[MD] Food for Thought

[Case]

dmb says:
The MOQ is "in essence wholly subjective"!? Okay, now I'm starting to think 
that you have not read Pirsig's books. In Lila you will find him referring 
to the subjective self as completely ridiculous, as a fictional entity. 
Likewise, William James (in his Essays on Radical Empiricism) humorously 
claims that the Kantian self built by philosophers is made of an essence 
called "breath". Using medical terms, he says this "breath" is the sort that

comes out of one's nose. He's saying the subjective self is a bunch of hot 
air. See, by rejecting the assumptions of SOM as a starting point, both the 
subjective self and the objective TiTs are already taken out of the 
equation. Or rather, their primary metaphysical status is taken away and 
they are reconcieved as secondary, as assumptions rather that the "real" 
starting points of experience. But seriously, how can you have read Pirsig 
and still say the MOQ is wholly subjective? Is that some kind of joke? Are 
you drunk?

[Case]
While I may or may not understand Pirsig, you certainly do not understand
James. Here is the passage you have miss read as being "humorous".

'My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will
sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have my
intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am
as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking
(which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for
what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of
my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my
objects, is the 'I breath' which actually does accompany them. There are
other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments,
etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these
increase the assets of 'consciousness,' so far as the latter is subject to
immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of 'spirit,'
breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am
persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity
known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in
the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the
same stuff as things are.'
- William James "Does Consciousness Exist?"

This is the conclusion of this essay. The ironic part you refer to starts
after the "...but breath, which was ever..." In this essay James denies the
existence of consciousness as a substance or thing metaphysical or
otherwise. He questions its usefulness as a concept at all. But James is
serious in his use of "I breath" as a substitute for "I think". As he notes
above the matter is taken up at greater length in his "Principles of
Psychology". There he says:

"My glottis is like a sensitive valve, intercepting my breath
instantaneously at every mental hesitation or felt aversion to the objects
of my thought, and as quickly opening, to let the air pass through my throat
and nose, the moment the repugnance is overcome. The feeling of the movement
of this air is, in me, one strong ingredient of the feeling of assent. The
movements of the muscles of the brow and eyelids also respond very
sensitively to every fluctuation in the agreeableness or disagreeableness of
what comes before my mind. In effort of any sort, contractions of the
jaw-muscles and of those of respiration are added to those of the brow and
glottis, and thus the feeling passes out of the head properly so called. It
passes out of the head whenever the welcoming or rejecting of the object is
strongly felt. Then a set of feelings pour in from many bodily parts, all
'expressive' of my emotion, and the head-feelings proper are swallowed up in
this larger mass. 
In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one person at least, the
'Self of selves,' when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the
collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and
throat. I do not for a moment say that this is all it consists of, for I
fully realize how desperately hard is introspection in this field. But I
feel quite sure that these cephalic motions are the portions of my innermost
activity of which I am most distinctly aware. If the dim portions which I
cannot yet define should prove to be like unto these distinct portions in
me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire feeling of
spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that [p. 302] name, is really
a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men
overlooked."
- William James "The Principles of Psychology: Vol. 1"

It is a mistake on your part to read James as a simply a philosopher. He
does write philosophy but many would argue the James is primarily a
psychologist, among the first of the breed. James is trying to understand
the nature of experience as a psychological not a metaphysical matter. He
does not deny TITs rather he is seeking to describe how we know them
psychologically. 

"As a room, the experience has occupied that spot and had that environment
for thirty years. As your field of consciousness it may never have existed
until now. As a room, attention will go on to discover endless new details
in it. As your mental state merely, few new ones will emerge under
attention's eye. As a room, it will take an earthquake, or a gang of men,
and in any case a certain amount of time, to destroy it. As your subjective
state, the closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous play of your fancy
will suffice. In the real world, fire will consume it. In your mind, you can
let fire play over it without effect. As an outer object, you must pay so
much a month to inhabit it. As an inner content, you may occupy it for any
length of time rent-free. If, in short, you follow it in the mental
direction, taking it along with events of personal biography solely, all
sorts of things are true of it which are false, and false of it which are
true if you treat it as a real thing experienced, follow it in the physical
direction, and relate it to associates in the outer world."
- William James "Does Consciousness Exist?"

