[MD] Windmills and Intellectual Pots

[David M]

Hi Paul

Don't get you here. Mike refers to sensations.
Surely experience is derived from sensations,
these are causal impacts on us as embodied beings.
They have an existence in experience prior to
being conceptualised we can conceptualise these forms
of experience with language such as 'pain' and 'red'
and such experiences have quality. We can also postulate
lots of objects or patterns that we never experience directly
and all of these have to rely on what we do directly experience
as qualities.

DM

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Turner" <paul at turnerbc.co.uk>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2005 10:25 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Windmills and Intellectual Pots


> Mike,
>
> I'm unsubscribing but here is a reply anyway.
>
>>By saying that matter is "redescribed" as inorganic patterns of value,
>>without emphasising the significance of the redescription, i.e. the
>>change of meaning, you risk losing that significance, which is:
>>inorganic patterns of value, such as the ones that form our living
>>bodies and are investigated by the natural sciences and are apparent
>>in sensory experience, are not the same as the objects that our
>>intellects deduce (or perhaps more accurately, induce) in order to
>>explain sensory experience from a third-person viewpoint. This act of
>>deduction (or more accurately, induction) is an act of creating a new
>>pattern of value.
>
> Paul:  I would argue that inorganic patterns are also deduced, which is 
> what
> Pirsig says in SODV:  "The bottom box shows inorganic patterns.  The
> Metaphysics of Quality says objects are composed of "substance" but it 
> says
> that this substance can be defined more precisely as "stable inorganic
> patterns of value."  This added definition makes substance sound more
> ephemeral than previously but it is not.  The objects look and smell and
> feel the same either way.  The Metaphysics of Quality agrees with 
> scientific
> realism that these inorganic patterns are completely real, and there is no
> reason that box shouldn't be there, but it says that this reality is
> ultimately a deduction made in the first months of an infant's life and
> supported by the culture in which the infant grows up."
>
>>So, the redescription is all well and good, but if we want to defeat
>>the materialist completely, we need to make absolutely sure that we
>>don't conflate static patterns of value that are postulated
>>intellectually (such as, "virus", "photon", "Proxima Centauri" and,
>>admittedly, "carbon"), with static patterns of value known empirically
>>(such as "fever", "blue", "bright point of light in the sky" and
>>"likes to bond with both metals and non-metals"). To conflate them is
>>to throw away the insight of Pirsig's revolutionary suggestion that
>>subjects and objects are deduced from Quality events, from
>>non-intellectual patterns of value.
>
> Paul:  I think you are slipping into a correspondence theory of truth 
> here.
> You are saying that some words inherently correspond with reality more 
> than
> others, as if they are in some kind of hierarchy of proximity.  This leads
> to all kinds of confusion, an example of which is in this thread where you
> previously said that carbon was known empirically but have now said that 
> it
> is "merely an intellectual postulation."  Once you divide concepts up this
> way you have to define the point at which the merely intellectually
> postulated concept becomes the empirically given concept.  The history of
> philosophy has thus far shown this to be an ill-fated endeavour so I tend 
> to
> side with the pragmatists and repudiate the idea of inherent 
> correspondence
> and this putative division or hierarchy of concepts with it.
>
> Pirsig's revolutionary suggestion was indeed that the existence of 
> subjects
> and objects is deduced from experience of Quality but in the context of 
> LILA
> this means that the existence of all static patterns is deduced from this
> experience and subjects and objects become contained in the four levels. 
> I
> get accused of overcomplicating things but perhaps I can make a simple
> statement with respect to the ZMM insight:
> Subjects and objects are the product of experience and not the conditions 
> or
> cause of it.  Thus, subjects and objects are still produced by experience
> but they are recognised as having a conventional, that is to say, static,
> reality and not a primary, fundamental or ultimate reality.  This is the
> same insight which the Indian tradition has carried for centuries while 
> the
> west has persistently reified one or the other as the starting point of 
> its
> metaphysics.
>
>>> Paul:  I gave my definition of matter in the first post in which I made
>>this
>>> argument.  Here it is again:  Something that has mass and exists as a
>>solid,
>>> liquid, gas, or plasma.  By this definition, do you still deny that
>>carbon
>>> is matter?
>>
>>Remember, the "something" is deduced from the mass and the state (and
>>other things), which, I think, are inorganic patterns of value. And
>>the "something" (which, by your definition, could be classified
>>"matter") is an intellectual pattern of value.
>
> Paul:  Inorganic patterns of value are also deduced from experience and
> "matter" is only an intellectual pattern to the extent that "inorganic
> patterns of values" is.  I think you are conflating what I have described 
> as
> thesis (1) and (2) of the MOQ.  In thesis (1), everything is recognised as 
> a
> human invention; a pattern of knowledge.  But in thesis (2), the pattern 
> of
> knowledge called the MOQ is laid out as a "plain of understanding" and IN
> THIS PATTERN inorganic patterns of values are independent of intellectual
> patterns and evolved prior to them.
>
>>To take that further, the mass and the state may themselves be
>>intellectual patterns, deduced from Quality events such as (the
>>inherent S/O construction of the English language make the description
>>of the following rather clumsy) the sensation of weight in one's hand
>>(mass) and the sensation of water flowing between one's fingers
>>(state).
>
> Paul:  The "sensation of weight in one's hand" and "water flowing between
> one's fingers" are also deductions from experience.  But once deduced,
> within the structure of the MOQ they can be assigned to a level of values
> and declared to be independent of intellectual patterns.
>
>>I realise that this may be taking things a bit further than Pirsig
>>did, but I think it's necessary, if we want to be serious about the
>>concept of a hierarchy of static _patterns of value_ , as opposed to
>>hierarchy of substances. If the MOQ is to describe an evolution of
>>value instead of an evolution of matter, we need to distinguish
>>between the four levels based on the type of Quality event.
>
> Paul:  Right, and all events currently described as "matter" fit into the
> inorganic level so why say matter is only intellectual?
>
> And in
>>this post I'm arguing that inorganic patterns of value are chemical
>>interactions (which I think can include 'raw' sense data), as opposed
>>to the interacting entities which (as is implied by the word
>>"INTERactions") we deduce from them.
>
> Paul:  I don't see why interacting chemicals and interacting entities need
> to be considered differently.  Are chemicals not entities?  Chemicals are
> also "deduced."
>
> Regards
>
> Paul
>
>
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