[MD] Does the MOQ invalidate Subjectivity?

[Steve Peterson]

Hi Matt, Ham,

Thanks for jumping in. 

Steve said (perhaps facetiously):
Maybe Matt K can sort out the question begging going
on here.

Steve:
It’s no joke that I think you are very good at
understanding the disagreements that we have around
here and pointing out where underlying premises keep
the two sides talking past one another.





Matt:

  Personally, I think Pirsig and everyone else should
run as far away as possible from the
"subjective/objective knowledge 
distinction". 

Steve:
>From a philosophical standpoint I agree, but I don’t
think we need to get those words out of the
vernacular. I just think of it as a scale of
inter-subjective agreement and am happy to use the
terms with people who take the distinction more
seriously so long as we aren’t talking philosophy.






Matt:

The tricky part is the movement from "subjective" to
"subject" that Ham makes.  I think people should be
more careful in moving back and forth between the two.

But the basic gist is the same claim Ham's been
pressing for a while: that for any judgment at all,
you're going to need a judger (or a "decider", if you
will).  Judging presupposes a subject/object
distinction.  Ham would like to say that Pirsig's
project of getting "patterns of value" off the ground
requires a subject, which is like Scott's claim that
Pirsig does a terrible job with consciousness, which
is why Ham and Scott (as Ham presents them) are on the
same side of this issue.

I think the way out is to just grasp the nettle Scott
offers us and say that Value indeed requires
Consciousness and Consciousness is ubiquitous.  Not a 
lot, as far as I can see, follows from this.  All we
need is to say that a locus of consciousness, a monad
of judging, is simply a "center of evaluative
gravity", a point that we call "the pattern of value
we call X".  All this means is that anything can be an
object if you judge it to be useful to treat it as
distinct from other things.  One of the things 
that's useful to distinguish is "you" from "everything
else".


Steve:
If I understand you correctly I would say that that is
pretty much my view. I don’t see consciousness as
needing any special explaining within the MOQ. I
wouldn’t say that Value requires Consciousness, I
would just say that if defined reality is patterns of
value and I am a collection of such patterns, them
consciousness is what it’s like to be Value, so it is
indeed ubiquitous. In that way all everything is
consciousness.





Matt:
What it does not allow you is what Ham wants: a
special, milky  secretion that is different from all
that, something called "the proprietary nature of
experience" or simply "subjectivity."  Ham looks like
a phenomenologist, somebody who thinks that the
_actual experience of experiencing_ is different (and
prior to) "patterns of value" or anything else we
might call it or say about it. That's why he thinks
the Subject/Object distinction so fundamental--because
"patterns of value" will never get at our actual,
lived experience.

Steve:
"An experience of experiencing" sounds like an
unnecessary extra term with no added explanatory value
and as such should be dropped.


Thanks,
Steve


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