's independent, pre-existing objects as a rejection of the
MOQ's static patterns. Where Morey says patterns are objects and they're real,
Marsha says patterns are objects and they're not real. These are opposite
position yet they both follow from an inability to properly identify the
meaning of SOM and the problem it presents. And of course the solution won't
make any sense to them unless the problem is understood first.
"Now you can do all this reasoning," Morey insisted, "only if you can
experience pre-conceptual patterns and through culture and concepts make sense
of these. If, as Dan claims, there are no patterns to make conceptual sense of,
there is nothing but flux to make sense of," he said. As I already pointed out,
he is not only asking an ancient question, he is also giving us an ancient
answer. We can't make sense of direct experience as such (DQ) because it's an
undefinable, unpatterned flux, he figures. How could the flux of experience be
ordered and defined if there aren't definable orders already there waiting to
become conceptualized, thus he coins the contradictory phrase, "pre-conceptual
patterns". In the MOQ static patterns ARE concepts but he converts them into
the pre-existing things, as the objects of conception, like Kant's
"things–in–themselves" or like scientific objects.
Basically, Morey wants to find a determinate reality behind our concepts. He
doesn't see how concepts can make sense of an empirical flux, he then considers
this to be a problem that he's going to solve for us, and his solution is to
construe static patterns as pre-existing things that we experience and then
conceptualize. So, let's take a look at the concept of "indeterminacy" in
relation to philosophy in general and in relation to the MOQ in particular.
Marsha has been misusing this term on the MOQ - with tragic results.
Generally, the term "indeterminate" just means "uncertain" or "unspecified" but
in philosophy it's used to describe certain epistemological positions (certain
views on the nature of knowledge and truth). The most obvious thing to say
about these "indeterminate" positions is that they oppose the positions which
claim that truth and knowledge can be specifically determined. The prime
example would be SOM, wherein there is an objective reality that determines
what's true. "If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality,"
Pirsig says, "then we're permitted only one construction of things - that which
corresponds to the 'objective' world." Like Plato's Forms or Kant's
things-in-themselves, the objective realities of science serve to "determine"
truth in a very exclusive way. There is only one way to be right because Truth
is "determined" by the ultimate reality beyond appearances. Because these real
objects of knowledge determine what's true, "we're permitted only one
construction of things". This is the position that Pirsig rejects. This is SOM
and its correspondence theory of truth, wherein our concepts are supposed to
represent realities as they really are independently of us. Truth is a
correspondence between our mental images and the real structure of reality.
This is what our radical empiricists are rejecting, shooting down and replacing
with something else. Their answer is quite different. That's why they call it a
Copernican revolution. The MOQ turns this on its head. The Sun is no longer in
orbit and yet it shines just as brightly.
As James explains it, the radical empiricist rejects SOM because it asserts "an
artificial conception of the relations between knower and known," insofar as it
treats the subject and its object "as absolutely discontinuous entities".
Subjects and objects are taken to be two completely different kinds of things,
taken to be the way reality itself is structured. So James asks us to re-think
the relations between knower and known in a totally new way and he says
everything you need to make this relation intelligible can be found in
experience. The relationship between knower and known is not between the
subjective mind and a mind-independent objective reality but between one
feature of experience and another feature of experience. Subject and objects
are both just concepts and both are derived from "the very bosom of finite
experience". Experience, even though it is not the subject's experience OF some
determinate reality, fully supplies everything "required to make the relation
intelligible."
If a tree falls in the forest, you better get out of the way or you'll be
crushed. If a stove is heated in the kitchen, you better not use it for a chair
or you'll get burned. But we're using concepts like "tree" and "stove" to refer
to actual experiences, not some metaphysical entity that exists independently
of experience. The crushing and burning are not metaphysical abstractions but
particular and concrete experiences and in fact we act or react even before
we're able to name the "things" involved. On a practical level, the idea of a
"thing" totally works. Pragmatically speaking, falling "trees" will kill you
regardless of how you conceptualize it. That's really what people can't give
up, the common sense belief that reality does not bend to our whims and wishes,
the there are real resistances, obstacles and dangers. This is what keeps us
from just believing whatever seems most pleasant. Without this reality check,
nothing can be right or wrong. And this is true in the MOQ too, but the radical
empiricist leans on empirical reality as such, on experience per se, rather
than the metaphysical entities posited by philosophers. The MOQ is a kind of
realism, but reality is synonymous with the flux of experience, not some
pre-existing ontological structure, not the meeting of minds and physical
substances, or anything like that. In the MOQ, experience IS reality, the
primary empirical reality and it is referred to as a "flux" as "dynamic,"
because it is the "predecessor of structure". Our "structured reality" is
conceptual and static but we do not need to suppose that the structure of our
thought mirrors the pre-existing structure of reality. We add this structure,
which is otherwise known in the MOQ as the ghosts of rationality, as the
invention of many marvelous analogies, as static patterns of quality, as
concepts derived from reality. In the MOQ, truth and knowledge do not exist in
relation to a realm beyond our experiences are they are not supposed to
correspond to any fixed and eternal reality. Instead, truth and knowledge are
human constructions derived from experience and they are expected to grow and
evolve just as we do.
Pirsig's "ghost" story is not intended to undermine his own conception of
intellectual static patterns, of course. His aim is to undermine the "law of
gravity" insofar as it is conceived as an eternal feature of the one only
objective reality. When it is taken like that, then there is only one exclusive
truth about gravity and Newton was the guy who discovered what was always
there. Instead, Pirsig says the law was not discovered but invented. It was
invented to explain things like falling apples but the apples don't care one
way or the other. They fell from trees long before Newton was born and when
Newton's law of gravity is replaced by a better idea, falling apples will still
just do what they do.
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