[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Matt Kundert]

Anthony,

It's amazing how many passages there are in Pirsig just bursting with usable 
flavor.  I'd forgotten about the lateral/frontal passage for years before 
rediscovering it.  I now find it one of the most useful.

I appreciate the time you've taken in addressing the postion I'm attempting 
to enunciate.  I should apologize for not being able to take the time to do 
equal amounts of investigation, in your thesis and the like.  But I think 
this is the point in the conversation where we start exchanging, "No, you're 
the SOMist!"s.  So--no, you're the SOMist ;-)

Now that that's out of the way, I'll try and explain why I think 
Dennett/Rorty is at least more out of the woods when it comes to 
consciousness.  I see the consistency of your point, but I'm suspicious of 
the distinction you rely on to make it: the distinction between concepts of 
intuition and concepts of postulation.  I see such a reliance as a remnant 
of Kant, which is how I see Northrop, and I think the distinction of a piece 
with SOM.  I think you've enunciated the distinction well, but that makes me 
all the more suspicious (not because you've done it well, but because it 
makes it all the more explicit).

Concepts of postulation are "deduced" and concepts of intuition are 
"immediately apprehended."  The latter we given by experience, the former we 
deduce later from the experience.  Between Quine's attack on the 
analytic/synthetic distinction and Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given, 
I don't think such a dichotomy can survive.  I'll ask one question to try 
and cast suspicion on the distinction: is the distinction between concepts 
of postulation and concepts of intuition a concept of postulation or a 
concept of intuition?  This is the same question that killed the logical 
positivists strong principle of verfication.

I suspect, given your examples of concepts of intuition, you'd answer that 
the distinction between the two concepts is a concept of postulation.  But 
if that's the case, then my saying that the distinction between linguistic 
and non-linguistic is a linguistic creation should start to look a lot less 
unhospitable.  It's the same paradoxical formulation.  (Massaging the 
paradox out involves following Quine and Sellars on their attacks and 
erasing the boundaries between fact/convention, fact/theory, 
contenct/scheme, until we get to Davidson saying that there's no difference 
between knowing a language and knowing your way around the world generally.) 
  In fact, Hilary Putnam argues in his Rosenthal Lectures, "The Collapse of 
the Fact/Value Dichotomy," that the fact/value dichotomy we were saddled 
with from logical positivism, which is roughly the same thing Pirsig is 
railing against in ZMM, is bred by the ealier distinction between 
analytic/synthetic.  At the least, I think they're interlocked.

So I wouldn't say that Dennett and Rorty _conflate_ concepts of postulation 
and intuition so much as they try to _erase_ the distinction between them.  
Chalmers' distinction between the two sorts of "seems" (phenomenal and 
psychological), as you noted, is just this same distinction that pragmatists 
want to blur (though I'll grant you that Dennett and some others do 
sometimes, in their less careful and more scientistic moments, sound like 
they are using the distinction and saying the latter physchological "seem"). 
  What they learned from post-postivistic philosophy was that all facts are 
theory-laden, or in Northrop's terms, all intuitions (thirst, fear, qualia) 
are postulation-ridden.  The idea is roughly that after we are programmed 
with a language, identification of things like thirst, fear, pain, and color 
in our experience are responses with a language.

Dennett isn't asking us not to believe in qualia.  He's trying to explain 
_why_ we believe in qualia.  His replacement of the Cartesian Theatre with 
the Multiple Drafts Model is an attempt to save all that was worth saving in 
qualia while dispensing with the rest.  It is an effort to get rid of 
philosophical problems, not an effort to unearth what consciousness really 
is (despite his sometimes pretentions).    When we take what Dennett calls 
the "intentional stance", roughly the first-person viewpoint, we get qualia, 
but that stance isn't the only one to be taken and its only useful for some 
purposes, like identifying whether you're in pain or not.

So, what needs discussion between us is whether or not we need this 
distinction between concepts of intuition and concepts of postulation.  As 
an appendix, I'll just run through your summary of objections.

Anthony said:
1. The hypothetical contrary to fact (about bats speaking human language) 
that I pointed out.

Matt:
I'm still not sure what you're objecting to here.  We humans have a 
first-person point of view, bats seem to function as if they have one, too, 
so we attribute one to them.  My description of bats having language was 
like a heuristic.  We can imagine, when a bat screams after its wing is 
pinned to the wall, it thinking, "Geez-ez, that effing hurts!"

