[MD] Fw: Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[David M]

> dmb said:  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.

DM: I would certainly simply prefer the term quality for what is, but
there may be ways to try to pull physicalism towards this term to make
it non-essentialist. Quality as a concept is not exclusive, it does not say
some qualities are more real than others. Sure the concept 'object' requires
construction but so does 'thing'. And so does all our linguistic 
world-building.
So this covers some of the same territory as idealism but I don't think we 
want
to go backwards and simply pick up with idealism again. All reality an 
imaginative
creation? Not sure about that. Not for us as humans, we can imagine that we 
might
be able to fly by flapping our arms but it don't work. But everything that 
does work
for us has required us to bring what ispossible into the actual and 
imagination is key
to this. So now and again we know what it is like to be like gods.

DMB said> 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.

DM: Well isn't the whole point of levels of SQ is that we can talk about 
real
patterns on all levels that require the earlier levels to emerge but cannot 
be
described simply in terms of the lower/earlier levels as if they were not 
real
levels. This is the MOQs ontological pluralism.

DMB:> 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: The plasticity comes from Coleridge actually. Yes that's OK, but there
is still the limit of 'what works'.

>
> 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?
>

DM: Yes there are patterns within patterns.A human being is one changing 
pattern
amid larger patterns. But if we divide the whole into smaller patterns than 
we can
look at how these are interacting, say an individual embedded in a 
society,exchanging
symbols, learning how paper can be used as money, making individual choices 
about
how to use the power of this special symbolic paper, having powers that can 
only be
attained within a society using paper in such ways. No society no exchange 
of paper
for food.