[MD] Static latching & faith

[Ant McWatt]

Ham,

Here are some answers:

You asked in reference to Pirsig’s hot stove illustration April 19th:

“What are "oaths"?  Are they the curses that accompany "ouch!" when we sit 
on
a hot stove?”

Yes, I’d definitely agree with your assumption here.

>The value is more immediate, more directly sensed
>than any 'self' or any 'object' to which it might be later
>assigned.  It is the primary empirical reality from which
>such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are
>later intellectually constructed."  (Pirsig, LILA, 1991, p.69)

You commented April 19th:

“I see that you and the author want to make a strong case for
pre-intellectual value, but it strains credibility.”

Pirsig argues that "pre-intellectual reality" should be regarded as 
primarily an evaluative one because for human survival, ‘sense data’ 
requires constant evaluation; there being an overwhelming avalanche of 
facts, sights and sounds that we are exposed to every second.  If all this 
raw data wasn’t processed:

“Our consciousness would be so jammed with meaningless data we couldn’t 
think or act.  So we pre-select on the basis of Quality, or, to put it 
[another] way, the track of Quality pre-selects what data we’re going to be 
conscious of, and it makes this selection in such a way as to best harmonize 
what we are, with what we are becoming.”  (Pirsig, ZMM, 1974, p.311)

In reference to a new-born baby’s experience, Pirsig (LILA, 1991, p.137) 
argues that this data is then constructed into ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ only 
after more primitive notions such as ‘good’ & ‘bad’, warmth’ & ‘cold’, 
‘before’ and ‘after’ are constructed:

One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple 
distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more 
complex ones of light and warmth and hunger… he will soon begin to notice 
differences and then correlations between the differences and then 
repetitive patterns of the correlations.  But it is not until the baby is 
several months old that he will understand enough about that enormously 
complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an 
object to be able to reach for one.  This object will not be a primary 
experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values derived from 
primary experience.

I think this Putnam-reminiscent assertion is reasonable to hold as an infant 
apparently doesn’t think its parents or other external objects are distinct 
entities from itself when it is born.  This distinction between oneself and 
the world must be eventually learnt as a valuable one to hold.  A similar 
example indicating the primary status of valuations in comparison to 
subjects and objects is given by Pirsig in reference to single celled 
organisms which apparently don’t ever develop a notion of a self opposing an 
objective reality but do almost certainly hold a distinction between good 
and bad:

“An amoeba, placed on a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid 
placed nearby, will pull away from the acid (I think).  If it could speak 
the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, could say, ‘This 
environment has poor quality.’  If it had a nervous system it would act in a 
much more complex way to overcome the poor quality of the environment.  It 
would seek analogues, that is, images and symbols from its previous 
experience, to define the unpleasant nature of its new environment and thus 
‘understand’ it.”  (Pirsig, ZMM, 1974, p.251)

It seems, therefore, that notions of subjects and objects only arose much 
later on in evolutionary history than the more primitive notions of good and 
bad - probably when organisms (such as human beings) developed sentience and 
then thought the subject-object distinction would be one of value to hold.

Moreover, the notion of a ‘pre-intellectual experience’ appears to be 
supported in the recent experiments by the neurologist Benjamin Libet which 
strongly indicates that there is always a constant half second of 
unconscious processing to stimuli before consciousness arises.  The 
intellectual patterns generated after the ‘stimuli’ of experience creates 
the subjective ‘experiencer’ and the object ‘experienced’ which - always 
being in the past – are, again strictly speaking, unreal.

“At the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there 
must be a kind of non-intellectual awareness…  You can’t be aware that 
you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant 
of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag…  The tree that 
you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always 
in the past and therefore is always unreal.  Any intellectually conceived 
object is always in the past and therefore unreal.  Reality is always the 
moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place.”  (Pirsig, ZMM, 
1974, p.247)

According to the psychologist, Susan Blackmore (‘Half a second to stop being 
wicked’ in “The Times Higher Education Supplement”, No.1660, October 1st 
2004, p.26) Libet’s research concerning the existence of this half-second 
delay, are ‘unequivocal’ and ‘are generally accepted by other scientists’.

You continued April 19th:

“If I spot a cardinal on the branch of a tree, I experience it as a brightly 
colored red bird with a black capped head.”

No, you first see a small red coloured patch with some black above it and a 
brown patch below it surrounded by green blobs.  You then hypothesis that 
what you are sensing correlates to a cardinal in a tree branch, both of 
which are three dimensional biological patterns in public space.  This 
recognition of the cardinal might happen quickly (i.e. Benjamin’s Libet’s 
half second delay) if you are near the “bird” or have a pair of binoculars.  
It may take more time if you are further away, your eyesight isn’t 
particularly good or you need to refer to a bird-spotting guide.  You may 
even first mistake “the small red coloured patch with some black above it” 
for another type of bird or creature.  Finally, keep in mind that if you 
then wake up from a dream about seeing a cardinal in a tree then you will 
then realise that the high quality hypothesis that there were corresponding 
three dimensional public biological patterns to the coloured patches was 
false.