Anthony said:
2. The limited scope of this Dennett/Rorty type of definition.  For 
instance, it denies most animals as having some form of consciousness simply 
because they can’t speak a human language.

Matt:
No, it doesn't deny "some form of consciousness."  My insouciance over how 
we define consciousness is exactly there to expand the scope of it when you 
need to for different purposes.  Is there a difference between bats and 
humans?  Sure.  We can enunciate it in a myriad of different ways.

Anthony said:
I note that you assert that your limited definition of consciousness is 
attempting to simply explain that every thing we would want to say has a 
“locus of consciousness” has a particular view point and, in that this 
sense, bats have consciousness.  However, isn’t a “particular viewpoint” a 
human invention imposed on other creatures?

Matt:
Now it sounds like _you_ want to deny consciousness to babies and bats.  I'm 
unclear on how you get to have it both ways and I get taken to task for 
trying to enunciate one way of cutting the differences.  If something as 
commonsensical as having a "particular viewpoint" is a human invention, then 
so is the notion of consciousness, which means you're doing as much foisting 
as I am.

Anthony said:
3. As I mentioned previously, if you were taking a psychedelic trip, a 
broader definition ... would be far more useful to the “Dynamic explorer” 
than this Dennett/Rorty type of definition.  I know such psychedelic 
exploration is not a hugely popular idea with governments who don’t want a 
huge mass of free-thinking individuals but it remains the case that such 
exploration can provide us with useful insights into the fundamental nature 
of reality not accessible by other methods.

Matt:
Again, never denied the uses of broader definitions and the possibily 
non-utility of the Dennett/Rorty narrow definition for those purposes.  
Though I am hugely suspicious of the notion of "methods" for gaining access 
to "the fundamental nature of reality."  I'm not sure how, once we've purged 
SOM and the appearance/reality distinction, that holds up or what its 
translated into.

Anthony said:
4.  The paradox in your concluding paragraphs i.e. “we do have to chuck the 
idea that qualia is non-linguistic”, “that the ‘non-linguistic’ [such as 
Dynamic Quality] is created in a language game” and “is a function of us 
talking about them, they are a function of static intellectual patterns” 
completely causes havoc with the internal logical consistency of the MOQ.

Matt:
If I'm write about how you'll answer the question of what the distinction 
between concepts of postulation and intution, intuition or postulation, then 
you're in the same boat as I.  And I suspect its the same boat Pirsig was 
talking about when he said in a Lila's Child note that rocks and everything 
else are deductions, that his philosophy is a form of idealism.

Anthony said:
5. As Professor David E. Cooper argues in his text “The Measure of All 
Things” (2002) there is also the matter of hubris that philosophers such as 
Rorty and Dennett are engaged in denying, or at least, denying the 
importance of, the non-linguistic source of all (static) things.  The MOQ 
re-centres metaphysics from being human-centric to Quality-centric which 
entails a correct recogniiton of the Tao (unlike, for instance, some human 
invented language game).

Matt:
I can accept it looking like hubris and note that Pirsig in ZMM has the same 
hubris when he sides with Protagoras against Plato.  I think any difference 
between being human-centric and Quality-centric is much smaller and minimal 
compared to the difference between being human-centric (like Protagoras) and 
reality-centric (like Plato).

Anthony said:
Moreover, what is (philosophical) life without mystery?

Matt:
Life will always have mystery, but I don't think we should make the mistake 
of worshipping mystery.

Anthony said:
Finally, I remember Pirsig mentioning last Summer that the components of the 
MOQ are very much intertwined so it is very difficult to radically change 
one part without undermining the whole lot.

Matt:
Well, I'll agree that they are intertwined, but I've been arguing for a long 
while that it looks like Pirsig intertwined two insoluable philosophical 
traditions.  Reliance on a distinction between concepts of intuition and 
postulation are one occurence.  I think that reliance is SOMic.  I think the 
other half of Pirsig, the pragmatist half, is constantly at war with the 
half that uses those kinds of distinctions.  Going one way or the other will 
undermine the other half.  I think emphasizing the types of arguments you're 
wielding against my pragmatism undermine's Pirsig's own pragmatism.  And on 
the other hand, I do think the pragmatism I'm wielding does undermine part 
of Pirsig.  But I think of it as purging Pirsig of stuff he didn't need 
anyways.

Matt

_________________________________________________________________
Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/