As matters of experience James says percepts and concepts are the same
stuff. And when he says that many will grieve that his explanations of them
will sound "materialistic" he is very serious. James is working to show that
psychological processes are rooted in physiology. He is explicitly saying
that consciousness is not some supernatural or mystical "stuff." He is
arguing against this Neo-Kantian idea of consciousness as Transcendental. It
is hard to pinpoint just what brand of Philosophical mysticism you espouse,
Dave, but it I do not know of many forms of mysticism that do not refer to
some form of transcendent consciousness. I don't think you are going to find
James a friend in this regard.

As for Radical Empiricism you similarly fail to get even the gist of James.
In the nice essay you sent you simply quote Pirsig's account of what Radical
Empiricism is alleged to be:

"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was
independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that
subjects and objects were not the starting point of experience."
-Pirsig "Lila"

While Pragmatism may be regarded as philosophy, Radical Empiricism, on the
other hand is philosophy rooted in James' psychology. But in it I think one
will find scant support for mysticism.

"Empiricism is known as the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to
emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic
as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the
explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats
the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction. My
description of things, accordingly, starts with the parts and makes of the
whole 42 a being of the second order. It is essentially a mosaic philosophy,
a philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and his descendants, who
refer these facts neither to Substances in which they inhere nor to an
Absolute Mind that creates them as its objects."
-William James "A World of Pure Experience"

So if it makes you happy I will gladly modify my statement: The MOQ is "in
essence wholly subjective" in favor of: The MoQ is "In essence wholly
psychological".

As for misunderstanding Pirsig I may be guilty of looking more at what he
points too than to what he says he is pointing at. Here are a couple of
examples:

In possibly the first reference to DQ in Lila, Pirsig talks about random
access and his slips of paper. He explicitly notes the connection between
random access and Quality:

"Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and
Quality. The two are closely related. Random access is at the essence of
organic growth, in which cells, like post-office boxes, are relatively
independent. Cities are based on random access. Democracies are founded on
it. The free market system, free speech, and the growth of science are all
based on it.

In the same passage he shows how his metaphysics was dynamically organizing
itself through the process of random access. He is describing here how this
abstract set of concepts in fact has a fractal structure much like a river
bed or a lightning bolt or a tree. Patterns emerge and organize themselves
spontaneously conceptually in much the same way:

"Before long he noticed certain categories emerging. The earlier slips began
to merge about a common topic and later slips about a different topic. When
enough slips merged about a single topic so that he got a feeling it would
be permanent he took an index card of the same size as the slips, attached a
transparent plastic index tab to it, wrote the name of the topic on a little
cardboard insert that came with the tab, put it in the tab, and put the
index card together with its related topic slips."
- Pirsig "Lila"


Pirsig hints at the same kind of thing in ZMM with regards to hypotheses in
science:

"As he was testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of
other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more
came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind until it
became painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and
eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It
actually increased as he went along."
-Pirsig "ZMM"

In his justification for writing his MoQ Pirsig says this:

"Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and
since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a
'Metaphysics of Quality' is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical
absurdity.
It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The more
you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes."

Here he is clearly pointing in the right direction: the MoQ IS like a
mathematical definition of randomness. What he glosses over is that, yes
this is possible. What he does not seem to be aware of is that static
patterns indeed emerge from and are a consequence of a mathematical
definition of randomness. 

I would like to point out that most of what I have said about James above
applies to what Pirsig is doing as well, at least to the extent that Pirsig
is talking about the psychological processes by which subjects and object
are derived from experience. It is a mistake to think that any of this has
to do with TITs. They are simply excluded not ruled out. My comments on
Pirsig do not relate directly to this point. I raise them because they begin
to show why I think Pirsig rightfully has a place in the science section of
your local bookstore.