[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Matt Kundert]

Anthony,

Anthony said:
In Pirsig’s work, I think there can be construed a static intellectual truth 
(corresponding to the pragmatists’ “what works is true” idea) and a Dynamic 
artistic truth.  However, these ideas of “frontal and lateral truths” are 
“foreign imports” from somewhere which I’ve never heard of and I think might 
confuse newer members.  Are you saying ‘frontal truths’ correspond to static 
intellectual truth while ‘lateral truths’ correspond to Dynamic 
“revolutionary” truth?

Matt:
Yes, that's more or less what I'm suggesting in agreement with Pirsig.  The 
frontal/laternal distinction is from ZMM, on page 119-20, where Pirsig is 
describing his lateral drift after being expelled from school his first time 
around.  I certainly didn't want to confuse newer members, I was simply 
trying to connect my point to Pirsig to help explain it to newer members.

"At first the truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer 
the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, 
but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye.  In 
a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when 
everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected 
results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking 
_laterally_ [italics Pirsig's].  That's a word he later used to describe a 
growth of knowledge that doesn't move forward like an arrow in flight, but 
explands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, 
discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his 
head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window.  Lateral knowledge 
is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction 
that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself 
upon one.  Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates 
underlying one's existing system of getting at truth."

Now, I do have reservations about some of the language used in this section, 
but I think it gets at an important idea, that of overturning old paradigms 
and axioms.  The idea I don't like is the idea of "lateral knowledge" 
(understood in a certain way), and I don't like it for the same reasons I 
suggested earlier in restricting "knowledge" to static patterns to DMB.  I 
should like to think of the lateral and Dynamic as indeed coming from wholly 
unexpected directions and as having to do with overturning underlying axioms 
and postulates, but I don't think we should describe it has "forcing" itself 
on us.  This seems to me to run afoul of the pragmatist suggestion that 
reality doesn't _force_ us, like an authority, to describe it in a certain 
way.

This reservation ties into why I don't prefer your way of elaborating on the 
distinction.  You say, "In other words, this Dynamic reaction is an initial 
litmus guide towards what is good and what is false while it is static 
intellectual truth which seeks to explain later in detail why a particular 
positive or negative reaction has occurred."  I agree that the Dynamic 
reaction is an initial litmus guide and that the static seeks to explain, 
but, I would suggest, the static also seeks to _test_ the initial reaction.  
I should think that it isn't always the case that our initial reaction 
proves to be fruitful.  This is what led to my description of what we can 
call a "lateral drift" (which I prefer over Pirsig's other moniker of 
"lateral truth") as going "against our common sense, the 'intuitively false' 
just are those 'lateral truths' that might expand our imagination and give 
us new tools."

Your elaboration, on the other hand, leads you to be suspicious of this 
formulation: "I’m also not convinced that this idea of marking something as 
'intuitively false' in the Dynamic sense I gave above should be conflated 
with 'common-sense' which (using Einstein’s understanding of the term) are 
simply the static social and intellectual prejudices we develop (are given?) 
before adulthood."  Your suspicion makes perfect sense to me given your 
formulation of the Dynamic/static distinction, but I think it punches up 
what I don't like about it.  What your elaboration creates is a faculty of 
intuition that can cut through our "prejudices", our static patterns, to 
help us create better static patterns.  This comes out in the question you 
proceeded to ask me: "Isn't pragmatist philosophy about replacing our older, 
statically false things with new, intuitively true things which, in their 
own time, often become the static truths replaced by better world-views?"  
I'm not sure what we are supposed to judge things against as being true or 
false except for our static patterns.  The idea that there are "intuitively 
true things" distinct from our static prejudices seems to me to look like 
the idea that something can cut past the appearances to reality, that we can 
compare "statically false things" with "intuitively true things."  But if we 
already _know_ they are true, having cut past our prejudices, then what's 
the hold up in replacing the false?  That's what I don't understand in this 
set-up.  It seems to me to lose the sense of fallibilism that Dewey sought 
to imbue philosophy with.  Pragmatism is about replacing the worse with the 
better, but we can only figure out which is better, old or new, by 
experimenting.  This is Dewey's experimentalism, but it doesn't quite seem 
like an experiment if we already know the new guy in town is going to win.

This is why I use "intuitive", not in the sense of a faculty, but in the 
sense of common sense, our static patterns in place.  DQ is 
counter-intuitive, but nevertheless gives us a sense of betterness, on my 
account because it grates common sense, our static patterns, but it is 
through experimentation that we can generate a new common sense, a new set 
of static patterns, that justify this new "lateral shift" in world-view.  
Then the old DQ becomes the new static patterns, the new common sense, and 
then the cycle continues.

Anthony said:
Regarding your definition of consciousness as the first person stance, I 
note in your post that you glossed over the hypothetical contrary to fact 
(about bats speaking human language) that I pointed out.  From what I 
remember from reading William James, a radical empiricist world view such as 
the MOQ shouldn’t be containing any relationship or thing that doesn’t exist 
and your limited definition of consciousness seems to be doing just this.

