[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[David M]

DMB/Matt

I certainly agree that the MOQ makes a great deal
out of the non-linguistic forms of experience (although
you could call colours, sounds, smells, feelings, etc
a formof language) that as human being/bodies we
are embedded in the world/environment and that this
environment is constantly changing us (how many
billions atoms of oxygen and photons absorbed per second?)
and it is change across a spectrum of values is what
makes up experience in the context of all that we ignore
and do not experience as we do not value it.

DM


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2006 4:00 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig


> 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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