[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[david buchanan]

Matt, DM and y'all:

dmb said:
"Objects are derived from primary experience, but these 'objects' aren't 
things or beings so much as deductions, interpretations, ideas."

Matt replied:
What I'm not sure about is why we have to handle "objects" with scare 
quotes.  Is it in the same way that I might handle "absolute truth"?  
Because that would imply that objects are, more or less, not as real as 
primary experience. But I don't think that's what you want to say.  Is it 
then the same way I might handle "objectivity"?  That would mean that your 
handling of "objects," like my handling of "objectivity," is an attempt to 
redescribe the usual meaning of the term.  That makes more sense,..

dmb says:
The meaning of the scare quotes should be clear. For most people, objects 
are things, not deductions. Objects are generally understood as things or 
entities with material existence, such as rocks or water. that exist 
independent of experience. I used the scare quotes because the MOQ's 
assertion that such "things" are deduced from experience is so contrary to 
the common sense understanding of what an "object" is.  In the LILA quote 
about the infant learning to deduce "objects" from the flux of experience, 
Pirsig is putting forward a different idea of what an "object" is, namely a 
pattern of experience rather than a "thing" made of "substance".  I guess 
you'd call that a "redescription". In any case, this is what I mean in 
saying that the MOQ is better understood in terms of epistemology (what is 
known in experience) rather than ontology (what things or entities exist).

Matt continued:
...but I still don't quite feel right about making "deductions, 
interpretations, ideas" secondary, except possibly in a temporal sense.  
This temporal sense is the sense in which metaphors are primary to literal 
meanings, which is what Pirsig was arguing for in ZMM when he said that 
rhetoric was primary to dialectic.  We have to have root metaphors for 
literalness to arise, we have to have rhetorical place-setting for 
dialectical argumentation to arise.

dmb says:
As I understand it, the deductions (sq) are secondary in a temporal sense, 
but I don't think this has anything to do with the difference between 
rhetoric and dialectic or between metaphorical and literal forms of 
expression. I think these deductions are temporal and secondary in the sense 
that they are not the first step in a cognitive process, but I'm not talking 
about cultural transitions in historical time or anything like that. (An 
interesting topic, but its not relevant to this particualr discussion.) As I 
understand it, the relationship between the primary empirical reality and 
the static patterns that emerge from it can be described in terms of a 
sequence of events in the cognitive process, but that's really just a way to 
think about it. Its pretty easy to think of this in terms of brain processes 
and the surrounding landscape in which this brained creature exists, which 
makes it easy to slip back into a Subject/Object view. Still, in some sense, 
the PRIMARY empirical reality comes BEFORE anything else. Its called primary 
because it is the first and most basic kind of experience we know, not 
because its better or more real. It is called pre-intellectual for the same 
reason, it comes before intellectual interpretations.

Matt said to dmb:
It would seem that what I want to say... is that primary comes before 
secondary, but knowledge
is internal to secondary.  And you want to say that we can have knowledge of 
both.  I'm still not sure what sense to attach to "knowledge of primary 
experience."  The way I would explicate what I'm trying to say is to recur 
to Pirsig's "the Metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction in terms" and the
map analogy....   I take Pirsig's criticism of this tendency to be that we 
need a map that has a little note at the bottom that says, "If you stare too 
long at the map, your vision will get blurry."

dmb says:
I'm not really following your map analogies here, but let me address this 
question about "knowledge of primary experience"? Did I use that weird 
phrase? Anyway, if knowledge is intellectual by definition, then knowledge 
of the pre-intellectual experience is impossible. I think this is what it 
means to say that this experience can't be intellectually known and what it 
means to say that Quality can't be defined. However, despite what your 
comparison of God and Quality (in another thread) might suggest, this 
pre-intellectual experience is not supernatural and can be known in 
experience. Does that seem like a contradiction to say that the 
pre-intellectual experience can be known in experience, but can't be defined 
or intellectually known? The only way that would be a contradiction would be 
to assert that there is only one kind of knowledge. Is that what a language 
idealist would say, that all knowledge is linquistic? In the MOQ, that would 
mean that we can only have static knowledge about static things. Or 
something like that. Anyway, I think the MOQ is saying there is more than 
one kind of knowing, more than one category of experience. Among other 
things, I think the analogy of the menu and the food is mostly about that. 
The food and the menu are both real and they're both valuable, the problem 
comes when somebody gets confused and tries to read the food or eat the 
menu.

