[MD] Objectivity

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Craig]
Does someone who holds that some people are more objective than others & some
more subjective, necessarily hold a SOM?  Or is it just an historical
linguistic accident that the 2 pairs of words are so similar?

[Arlo]
I don't think its a "linguistic accident".

Some stuff.

The old Lila Squad had a lengthy conversation of what is meant by SOM. Donald
Palmgren's midway summation is a good starting point if you're interested.
(http://www.moq.org/old_lilasquad/9805/0045.html)

Basically, SOM refers to a dualism, where "reality" consists exclusively of
"subjects" and "objects". An "objectivist" would tell you that there is a
"fixed" reality independent of "subjects", and often that anyone at any time
will experience identically. "Reason", thus, will lead all wo/men to the same
conclusions. A "subjectivist" will tell you that there is no "fixed" reality
independent of "subjects", and that "objects" exist only in the mind. Both of
these schools of thought imply "subjects" and "objects" as the only existants.

In ZMM, Pirsig introduces us to Phaedrus' analytic knife with this:

"The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the
building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are
aware of millions of things around us...these changing shapes, these burning
hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed
and fence post and piece of debris beside the road...aware of these things but
not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they
reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious
of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of
useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must
select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the
awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of
sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of
sand the world. ... To understand what he was trying to do it’s necessary to
see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood,
is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape
without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all."

This flows nicely into another key paragraph where he discusses Poincare's
thoughts on the "objectivity" of the world.

"What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this
world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications
that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious
reasonings. We know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same
time we recognize in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable
beings like ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our
sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the
same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven’t been dreaming. It is this
harmony, this quality if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality
we can ever know."

In Lila, Pirsig also addresses "objectivity", and why it has emerged dominant in
Western thinking.

"The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself
from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of
independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason,
this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social
world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social
mediation whatsoever."

"Objectivity", thus, if for Pirsig a "myth".

Back in ZMM, Pirsig discusses Einstein's strange views on from where come
hypothesis. This begins his movement towards a metaphysical stance that rejects
both "objectivity" and "subjectivity". "A lesser scientist than Einstein might
have said, "But scientific knowledge comes from nature. Nature provides the
hypotheses." But Einstein understood that nature does not. Nature provides only
experimental data. ... A lesser mind might then have said, "Well then, man
provides the hypotheses." But Einstein denied this too. "Nobody," he said, "who
has really gone into the matter will deny that in practice the world of
phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that
there is no theoretical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical
principles.""

Back in Lila, the preceding paragraph to the aforementioned one describes
Pirsig's position clearly.

"The mind-matter paradoxes seem to exist because the connecting links between
these two levels of value patterns have been disregarded. Two terms are
missing: biology and society. Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic
nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which
originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what
a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are
dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by
inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and
matter. As the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in
language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally
derived."

Arlo