[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:

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.


dmb says:

Giving Pirsig credit for Lao Tzu would require a time machine or something equally ridiculous. Besides, Pirsig says that the MOQ adds nothing to our understanding of Taoism or mysticism. His focus is on our modes of rationality and so that Taoism and mysticism are used to expand rationality at its roots. In fact, he explicitly denies any expertise with respect to Taoism. But I think it's perfectly reasonable for him to get excited about the parallels, to be encouraged by the fact that he could read the Tao Te Ching while using the "tao" and "Quality" as interchangeable terms. 




dmb said:
... but the distinction between discrete and continuous is not exactly a "metaphysical" cut. 



Krimel replied:

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 says:

I think those are really bad analogies. I mean, if the idea were to balance Heraclitus and Parmenides, then the radical empiricist would be claiming that discrete concepts are eternal and unchanging. But Pirsig and James think that truths are provisional and plural and they are drawn from the stream of consciousness. Discrete concepts are relatively stable but they are nothing like "eternal". Also, it's important to remember that Plato was wildly anti-empirical. For him, the world of experience is nothing but shadows on a cave wall and every thing in "material" reality is just an imperfect copy of the "real" thing. He was quite other-worldly in that sense, a snob who hated to get his hands dirty. He'd probably say motorcycle maintenance was for trailer-trash losers. No, I think Pirsig and James are with Heraclitus all the way. I mean, how neatly does James's "stream of consciousness" go with the Heraclitian (Is that a dirty word?) idea that we can't stand in the same river twice? Very neatly. 



Krimel said:
... 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 says:

I don't see how the claim of independence is incoherent or Orwellian. The fact is Pirsig did not see the parallel with James until it was pointed out by a reviewer after ZAMM was published. Reviewers also made comparisons that didn't make much sense to Pirsig and he explicitly denies his affinity with Hegel, as one of them suggested. But the match up with James held up to scrutiny and so we find Pirsig identifying his MOQ with James's pragmatism and radical empiricism in chapter 29 of Lila. Despite this chronology, one can line up quotes from ZAMM and quotes from James's radical empiricism. In other words, Pirsig was already a radical empiricist before the reviewer pointed it out and before Pirsig confirmed it for himself. 
So how is that incoherent? How is that Orwellian? And the charge that he failed to do his homework is predicted on the fact that Pirsig did not carefully read every philosopher before writing ZAMM, as if that were even possible. I mean, these complaints are way too goofy to be taken seriously. It's right up there with you complaints about how Pirsig failed to include a chapter on nano-technology and the awesomeness of Star Trek. Get real, will you?


Krimel said:

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.


dmb says:

Are you kidding? I think you have a problem with Pirsig because you say so in nearly every post. It's safe to assume you'd count "incoherence" as a problem, right? That's what you've said most recently about the levels, for example. 

  
Krimel said:

I have mentioned Gazzaniga and the spilt brain experiments to you about a gazzilion times. Jung's problem was twofold. First, 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 too mystical in a purely spiritual sense. Freud took a pretty biological view of his "unconscious" but his concepts get all mushy in part because they originated in the Victorian era and he and his followers focused on symbolic meanings in the absence of access to biological facts.


dmb says:

James met both of them. He and Jung had a long talk and Jung's work was influenced by James. All three of them were interested in the unconscious - that's a big part of what the Varieties is really about. But I think it's safe to say that Jung rejected the biological reductionism of Freud and went in a completely different direction. The two schools disrespect each other to this day. In fact, the whole field of psychology has never been coherent or operated on a consensus. Behaviorist, transpersonal, positive, analytic, analytical, clinical, evolutionary and social psychology are not just different specializations within a field but rather rivals for the field. It's one of the strangest, newest, most contentious sciences. Eugene Taylor thinks William James and cutting edge neurology will finally pull things together. 

I honestly do not recall any mention of Gazzillionaniga. 


Krimel said:

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.





dmb says:

Verbal conceptual functioning is biological? Yea, we disagree there. I'd call that reductionism. Jung broke with Freud because Freud held that all of human culture was an elaborate sublimation of our base instincts. Similarly, there is a position in the philosophy of mind called "eliminative materialism" or rather "physicalism". Subscribers hold that mental states are really just brain states and our common sense notion of having beliefs and intentions is fundamentally bogus. Oddly, the whole thing is predicated on scientific data that is only expected at some point in the future. Rorty, for example, subscribes to a softened version of this position and it is no co-incidence that he's also sympathetic with Freud. I find a certain coherence of temperament in these kinds of connections. James and Jung, for example, were very interested in religious matters and particularly with mysticism. By contrast, Freud thought of religious faith as a kind of mental disease and Rorty says he finds nothing whatsoever of value in James's work on religion or radical empiricism. And he sees human literature as a series of marks and noises, no different in kind from the scratches and grunts of the other animals. 

But I think it makes a lot more sense to think of language and culture as different in kind from the biological platform on which it depends. I think it makes a lot of sense to think of biological evolution and social evolution as distinctly different, qualitatively different. Because of this difference, I think you can't explain or understand the latter in terms of the former. This is not to say that you can have culture and language independently of bodies with brains. I'm just saying that culture is not biological and language is not a property of the brain. 

There is an interesting relation, but it is largely a matter of the culture putting limits on the biological. Rules governing our appetites for food, sex, violence, and vice are universal, from the Kalihari to the Vatican. Pirsig claim that the levels have distinct purposes that are sometimes at odds is just a matter of making sense of this anthropological fact. I mean, the line between biological and social is something we can feel and know in our own lives. What dog ever decided to go on a diet? Ever seen a wolf in an anger-management program? Do parrots ever have a life altering experience? Are butterflies democratic or are they ruled by monarchs? What god does the Mantis pray to? Do bees feel patriotic when they sacrifice themselves for the hive? And do ants hold parades for their war heroes?


Don't get me wrong. We ARE animals. But that doesn't mean Einstein invented E=mc2 just to get laid or get fed or whatever else Freud would have said. Not to get all dramatic about it, but I think we all know what it looks like to see a human who's been reduced to that level. The Donner Party or the inmates at a concentration camp, for example. It's the stuff of horror movies and nightmares. It's not quite the same, but I do get a little bit of that sick, evil vibe from reductionist positions. Somehow, it just seems degrading, cynical and a generally bleak view of humanity. Probably a matter of temperament that it bugs me, but I also think it really makes more sense to recognize the distinction.














 		 	   		  
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