[MD] David M and DMB clearly disagree -what do others think?

[Matt Kundert]

Hey David (either),

>From just reading what was written, I'm not sure there is a clear 
disagreement, but that's just because whenever people start slinging the 
"Noooo, YOU'RE stuck in SOM!" stuff, I think that's often time a good 
indication that the water's still too murky.

I doubt DMB would deny that the possible is real, as you're saying David, 
but just insofar as its properly explicated.  I see what you're trying to 
suggest, and how it highlights a weakness in SOM, but whatever redescription 
we use still needs to be able to capture the contrast between possible and 
actual, which is why, I gather, DMB is protesting.  I think the easiest way 
to try and explain your point is to suggest that by saying that "the 
possible is real" you're saying the same thing against the tradition that 
Pirsig was suggesting with DQ and it's relation to Whitehead's "dim 
apprehension."

As I see it, the muddy water is occuring around what it means to "know," as 
when DMB says, "I think a person has to torture logic and the english 
language in order to make a case that 'the possible' is a real thing that we 
can know in experience."  I'd first remind DMB that Pirsig tortured logic 
with his Quality and that torture alone is not an indication of regression 
or badness.  I'm not sure if David mentioned knowing and knowledge in his 
excursus on "the possible," but DMB is bringing in "what we can know" to 
curb "what is real," such that, because the possible is, by conventional 
definition what we don't know because it hasn't happened yet, it isn't real.

It isn't hard to see how curbing "the real" with "what we can know" can get 
out of hand and turn into SOM--such a formulation is how the tradition 
curbed out values from reality.  The solution that Pirsig attempts is to 
expand our notion of reality, which thereby also expands our notion of what 
counts as knowledge, "what we know."

I'm not saying DMB _is_ regressing, but that that is, I think, the point on 
which it hangs.  I think there is an obvious, commonsensical sense that DMB 
is right to defend, the idea that we don't _know_ the future (as, for 
instance, against seers), but I think David might be playing around with a 
different, broader sense of "know."

Who's supporting the MoQ?  Both.  To use the MoQ with any kind of efficiency 
requires you to move back and forth between common sense (which, as Pirsig 
tells us, has some Platonism/SOM built into it currently) and 
counterintuitive philosophical formulations with a fair amount of 
agility--good static patterns of the past with breaking the static patterns, 
with the hope that they are Dynamic and not degenerate.

Matt

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