[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[david buchanan]

Matt, Scott, DM and all interested MOQers:

Matt said to dmb:
So, if you're saying that primary experience should only be understood as 
temporally primary, how does that square with the identification of primary 
experience with DQ, and DQ's identification as, all other things being 
equal, better than static patterns?

dmb says:
I thnk the "All other things being equal" remark was made in the context of 
explaining the moral codes of the MOQ. I think he WASN'T saying that DQ is 
better than sq and was only using the phrase "more Dynamic" in describing 
the relationship between levels of static quality. In another context there 
is the similar idea that social level patterns aren't less true than 
intellectual patterns in any absolute sense, "whatever that means", it just 
that they're less Dynamic. In both cases, the idea is simply that static 
patterns are more static the further down you get. We could also say that 
static patterns are more stable the further down you get. Now, on top of 
those moral codes, the ones that pertain to the relationship between levels, 
there is also a kind of reverence for DQ itself, which is where the code of 
art comes in, the idea that DQ is the generating force of evolution. There 
is also the equation of DQ with freedom. But of course there are warnings 
about degeneracy and the rather obvious idea that DQ and sq are BOTH 
necessary to the whole picture.

Matt said to DMB:
Okay, so you basically agree that, _if_ we define knowledge as intellectual, 
then "we can only have static knowledge of static things."  What I'm still 
not sure of is what it means to say that we have, so to speak, Dynamic 
knowledge of Dynamic Quality.  What does it mean to "know" Dynamic Quality,
when "knowing" in this sense has nothing to do with "knowing" (and 
knowledge) in the static sense? And how do the two "interact"?  Do they 
interact only in a temporal sense (first comes one, then the other)?  (The 
only reason I introduced the "weird" locution "knowledge of primary 
experience" is because you've asserted against my definition of knowledge as 
static patterns, secondary experience, that we can know primary experience. 
I'm trying to figure out what that means.  Because my inclination is to say 
that we _have_ primary experiences, but knowing is something done by 
linguistic use.)

dmb says:
Let me take the "weird" locution first. As I understand the concepts, the 
phrase "knowledge of primary experience" would translate into something like 
"intellectual descriptions of a pre-intellectual experience", or "a slice of 
the uncut pie", which is nonsense.  There would be a problem with talking 
about these different ways of knowing only if intellectual knowledge were 
the only kind. This is only a problem if linguistic knowing is the only 
kind. But I think a person would have to ignore their own ordinary 
experience to make that claim. Maybe I don't understand what the problem is 
or what your question is because your last sentence seems to show that you 
already know what I'm talking about. I mean, if you're already inclined to 
say "that we HAVE primary experiences", then what's the problem with saying 
"that we KNOW primary experiences"? We know it from experience, which is the 
only way we can know anything at all. How do you suppose we "know" the 
english language? Isn't "linguistic use" pretty much the same thing as 
"experience with words"? Now backing up to the first part of your paragraph, 
I'm saying that "static knowledge of static things" is NOT the only kind of 
knowledge. I'm only saying that this sort of knowing can be distinquished 
from other sorts. You know how to read menus from experience, even at those 
fancy French resturants, but you still can't know what the food tastes like 
until you've eaten it. Categories of experience. Kinds of knowledge.

Matt asked dmb:
And how do the two (DQ&sq) "interact"?

dmb says:
This is the question that got me started here. I think its a bad question 
insofar as it assumes that DQ and sq are "things" which can have a casual 
relationship with each other. I think its a bad question insofar as it 
contains some kind of physicalist assumptions. This is why I've tried to 
point out that DQ and sq are better imagined as categories of experience 
rather than "things". How does the experience of reading the menu "interact" 
with eating? Well, they simply don't have the kind of relationship in which 
the food ever "interacts" with the words on the menu.

Scott said to Matt:
...The thing that seems to be missing from this discussion about pragmatism, 
physicalism, and mysticism is what mystics (at least the ones I pay 
attention to) are saying. They deny physicalism. They accept the 
supernatural (where the "natural" is the sense-perceptible, what has 
microstructural explanations). They say that the natural is a manifestation 
of the supernatural, and so on. In sum, I trust these mystics (because I 
find what they say that I can understand to be rational), therefore I am not 
a physicalist. You are a physicalist, therefore you must reject what these 
mystics say.

dmb says:
Missing from the discussion? But the MOQ is a philsophical mysticism that 
denies physicalism and I believe I've been pointing that out. I would also 
object to the notion that mystics accept the supernatural, unless by 
"supernatural" you mean "extremely natural".

