[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[Krimel]

Krimel said:
... I think DQ and SQ correspond exactly to Yang and Yin. The point you seem
to miss is that dividing the world is not mandatory.

dmb says:
I think Yin and Yang represent all the pairs of opposites, which means all
our conceptualizations. So I think Yin and Yang are both static. The Tao,
the whole circle, includes them both and yet it is beyond all the pairs of
opposites. 

[Krimel]
Since that is just about exactly what I have said at least 20 times over the
past five years maybe we are at last on the same page.

[dmb]
Just like Quality itself, that's why it can't be named. Also, the world as
we know it is one analogy upon another, one ghost upon another and so whole
thing is made up of such divisions. I mean, the analytic knife has to cut
somewhere so that even the DQ/sq distinction counts as a pair of opposites.
The MOQ makes that cut as the first move in a larger system but that system
also says that such intellectual divisions are always secondary to the whole
circle.

[Krimel]
I think we are still on the same page except for this phrasing; "Just like
Quality itself..." This kind of makes it sound like Lao Tsu owes some debt
to Pirsig when the reverse it obviously the case.


Krimel said:
Concepts according to James are the discrete units that we use to cut up our
continuous experience into manageable units, words, ideas, communicable
patterns of thought. This distinction between discrete and continuous I
would say is a metaphysical cut of the sort that Pirsig talks about in Lila.
It has some correspondence with Yin/Yang and SQ/DQ and I think it could be
argued that it has played at least as important a role in the development of
western civilization as the S/O, mind/matter spilt.

[dmb says:]
That's not too far off but the distinction between discrete and continuous
is not exactly a "metaphysical" cut. 

[Krimel]
But it is in the same way that Platonic idealism is a metaphysical cut or
the mind/body is a metaphysical cut. I was attempting to put this one made
by James in the same philosophical lineage as the split between Heraclitus
and Parmenides. Heraclitus thought the world was continuous and changing.
Parmenides, Democritus and Zeno thought was was discontinuous (atomic) and
unchanging. These are metaphysical positions that James locates in the
difference between conception and perception and which a great many thinkers
see in the difference between analog and digital information.

[dmb]
The difference is known and felt in experience and so the claim is not just
based on experience, it is a claim about experience itself. 

[Krimel]
It is also rooted in mammalian physiology. It is not as though your
trajectory is especially wrong here it is just shallow and incomplete.

[dmb]
It is also true that Pirsig and James construct philosophical doctrines on
that premise, but the premise itself is not really a doctrine. It's an
observation. I think it's important to point this out because they're both
very much interested in eliminating metaphysical fictions like the Absolute,
Objective reality and the Cartesian subject. 

[Krimel]
I guess this is as good a place as any to make this point. You are not doing
Pirsig a favor with claims like this or in your Oxford talk where you say
the James and Pirsig arrived at these conclusions independently. That is
just an overly polite way of saying Pirsig never bothered to do his
homework. You make James sound like Pirsig's John the Baptist. It is
positively Orwellian. Do you realize this is what you are saying or does
that claim of independence really sound coherent to you?

[dmb]
They want philosophy to move out of the armchair and into the streets. It's
about engaged action in the stream of life and so empirical in a essential
way, you know? Experience takes priority over everything because Pirsig has
the nerve to ask corny old bad questions like, "what's the best way to live"
and "what's right and true and good"? The answer is that you can't put that
in terms of a propositional sentence. Truth is right up there at the top but
it's still smaller than life. That's where DQ comes in. That's what the West
has been missing, mostly. 

[Krimel]
I don't have a problem with Lao Tsu or James so far so I don't know why you
think I have a problem with Pirsig. 

Krimel said:
...Quality is continuous. "Quality" is discrete. Pirsig makes this pretty
clear when he talks about mystics being concerned with Quality and having
distain for the metaphysicians concern with "Quality".

[dmb says:]
That's right. That's one of the reasons I like James's analogy wherein
concepts are buckets of water taken from the stream of experience. As soon
as we fill the bucket, the water takes on the shape of the container. It's
made of the same stuff as the stream and yet the flow is gone and the
borders are stable. And of course you need that kind of stability if you
want to construct a metaphysics or just order a pizza.

[Krimel]
Once again I have been saying that same thing for at least two of the past
five years so no disagreement here either. James' distinction between
Perception and Conception was pointed out to me by a couple of scholars at a
religion conferences I attended and I have been grateful to them ever since.


[dmb]
Think of Quality in terms of evolution. How long did our ancestors respond
and survive before the emergent of conceptual thought? Well, in some sense
this ability goes back to the very beginning of life itself, not just
primates or rodents or something with a cute face. So it wouldn't be wrong
to say we have billions of years of practice at using non-conceptual
awareness in the ongoing process of life. You don't have to be a Jungian to
believe we've inherited this evolved wisdom. You'd probably like to think of
it as a kind of "biological intelligence". In any case, there are
unconscious processes by which we evaluate and respond and despite the fact
that it is not deliberate or rationally decided, it's impossible to function
without it. 

[Krimel]
Again perhaps you have just been able to get a grip on some of what I have
been trying to tell you for a very long time. I have mentioned Gazzaniga and
the spilt brain experiments to you about a gazzilion times. Jung's problem
was twofold. Firs,t he was saddled with tons of Freudian baggage both in his
terminology and the his framing of the problem of the "unconscious." Second,
he was way to mystical in a purely spiritual sense. Freud took a pretty
biological view of his "unconscious" but his concepts get all mushy in part
because the originated in the Victorian era and he and his followers focused
on symbolic meanings in the absence of access to biological facts.

Gazzaniga and many modern psychologists go to great lengths to avoid
Freudian terminology and its attendant baggage. Gazzaniga uses
"non-conscious" others use "implicit" versus "explicit". Even Bolte-Taylor
talks like this if you would pay attention to her. Really all they mean is
that consciousness is the verbal part of our thought processes and the rest
is non-verbal. As a psychologist of course, James was on to much the same
sort of thing.


[dmb]
And if you can't function normally without "it", you can bet that "it" is
NOT a metaphysical fiction. I don't think it would be wise to REDUCE Quality
to biological intelligence. I think it's actually a biological response to
Quality rather than Quality itself, but you get the idea.

[Krimel]
Well, do we disagree? Since I think emotional non-conceptual functioning as
well as verbal conceptual functioning are sets of biological patterns that
evolved in response to Quality.