dmb,
It isn't a problem to separate conceptions from perceptions, and it does not
indicate that anything other than Value is moving the senses. Our structured
(relative) reality involves concepts and percepts. And the terms 'ghosts' and
'imagination' do not undermine or attempt to undermine intellectual static
patterns of value, but are a direct RMP quote, a quote that has little to do
with this discussion.
"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.''
(RMP, 'ZAMM', Chapter 3)
Marsha
On May 4, 2013, at 4:31 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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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