[MD] Flying Spaghetti Monsters

[david buchanan]

Ham said:
To justify this epistemology, Pirsig's "metaphysics" assumes that the 
division of my being from the undifferentiated source (Quality) occurs with 
every experience.  As someone here said, we have to "deduce" our selfness as 
part of having an experience.  This doesn't make sense scientifically, and 
it strains one's credibility philosophically, but it's Pirsig's way of 
"overcoming" SOM...

dmb says:
Ham, most of what you're saying is just common sense mixed with a little 
essentialist theology. You keep repeating things like "experience requires a 
sentient organism" as if this is some wild new concept nobody here has ever 
heard before. Trust me. Every person in the english speaking world thinks 
they inhabit (or are) a body. This is not news, not even to MOQers.

As you undoubtedly recall from your careful reading of Pirsig, the human 
infant is not born with the knowledge of itself as a distinct organism nor 
is it born with the ability to recognize distinct "objects" in its 
experience. Experience, as we say around here, is undifferentiated. Its is 
experience in the absense of any such distinctions. The infant learns to 
recognize itself as it learns to make distinctions in experience. They 
experiment a lot, they begin to acquire language and in time inherit all 
kinds of distinctions from the language and culture. This matrix of 
distinctions is reality as we know it.

Pirsig is not making this up. You can take a look at the literature. 
Developmental psychology has studied the formation of self identity in the 
early stages of life. The stuff I've been looking at lately in a bit tangled 
up with gender studies and some other Freudian stuff, but I'd guess a person 
could find some straight-up data on the formation of self concepts if he 
wanted to.

Also, I think Pirsig adopts the "radical empiricism" of William James 
precisely because it gets at that same undifferentiated experience. Its not 
that we can go back to infancy (echoes of being born again here, hang on to 
your faith-based hat). But the idea of being a dead man, of killing the 
static patterns, is to rediscover, as an adult, the undifferentiated 
experience. We are so habituated to interpreting experience through the 
matrix of distinctions given to us in the acquisition of language that it 
takes a real jolt or a real effort to even see that it is an interpretation. 
I use the word "matrix" because the movies kinda sorta get this idea across, 
that reality has been constructed and fools us into thinking otherwise. 
These movies, and there is a bunch of them, are usually too dark, gnostic, 
conspiracy ridden and full of empty spectacle, but the point remains. The 
idea of meditation, of eating magic mushrooms or peyote, or even learning 
another language, living in a foreign country, studying history or whatever 
it takes to make a person see that there is more than one such matrix, to 
see that there is more than one way to divide experience.

Yes, the idea that people are organisms living in an objective reality is 
something we all understand. That is common sense. That is SOM. That is 
exactly what Pirsig's work is meant to attack. It works most of the time, in 
any ordinary situation. It makes a great deal of sense. If it didn't work so 
well it would have come to be common sense. But it has some problems and 
some limitations. And one of the biggest problems is that it traps people 
into thinking reality can be no other way. It traps people into thinking 
that every experience must be explained within certain terms, the very terms 
you repeatedly insist upon. Please don't take this as mere insult, Ham, this 
is a sincerely made point that I hope you'll ponder. As I see it, your 
perspective is a textbook example of SOM, of the central problem. The MOQ is 
the solution to that problem and you're offering the problem as if it were a 
solution to the MOQ. See, you're not on the fringe. You're not even in the 
ballpark. Your plane didn't even land in the right city and the ballpark is 
on the other coast. (Just to "Ham" it up a bit.)

Ham also said:
My epistemology is actually much simpler and more plausible, because it 
assumes a Creator (Essence) which establishes the primary division of 
awareness from beingness.  Quality (or Value), then, is not the source but 
the "ground" of physical existence.  Thus, I don't have to create myself 
anew with each experience.  I exist as a "being aware" for the duration of 
my life, attaching to the relative values that represent Essence to me.

dmb says:
Here you are pushing essentialim and theism. The MOQ is anti-theistic and 
anti-essentialist. Again, you've absurdly offered the problem as if it were 
a solution. I would also object to the assertion that your epistemology is 
simple or plausible. I don't even think its an epistemology. If you posit a 
divine being as an explanation for experience, then you have explained 
nothing at all. It just pushes the question back onto an unknowable and 
untestable fiction. Same with essences. This is just re-cycled Aquinas. Its 
syllogistic Aristotelian nonsense. See, experience is not CAUSED by god 
orthe prime mover or by the clash between subject and objects. We can't even 
say its a feature of biological organisms, exactly. These are all just 
invented explanations for something we can't know. Asking what causes 
experience might just be a nonsense question. And what the heck is an 
essence, anyway? Sounds made up too me. The MOQ says that reality and 
experience are identical and quite enough reality for me, thank you very 
much. I don't care for the idea that there is an invisible world that 
explains and drives this one. Such a notion is not supported by any evidence 
and asserting a mystery as an explanation for experience is a logical 
fallacy too. In short, its not plausible. This is it, baby. Its all you get. 
The MOQ also says that Aristotle was an "asshole", thus you are not even in 
the right time zone and you're definately gonna miss the game.

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