You continued April 19th:

“Whatever value I may give to this experience does not change the fact that 
the bird is an object of my experience…”

As noted above, the bird is only indirectly an object of your experience.  
The cardinal can never be an empirically immediate pure fact, but only a 
speculative theoretical inference (if a high quality one) constructed from 
the aesthetic continuum.

You continued April 19th:

“And that I recognize this object by its physical attributes.  To claim that 
my
recognition of a cardinal is secondary to my evaluation of the experience
simply doesn't make sense to me.”

Your recognition of a cardinal is a learnt response from what you have 
learnt to value in the past.  An adult person with no interest (i.e. no 
value disposition) in bird watching would just see a bird while a very young 
infant would just be aware of “a small red coloured patch with some black 
above it and a brown patch below it surrounded by green blobs”.  Moreover, 
Hilary Putnam (“Reason, Truth & History”, 1981, pp.201-02) details numerous 
categories such as space, animate, inanimate and purpose that need to be 
valued just to utter ‘the most banal statement imaginable’ i.e. ‘The cat sat 
on the mat’:

“We have the category ‘cat’ because we regard the division of the world into 
animals and non-animals as significant, and we are further interested in 
what species a given animal belongs to.  It is relevant that there is a cat 
on that mat and not just a thing.  We have the category ‘mat’ because we 
regard the division of inanimate things into artifacts and non-artifacts as 
significant, and we are further interested in the purpose and nature a 
particular artefact has.  It is relevant that it is a mat that the cat is on 
and not just a something.  We have the category ‘on’ because we are 
interested in spatial relations…  To a mind with no disposition to regard 
these as relevant categories, ‘the cat is on the mat’ would be as irrational 
a remark as ‘the number of hexagonal objects is 76’ would be, uttered in the 
middle of a tete-à-tete between young lovers.”


You then questioned my statement about the Tao Te Ching and Western 
imperialism:

“I couldn't let this statement pass without a response”:

>I don't know what kind of world we would have had
>if the Europeans and their American offshoot had just
>taken advice of the Tao Te Ching and just stayed at
>home (gardening?)

And then commented:

“While staying at home and tending to the gardening might allow you to 
temporarily evade the wilful destruction of populated market areas and 
office buildings, would you really have us believe that it's an effective 
response to the terroristic threat?  Or do you think that the goal of making 
the world a "more beautiful, unpolluted and peaceful place" takes precedence 
to the defense of a nation in distress?”

I was thinking more about the West’s imperial history and the cultural and 
natural heritage we have destroyed in Australasia, the Americas, the Middle 
East and Africa over the last few centuries.  However, regarding the 
present, it would help matters if the West’s armed forces left the Middle 
East as soon as practically possible and, while we still have oil to use 
(i.e. time), other alternatives to it are developed in the next few decades. 
  There’s great engineering talent in North America and Europe and 
developing high quality oil alternatives would be an exciting if immense 
challenge and also something positive to trade with other cultures (rather 
than war, arms, etc).  I think that’s the quality way to go with achieving a 
more peaceful, high quality global environment.  The old solution of 
invading a country for its natural resources is just lazy, short-sighted and 
continues the cycle of violence.  Moreover, “staying at home” doesn’t mean 
that each Western nation removes it home defences (or dismantles its 
security services) to freely allow in the (largely fictional) “mad Islamic 
hordes”, either.  Finally, with your comment about the “terroristic threat” 
in mind, do remember that one man’s terrorist is often another man’s freedom 
fighter.

Finally, you mentioned:

“One other question I had asked was why Mr. Pirsig didn't put down 
supernaturalism (or, if you prefer, spiritualism) in a logical or 
dialectical way instead of merely excluding his philosophy from it by a 
causal [casual???] remark.”

I replied April 19th:

>I presume because the "author" had more important
>things to be concerned with though the MOQ is an
>attempt to remove superstitious nonsense without
>losing the mystery of the ineffable aesthetic continuum.

You then commented:

“I find it incredulous that an author who devotes his life to philosophy 
would find other things more important than clarifying the ambiguities in 
his theory.  Why has he left this to academics like yourself?   Surely that 
neglect must have troubled you, as well.”

Well, philosophologists would largely be out of a job if philosophers 
composed absolutely thorough and complete works!  Anyway, Pirsig has made 
considerable effort to clarify the ambiguities in his work since the 1970s 
starting off with readers’ correspondence, Di Santo’s and Steele’s 1990 
“Guidebook to ZMM”, “Lila’s Child” (where he made numerous comments about 
early MOQ Discuss posts) and my PhD work.

Best wishes,

Anthony


www.robertpirsig.org


.

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