Matt said:
...and considering I think language is the map and language is analogous to 
a limb or any other tool, no doubt our maps are going to get dirty.  
Language is just one of the tools we use to make our way about the world.

dmb says:
Here is one of those spots where I get the distinct impression that, despite 
all your efforts to avoid the appearance/reality distinction and other 
Platonisms, you've fallen back into a kind of SOM thinking. Or rather, the 
sort of anti-essentialism you've brought to the table was born and now lives 
within that framework. I mean, the idea that language is a tool to use in 
the world is obviously analogous to Darwinian biological adaptations to the 
enviroment. But I want to keep mentioning the pivot point because the MOQ, 
as I understand it, says that the subject and the enviroment are both 
deduced, they are both imaginative creations. See, the MOQ would not say 
that language is a tool we use to cope with the world, instead it says 
something more like language IS the (static) world.

Matt said:
So, say we define essentialism this way: "the view that there is a single, 
correct explanation for any given thing (be it rocks, ideas, truth, poems, 
etc.)." ..."Say we define physicalism this way: "the view that things can be 
explained in microstructural terms."

dmb says:
See, I think you're trying very hard to obey alll the anti-essentialist 
rules and otherwise be thoroughly pragmatic, but your fancy-pants 
philosophological approach has you missing the simple stuff. This is why I 
brought up the idea of psychological essentialism and its role in normal 
cognitive functioning, even in children. As I understand it, Pirsig is not 
just attacking objectivity becasue it allows only one truth to exist, he's 
also attacking the most basic assumptions contained in the mythos, the ones 
we all learn by virtue of living. As I understand it, every person on the 
planet is an essentialist or an anti-essentialist. I think this is the form 
of essentialism, as I already tried to point out, that simply believes that 
rocks are made of rock, that the essence of water is H2O, that the world was 
here before I arrived and will persist after I'm gone. You know, common 
sense.  I think that in the Eastern religions, this natural essentialism is 
thought of as a kind of illusion, or at least that it is illusory in the 
sense that the world isn't as solid as it seems, not even the rocks. Its 
sort of their version of original sin, the fate we are all damned to endure 
and the problem to be overcome. Enlightenment entails seeing through this 
illusion. As to your "non-reductive physicalism", I'm skeptical. I mean, by 
saying things can be explained in "microstructural terms" you seem to be 
saying they can be reduced to atoms and molecules. I guess I just don't have 
a knife sharp enough to split that hair. If the larger point is simply that 
science works and we shouldn't junk it, I'd agree of course. But I think the 
MOQ asserts that science and the "things" it investigates are both 
imaginative creations and both are part of the mythos, but would avoid 
making any claims about the "substance" or microstructural cause of that 
experience. (Sub-stance being that which stands below experience, whether 
its concieved as Platonic essences, Kantian things-in-themselves or just 
plain old rocks.)

Matt said to dmb:
...You want to say that science's explanations aren't much help with 
spiritual enlightenment.  I can only agree.  The thing that allows us to 
_not_ throw out physics is our common antiessentialism.  Once one becomes 
antiessentialistic, antireductive, then all vocabularies lose their status 
as getting past appearances to reality because we've dropped that 
distinction.  Whatever form of mysticism you favor doesn't get at reality or 
essence anymore than physics. Once one becomes an antiessentialist (a 
pragmatist), any particular way of speaking, any particular vocabulary (be 
it physics, Buddhism, Christianity, or Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality), 
becomes useful for certain particular purposes.  Physics textbooks are 
useful for rocks, Pirsig's texts useful for spiritual enlightenment.

dmb says:
Well, I'd certainly agree that enlightenment can be understood in terms of 
physical microstructures, which is why I had such strong objections to 
neurological explanations. That's the worst kind of reductionism, the kind 
that basically denies entire categories of experience to a bio-chemical 
event. But what I really wanted to address here, was the idea that 
anti-essentialism leads to the equality of all vocabularies. I'm skeptical 
here too. I mean, how and where do we draw the lines between this vocabulary 
and that? This probably seems like some kind of throw away line or an 
unfunny joke, but I really don't understand how such a thing can work since 
everybody I've ever met has only one vocabulary, one set of terms with which 
to think. Even if the guy speaks five languages and has ten PhD's, he's 
still just gonna have one big vocabulary. Unless he's functionally insane, 
these terms are going to have to fit together into some kind of coherent 
picture. I mean, even if we do have distinctly different sets of 
vocabularies, aren't they interconnected and mutually dependant? Can we 
really keep them in a drawer until the right occasion arises, only believe 
them for the duration of a task?

Its not that I object to the mild-mannered assertion that the truthfulness 
and/or usefulness of the terms and concepts depends on the project or 
purpose for which they're being used. I guess I'm just confused by this 
point insofar as our project and purpose here is pretty obvious. We're 
exploring the MOQ. As broad as that is, its still no big mystery. So if 
we're doing metaphysics, then what is the truest and most useful vocabulary? 
I mean, we're not doing psychiatry or brain surgery, where neurological 
terms might be useful. Shall we use physicalist terms to get at Pirsig's 
attack on scientific materialism? Shall we use theological terms to get at 
Pirsig's anti-theism? You see, there seems to be a major gap between theory 
and practice. Instead of employing the terms that would be most true and 
useful, I keep seeing terms that are wildly misleading or even hostile to 
our purpose. I suspect there is something about this little theory that 
you're not telling me. I suspect it was designed primarily for demolition 
projects and deconstuction purposes. Around here at least, this is not a 
tool so much as a weapon. Anyway...

