[MD] Food for Thought

[LARAMIE LOEWEN]

You're a bright light, Case.

Happy New Year.

Cheers,
Laramie


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Case<mailto:Case at iSpots.com> 
  To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org<mailto:moq_discuss at moqtalk.org> 
  Sent: Monday, January 01, 2007 1:06 PM
  Subject: Re: [MD] Food for Thought


  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.



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