[MD] Static latching & faith

[Ant McWatt]

Ant quoted Northrop April 21st:

“All that the senses convey are colors and sounds and odors, pains and 
pleasures. These are not external material objects.  They are ineffable, 
aesthetic qualities, the kind of thing which the impressionistic artist 
rather than the physicist gives one. Thus again we come to the same 
conclusion. Pure fact is a continuum of ineffable aesthetic qualities, not 
an external material object.”

“Consequently, if one prefers to be thoroughly hard-boiled with respect to 
one’s beliefs, rejecting all inference and theory as belonging to 
soft-minded speculative philosophers sitting in arm chairs, and if one forth 
with proposes to restrict oneself to facts only, then it is not with the 
belief in external material objects or the other persons of common sense, or 
with the electrons, protons, electromagnetic waves and other unobservable 
scientific objects of the physicist that one can have anything to do. For 
all these common-sense and scientific objects are theoretically inferred 
objects; they are not purely empirically given, immediately apprehended 
facts. Instead, it is to impressionistic art with nothing but its sense 
impressions that one must restrict oneself.”  (Northrop, “Logic of the 
Sciences & Humanities”, 1947, p.41)

Scott wasn't impressed and so noted:

I see nothing but a spinning of arguments to convince oneself that something
that one is already convinced of can have the word ‘empirical’ attached to
it. I see nothing here that rules out the old mechanistic Newtonian 
worldview

dmb then responded with disbelief April 22nd:

Nothing but spin? Its almost had to believe that you’re sincere, Scott. I
mean, its hard to see how you could miss the point or otherwise fail to
understand what “empirical” means here. Looking at the two quotes we see the
use of terms and phrases such as “colors, sounds, odors, pleasurs, pains,
aesthetic qualities, purely empirically given, immediately apprehended fact
and sense impressions.” How could anyone fail to see how all of these refer
to experience, to raw empirical data?

Scott answered April 22nd:

I am not failing to see that. Where have I said they are not empirical? The
question at hand is whether the metaphysical system called the MOQ is “pure
empiricism”.

Ant McWatt comments:

Just a quick observation, I thought _the_ question of Scott’s (from April 
20th) was actually:

“What is the empirical basis for postulating DQ as an ‘undivided continuum’? 
All experience comes to us divided (e.g., into pleasurable and painful, red 
and black, etc.) Why can’t all reality ‘in itself’ be divided (pluralism), 
and so why isn’t DQ-as-undivided-aesthetic-continuum being taken on faith 
(or at least as a non-empirical assumption)? - Scott”

===============================

Ant continues:

As I mentioned at the time “undivided continuum” is not a phrase used by 
Northrop, Pirsig or myself (i.e. it’s partly a strawman as no-one is saying 
that the aesthetic continuum is “undivided”) so the central issue that I’ve 
been addressing recently with Scott is that Northrop’s “undifferentiated 
aesthetic continuum” (which can be abstracted from the “aesthetic continuum” 
in the same way that other particular elements such as colours, sounds etc 
are) isn’t just a non-empirical assumption because it’s also directly 
observed.

“Most of the directly experienced field [of the aesthetic continuum] is 
vague and indefinite.  Only at what William James termed its center is there 
specificity and definiteness. Thus it is evident that the indefinite, 
indeterminate, aesthetic continuum is as immediately apprehended as are the 
specific differentiations within it. Hence, the concept of the indefinite or 
undifferentiated continuum, gained by abstraction from the differentiated 
aesthetic continuum, is a concept by intuition, not a concept by postulation 
[or non-empirical assumption]. (Northrop, “Logic of the Sciences & 
Humanities”, 1947, p.97)

Even Daniel Dennett (“Consciousness Explained”, 1991, pp.53-55) confirms 
Northrop’s and William James’ observation, at least as far as the visual 
field is concerned:

“The visual field seems to naïve reflection to be uniformly detailed and 
focused from the center out to the boundaries, but a simple experiment 
[moving a playing card from the center to the boundary of the visual field] 
shows that this is not so.”

(As noted previously, that there is a scientific theory to explain the 
indeterminate nature of the visual field (i.e. “more photons are processed 
by the central fovea area of the retinal field”) is not the issue here as 
that is a concept by postulation i.e. it might be a high quality scientific 
explanation but it still comes logically after the concepts by intuition 
(via hypothesis and theoretical inference) in Northrop’s conceptual scheme 
of things.  If there wasn’t the indeterminacy of the visual field to start 
off with, a scientific explanation for it would never arise).

Best wishes,

Anthony


www.robertpirsig.org

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