Matt said to dmb:
...What you are saying is that _everything_ is a deduction, every _thing_ is 
redescribed as a deduction.  I think this produces the same effect as when 
James claims that the trail of the human serpent covers all.  We can't pull 
off the human from the non-human.  What that does _not_ mean is that 
everything is an idea.

dmb says:
Right. The MOQ is to be distinguished from subjective idealism, which 
entails the assumptions of SOM and so asserts that everything is "just in 
your head". And while I don't know what it means to say "the trail of the 
human serpet covers all", I think I agree. I suspect you're getting at the 
MOQ's re-affirmation of the idea that "Thou art That", "man is the measure 
of all things" and says we don't have static patterns, they have us.

Wrapping it up, Matt said:
Pirsig is still leaving a place for physics and biology and insofar as he 
does that, he's a physicalist in the sense I defined above.  What he is not 
is a reductionist, which is why he produces the discrete levels. ...To try 
and sum up, this is why I've read Pirsig as primarily attacking the a/r 
distinction.  Once you ditch that distinction, science and art and morality 
all fall on an epistemological par.  They all have their uses.  What was 
wrong with science was not _science_, but philosophy of science, modern 
philosophy that came out of reaction to the New Science during the 17th 
century and said that science got at the way things really were.  Science is 
physicalism.  Philosophers are the ones who keep tacking on reductionism, 
keeping tacking on the appearance/reality distinction so that they can say 
that _this_ way of describing things is the correct and _only_ way of 
describing things.  The universe is _only_ bouncing atoms in a void and the 
like.  Pirsig sees nothing wrong with the work of scientists. They are quite 
good at what they do.  As I see it, Pirsig just wants to
clear up the philosophical space around the work of scientists so we aren't 
saying silly things like, "Values aren't real because they aren't bouncing 
particles."

dmb says:
It just occured to me that Pirsig returns the favor by "reducing" so-called 
physical objects like chairs and glasses of water to little moral orders. 
He's not quite saying that "bouncing particles aren't real because they're 
not values", but something like that. I mean, there is some sense in which 
the MOQ has boiled it all down to Quality, has "reduced" all of reality to 
different kinds of quality. The difference between that kind of reduction 
and the kind we know from scientific materialism is that the latter excludes 
huge patches of reality, whole categories of experience whereas the MOQ is 
designed to include the broader range of experience.

Finally, I'll address the idea that "science and art and morality all fall 
on an epistiemological par". Wilber calls these "the big three" and 
discusses the problems of modernity in terms of how the big three relate to 
each other. As Pirsig puts it the problem is that science, in trying to 
separate itself from the church, threw the baby out with the bath water. 
Differentiation went too far and became dissociaton, as Wilber puts it. I 
don't want to change the subject here. But I would like to suggest that 
you're playing a different game than they are. Wilber is just like Pirsig in 
that these big three are all true and valid, they also make distinctions 
that would preclude putting them on a par most of the time. You know, levels 
and domains and all that. See, the problem with the metaphysics of 
substance, what Wilber calls "flatland", is that science dominated the other 
two, excluded the other two. Wilber's short hand is helpful here. The domain 
of science is "it", the domain of art is "I" and the domain of morality is 
"we". The problem is a kind of colonization of science into the other 
domians, so that "I" and "we" are treated as "it". This is the disaster of 
modernity. This is reductionism. Scientific materialism flattens the world 
so that everything real is an "it". And you know what horrors can result 
from that sort of view, enlightenment is described in neuro-chemical terms.

And I can't quite find the words to make it clear, but there's a similar 
kind of flattening effect in this idea that all vocabularies are equal. 
There's something flat about putting the big three on an epistemological par 
within linguistic idealism. I think the idea is to give each kind of truth 
its due respect, but to also understand the limits of its jurisdiction, so 
to speak. Take science and myth, for example. We've had discussions in 
which, if I recall, you denied there was a distinction between literal truth 
and metaphorical truth on the basis that all truth is metaphorical. Maybe 
that's a valid point in some philosophological conversation, but I think 
this distinction is not just useful but necessary. Its NOT because literla 
truth is truer than metaphorical truth, just that they are different modes 
of expression. If this distinction is not made properly, there's no way to 
understand HOW its true. If I say you're a tiger and you take it literally, 
you might conclude that I'm insane. If you take it as a metaphorical truth, 
you'll be flattered. Totally different outcome. And its for reasons like 
this that I'm awfully suspicious of the idea that vocabularies are so 
interchangable, that these domains are epistemologically equal. Its just too 
flat.

Remember my complaint that you have a pile where you need a structure? Seems 
like all this equality is just too mushy to stand.

Thanks.
dmb

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