Matt:
I wouldn't say "glossed over" I would say "quietly skipped over hoping no 
one would notice" ;-)  I wasn't actually sure what you meant.  I don't run 
across the notion of a "counterfactual" very much, and so I'm not really 
sure what the weapon is supposed to be doing (remember, I am a novice and 
not formally trained in philosophy).  If the point is that bats _don't_ 
actually speak language, then yes, of course, you are right, but I'm not 
sure how that speaks to what I'm trying to suggest, probably because what 
I'm suggesting is currently vague.

I guess what I'm not sure about is why you would say that a bat doesn't have 
a first-person stance.  I understand that you are wary to say, "If bats 
could speak....", but the common sense notion that my limited definition of 
consciouness is attempting to explain is simply that every thing we would 
want to say has a "locus of consciousness" has a particular view point.  In 
this sense, bats have a consciousness, right?

The further reason I would describe this notion in terms of linguistic 
ability is a methodological issue.  If what we are doing right now, the two 
of us exchanging views and such, is the manipulation of static intellectual 
patterns, and we follow DMB's notion that Pirsig is a heavy duty idealist 
(roughly, that everything we call "reality" is a static intellectual 
pattern, from rocks to math), then it should follow that what we are doing 
is talking about the way we should talk.  In this sense of idealism, when 
doing biology we aren't comparing our intellectual patterns revolving around 
biological static patterns to the biological static patterns themselves.  
Rather, biological static patterns, so understood, are a subset creation of 
intellectual patterns and what we do in biology is compare intellectual 
patterns about biological patterns to other intellectual patterns about 
biological patterns.  In other words, we talk about the way we talk.  Like 
DMB, I don't think this cuts us off from reality (as long as this kind of 
idealism is understood in a certain way).

So, when we make inquiries like the one about consciousness, we ask 
ourselves what the notion of "consciousness" is doing for us, what is 
extraneous and can be cut off, and what we _want_ consciousness to do for 
us.  But if everything is a static intellectual pattern in this sense of 
idealism, and what we are doing is talking about the way we talk, then in 
this sense it follows that "consciousness", along with everything else 
(including the notion of a "language"), is dependent on a way of speaking.  
And that's why I said a week ago (that started the bafflement), 
"'consciousness' (as a demarcation point between us and rocks), like 
everything else, is something that's created in a language-game."  I've been 
confused by the bafflement, particularly on DMB's part, because it seemed to 
me to be what he was arguing for in Pirsig's industrial strength idealism.  
As he said on Mar 5, "ultimately, [Pirsig] says, the idea of inorganic 
realities and the process of evolution has to come first" and the stress 
here is on _idea_.  In one sense, consciousness comes before language 
(insofar as we define consciousness as something that bats or rocks can 
have) because that's the story of evolution we tell (the story that Scott 
wants to deny).  But in the sense I was using it, the very idea of 
"consciousness" is created in a language-game because _everything_ is 
created in a language game, everything (carefully qualified) is an 
intellectual static pattern, an idea, a "persistent deduction" as DMB calls 
it.  And the stress in "everything" is, of course, on every_thing_, as DMB 
points out.

Anthony said:
Before I make any further comment about the remainder of your post, could 
you clarify in what sense that you are using this notion of privileged 
epistemic status in the context of qualia?

Matt:
I'm just talking about the idea that, from Descartes, we got the idea that 
we know our own minds best, that we have privileged access to them.  Since 
Descartes, in trying to find out what exactly we have privileged access to, 
Descartes' "clear and distinct ideas" turned into qualia.  That effectively 
becomes the latter-day Cartesian epistemological foundation.  Dennett and 
Rorty are suggesting that the notion of "privileged epistemic access" is 
something we need to chuck.  In doing so, we don't have to get rid of the 
idea that we can't currently get inside other people's heads and have their 
point of view.  But we do have to chuck the idea that qualia is 
non-linguistic.  From their point of view, language interpenetrates 
everything, including whatever qualia is.  I think the idea is more or less 
the same as the above methodological suggestion.  Every_thing_ is an 
intellectual static pattern, everything we talk about is created in a 
language-game.

Now, if we agree broadly on what the gist of the above is about what DMB 
calls Pirsig's "industrial strength idealism" (as I think we might), we 
still can quibble about what definitions of consciousness and such work 
best, one motivating factor of such descriptions being the purging of SOMic 
remnants.  And one thing I'm guessing will come up is when I said "we do 
have to chuck the idea that qualia is non-linguistic," since DQ is often 
pictured as being non-linguistic.  I'm not suggesting that it isn't nor am I 
suggesting that there is nothing that is non-linguistic.  However, on the 
pragmatist picture I'm suggesting, we should realize that whatever is 
non-linguistic is in the same boat as rocks and evolution--they are a 
function of us talking about them, they are a function of static 
intellectual patterns.  This seems paradoxical, that the "non-linguistic" is 
created in a language game, but I think properly massaged it will seem less 
so.

Matt

p.s.  The two different uses of "intuitive" that we were using, me for the 
"obviousness" conferred on beliefs by common sense and you for someting 
distinct from static patterns, is something I talked about, and argued 
against, in an old three part post that drew a lot of fire, "Begging the 
Question, Moral Intuition(s), and Answering the Nazi".

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