[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[David M]

Hi Matt/DMB

See comments below:
DM

> Matt:
> Sure, I was using temporal in both senses, in the cognitive process and in
> historical time.  It's basically the learning of language, which we can
> trace through a baby or through humanity's evolution.  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?  (This was always the nit that made my hair stand on end, and is
> why I start distinguishing between different senses of DQ and the like.)

DM: Don't see the problem. DQ is the ability for forms to come and go,
SQ means that some of them stick around and repeat. SQ is great and
science loves to check it out, DQ is what we were overlooking a bit
and Pirsig helps us recognise there is no SQ without DQ.


>
> DMB said (Mar. 3):
> 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. ... 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.

DM: If we take the taste of apples as being something pre-lingusitic and 
having
a non-linguistic quality that's great. If we think a menu ofapple pie tastes 
of
anything we are dumb, but maybe we get a much clearer handle on the 
different
tastes of different apples if we analyse themout and give them different 
names.
But look at all the strange metaphors used by wine tasters doing this kind 
of work.
Doing this work makes SQ -that is dynamic work.

>
> Matt:
> 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.)


DM: The work of differentiation is done using linguistic stuff to de-scribe
over to graph-over what is already thereis experience but un-differentiated
by graphing and scribing over. Some people, you know, see the lines
they imagine out in the empirical world, you know we may have learnt
to internalise what was  once entirely projected. Like learning to read
without speaking out loud.

>
> David said (Mar. 4):
> Well the bias I suspect in your emphasis sounds a bit Platonic to me, the
> emphasis on theoretical knowledge and making maps seems a bit removed from
> practical experience and getting your hands dirty, i.e.  the tradition's
> elitism and other worldliness/transcendence seems to be hanging around
> still.
>
> Matt:
> I was just using the analogy provided by Pirsig (an analogy you picked up
> and used straight after I did, by the way).  It seems handy, 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 said (Mar. 4):
> Please explain how it is the MOQ can go to such great lengths to defeat 
> the
> metaphysics of substance and yet fail to defeat physicalism? Isn't that 
> just
> something like materialism without the certainty, without the objectivity?
>
> Matt:
> The problem I've always had with Pirsig's use of substance is that
> "substance," in philosophy, has never universally denoted "matter."  In 
> the
> Cartesian, S/O, problematic there were _two_ substances, mind and matter,
> not just one, matter.  The root of the problem of substance is about
> essentialism.  Under that understanding, Pirsig's defeat of the 
> metaphysics
> of substance doesn't necessarily effect physicalism because physicalism
> isn't necessarily essentialistic.


DM: Didn't you just say matter was one of Descartes substances? How does
physicalism differ from saying there is one substance called matter?

>
> David sometimes agrees with me (as when he wrote about the "physicalist
> story of evolution"), sometimes he doesn't (as when he says 
> antiessentialism
> is "hard to square with physicalism").  But all we should take physicalism
> to mean is "microstructural explanations of events."  All that means is
> "whatever it is they do in physics, chemistry, biology, etc."  The trouble
> I've always had with your attacks on my non-reductive physicalism is that
> I've never understood how, if you agree that whatever it is they do in
> physics, chemistry, biology, etc., is useful, then how you are _not_
> physicalist in the same sense that I am.

DM: Well all explanations do not appeal downwards. EG How are certain
organic molecules formed? By RNA using the codes laid down in DNA.
How do H-bombs go off? Scientists set up very special non naturally
occuring conditions and light the match. I am not sure about using the term
physicalist because on different levels we require different entities and 
agents
to explain events, microstrutural ain't always at the party you know. But we 
do
have to have a bottom up story to go from atoms to molecules to cells
to people/culture etc. That's my view.


>
> 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."


DM: No good. Sure physicalist approach yields results, but it don't
cover even the full extent of sciences approach to entities and agents.
>
> Essentialistic physicalism would indeed be the scientific materialism, the
> view that the correct explanation of anything is a microstructural one, 
> that
> Pirsig rails against and is indeed the way the Oxford Dictionary defined
> physicalism.  Non-reductive physicalism, however, simply says, "Science's
> microstructural terms can be useful."  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 there 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.

DM: Except Pirsig wants science to recognise something it was missing: DQ.
But in fact it is much more in sight now in science than when Pirsig wrote 
ZMM
and even Lila.

>
> In other words, my answer to your question above, "how is it the MOQ can 
> go
> to such great lengths to defeat the metaphysics of substance and yet fail 
> to
> defeat physicalism?", is that Pirsig isn't _trying_ to defeat physicalism
> cum microstructural explanation.  He's just trying to defeat reductionism.

DM: Yes, something very big 15 years ago, but less so now. But what about
the human sciences are they physicalist?


> Pirsig is perfectly comfortable with physical explanations of rocks and
> such.  What he isn't comfortable with is philosophers of science (and
> know-nothing scientists themselves) who say, "And this is all there is.

DM: Problem here is saying what this other is that is not physical? I think
we need a more sophisitcated idea of what is physical, one that can
place and make plausible what we call experience.

> This is how reality really is."  Pirsig _likes_ evolution, he likes 
> physics.
>  He just wants to supplement, as David put it, the "physicalist story of
> evolution" with an "experiental story of [cultural] evolution and how ever
> changing maps have dragged us up from single cell forms of life."

DM: Yes, and I think the 2 stories need to make each other more 
sophisticated
and play off each other.


>
> Another way to put this is to take up your description of Pirsig's
> philosophy as "a heavy duty
>form of idealism."  (I've moved on to your March 5th post.)  The thing I
> would want to suggest is that Pirsig's philosophy is _not_ a heavy duty 
> form
> of idealism insofar as Pirsig should not be seen as claiming that this is
> all in our heads.  As you say, "Now I don't think he's saying that planets
> and
> stars and the big bang were somehow actually produced by our deductions."
> 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.

DM: Yes but the non-human is still in the mix.


 What that does _not_ mean is that
> everything is an idea.  To qualify what you want to call his idealism,
> Pirsig distinguishes between ideas/deductions that are "physical" and 
> those
> that are not, the effect of naming the inorganic and biological levels the
> old "object" and the social and intellectual levels the old "subject."
> 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.


DM: Yes.

>
> To try and sum up, this is why I've read Pirsig as primarily attacking the
> appearance/reality distinction.

DM: Yes, where the subject got dismissed as an illusion and matter as the 
only real. Or the object got
dismissed via Platonism.

 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.

DM: Can't we study cultural and psychological SQ then?

 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."
>
> Matt
>
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