Matt said:
So I take Pirsig's map analogy as suggesting that it just doesn't make sense 
to say that we have primary knowledge of the landscape and secondary 
knowledge of the map.  I take it, linking it to the last post, to be 
suggesting that we only have knowledge of "things," and that "things" only
arise on the map, but not the landscape because the landscape is no-thing. 
The only way I can make sense of having two kinds of knowledge ...is if 
there are two different senses given to the term "knowledge," senses that 
aren't really analogous (and to which we could just as easily use two 
different words).  The knowledge of the landscape is the stubborness of 
sensation, its the kicking of a stone, the low value of pain, the primary 
experience before the secondary curses.  Now, I wouldn't call that 
_knowledge_.  I would just call that sensation (or something)...

dmb says:
Yikes. "Primary knowledge" of the landscape and "Secondary knowledge" of the 
map? How about primary experience and static knowledge? As I tried to 
explain above, the primary empirical reality can't be intellectually known, 
but it can be known by non-rational means. We could call it a pre-static 
aesthetic experience or a non-rational apprehesion or apply any number of 
labels, but I think its extremely misleading to call it "the stubborness of 
sensation" or think of it as "the kicking of a stone". I think "landscape" 
is even a bit misleading if you're using in place of DQ because pain and 
stones and landscapes are the deductions, all these sorts of static 
descriptions of an enviroment in which we exist are the pattens. But you've 
heard this before...

Matt continued:
...It's confusing knowledge with sensation that caused some of the SOMist's 
mistakes (truth based on the analogy of sensory experience; as you once put 
it, "the very idea of sensory data is itself an assumption, an anatomical 
explanation of experience that rests on the very assumption of subjects 
responding to an objective reality" (the post you said it in is actually 
missing, disappeared from the archives, but it was in one of the early posts 
in the "Rhetoric" thread and chopped up pieces of the post appear in my 
response to the missing post on Sept 15)).

dmb says:
Thanks for letting me know about the missing post. Maybe I do something 
about it later. Anyway, this is why I think it is such a big mistake to 
equate DQ with sensations, sense data, feelings, emotions, intuitions or 
anything like that. Pirsig, Wilber, Campbell, and all my favorite guys warn 
about this kind of confusion. I suspect they issue warnings because its a 
relatively common mistake and an easy one to make. Have you ever been lost 
in a daydream? I don't mean the kind where you're just absorbed by a train 
of thought, although that's fun too. I mean that kind where you're not 
following a train of thought at all. The mind is relaxed and not fascinated 
on anything, just like the eyes, which are letting in the scene without 
being focused on anything. And you're not lost in the intricate connections 
betweeen this or that, but somehow you're just not very aware of yourself, 
lost in the sense that you're not really anywhere in particular. Its not 
like being asleep or unconscious, but its not really normal ego 
consciousness either. You know that kind of daydreaming? You know that 
unfocused, restful, pleasantly calm or even slightly blissful kind of 
daydreaming? I don't know if its just an analogy, if its a small sample of 
somthing bigger or if its just off in that general direction. But I think 
that kind of daydream is at least a better way to imagine the 
"undifferentiated aesthetic experience". Feelings, sensations and emotions 
make a lot more sense within an SOM framework and are part of the anatomical 
explanations. But the remarkable thing about even these little daydream 
experiences is that they "feel" good in a way that doesn't sem to involve 
the body or the mind, at least not any more than anything else. But when I 
kick a rock and it hurts....

I'm out of time, but let me say one more thing...

Radical empiricism is the pivot point of the MOQ's Copernican revolution. 
Experience causes subjects and objects instead of the other way around. 
That's all I'm sayin'.

Later,
dmb

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