[MD] Fw: Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[david buchanan]

DM, Matt and all MOQers:

David M said:
I have been round this block with Matt. I think that the MOQ should be seen 
as anti-essentialist and that this is hard to square with physicalism, and 
that physicalism is little more than making one's views subservient to 
physics and worse end up being materialistic as are most scientists and 
modern philosophers (according to most surveys I've seen).

dmb says:
I hope the re-visiting of this issue isn't too boring for you. Anyway, it 
seems to me that physicalism is the most common form of essentialism and so 
being an anti-essentialist would rule it out. It seems to me that the MOQ is 
both anti-essentialist and "anti-physicalist", if there such a term. This is 
what I was getting at in bringing up the idea that "objects" are more like 
deductions than things. This is why I refered to the MOQ as a heavy duty 
form of idealism. This is what the copernican revolution is all about and 
what it means to say that all of reality is an imaginative creation.

I don't remember the source or the exact quote, but somewhere Pirsig 
answered a question by saying that the idea that evolution occurs in time 
and is a process of increasing physical complexity, moving from the 
inorganic to the organic, etc. is a great idea. Its one of the best, but 
ultimately, he says, the idea of inorganic realities and the process of 
evolution has to come first. Now I don't think he's saying that planets and 
stars and the big bang were somehow actually produced by our deductions. I'm 
saying that the planets and stars and the big bang ARE deductions, just like 
every "thing" else. I'm saying that even that our static reality is no-thing 
in some sense too, in the sense that static patterns are not physical things 
like atoms or whatever, they're more like persistant deductions. They're 
static patterns of experience. I think this is what allows us to keep a 
data-is-data realism without being physicalist or any other kind of 
essentialist.

The really cool thing about this is the radical freedom that it implies. I 
mean, if all of our static reality is an imaginitive creation and the 
Dynamic reality can be sliced up any way that works...  Damn! I this this is 
where the meaning of the saying "Thou art That" really shows up in the MOQ.  
The creative freedom implied in this heavy duty idealism means that we are 
the creator gods. We are the intelligent designers and have been all along, 
see? I know this sounds a bit grandiose when its put this way, but on a more 
conventional level we can see that creative and imaginative people have 
always been at the cutting edge of things. I think guys like Pirsig get 
bummed when art is seen as something frivilous because they see it as 
central. By art I do not just mean pretty things or famous paintings, I mean 
the act of creation in any field. I suspect you were in this neighborhood 
when you talked about the placticity of our reality, but I'm having trouble 
following your Continental imports here...

DM said:
Generally we are not observers but actors and agents doing things. We are in 
open situations that are not unstoppably moving towards a given end. We are 
the open, we are that which changes the underdetermined into something 
definite. We are in an open situation, we may go to work, we may not, we are 
the one forced to choose from a set of choices within a context or our given 
projects/society/body/etc. What is choice other than an awareness of the 
possible strethced out into the future. But we can also become observers, 
sittting indifferently not acting. But can we just sit? What is observation? 
We notice things as Pirsig says. We notice what is of value to us or 
threatens us. Why? What helps or threatens us? Well are we not in a state of 
constant change? The environment is not just there, it interacts with us, we 
absorb heat, we give out energy, we absorb light, we exchange gasses, we are 
in constant change. This change is either good or bad, helping our 
patterns/organism to go on or to cease to hold together. Is not 
consciousness & value/valuation the constant companion of change & the need 
to act (lack of pattern), unconsciousness & indifference the constant 
companion to repeating static patterns? So this is pretty physcialist is it 
not? But we need to understand the DQ/conscious/valuing aspects of the 
so-called physical. This would fill in what an SQ orientated version of 
physicalism misses. DQ is also a constituent of the physical but in what 
terms could normal science recognise this?

dmb says:
Yea, that all sounds pretty physicalist to me. I think its interesting that 
even from within the point of view of scientific materialism, there is no 
there there. Don't the latest theories basically say that "physical" reality 
is more like bundles of energy vibrations with various potentials to 
manifest as this or that? And biological science and the theory of evolution 
is a good example of dependant origination, with all forms dependent on each 
other, evolving togeather and basically creating the atmosphere and the 
enviroment on which all life depends. Its like some kind of magic, as if the 
image created reflects the nature of the imagination that created it.

Did anybody hear a branch crack?

Later,
dmb

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