[MD] Tit's

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
What you offer up is an impressive bit of philosophology about which I have very little to say other than I plan to listen to the Dreyfus lectures as soon as time allows. And I did seek them out based on the earlier discussions you mention.

dmb says:
Thanks, but I'd call it a comparative analysis. The idea was simply to elaborate on Pirsig's assertions about language by citing other thinkers who've also made those assertions. I've found it helpful to see these ideas expressed in other terms, from other angles, so as to light the thing up from all sides.

Krimel said:
As you say, I do indeed think that mind arises from matter. I regard life as an emergent property of matter. I regard "mind" as an emergent property of life. As I have stated so many times that I am perfectly willing to call my personal acceptance of this view a "skip of faith". It is a primary assumption; a starting point. It is, I would argue, an assumption held tentatively and subject to change. It says nothing at all really about the nature of matter or material substance. It is merely the conviction that some form of reality exists independent of my ideas about it. I believe that this independent reality is orderly. I believe that humans arise as a product of this reality prepared to detect that order, to see patterns in that order and to use those patterns to reduce uncertainty. That is, we create knowledge and meaning in such a way as to increase the likelihood of replicating ourselves. And by this I mean creating others like us both physically and socially.

dmb says:
I understand. The belief in an independent, orderly reality stretches from Pythagorus to Einstein. I'm a little insulted that you think this view is unknown to me. C'mon, its been going on for a couple dozen centuries. Don't you think most normal adults know this already? And as I keep pointing out, you are only re-asserting the SOM view; a reality independent of what you think about it, to put it in your words. That's exactly what we mean by SOM. That's just normal science and nobody thinks its weird or bizarre or stupid to see things that way. But I do think you fail to see the flaws and limits, to understand the critique offered in these postmodern days. You're asserting the most recent, updated versions of a view that was established in the 18th century, a view that has been seriously challenged by philosophers for a hundred years. This doesn't mean that Pirsig rejects science. Science was his first love but after a time he found it to be inadequate because of the very "conviction" to which you've just confessed. The explanations I offered last time with respect to language were meant to explain one of the most widely recognized flaws in that view. But, again, this doesn't mean that science isn't a wonderful, beautiful, valuable thing. The data it produces is interpreted differently in the MOQ, but its certainly not disregarded, rejected or ignored. The MOQ is a naturalistic, atheistic and empirically based and evolutionary, all of which is more than just compatible with science. In fact, if we carefully remove the SOM reductionism from what you've said here about emergence,  it would agree with the MOQ entirely. 

Krimel said:
If I were pressed to advance a rationalization for making these assumptions I would say, because they stir in me an emotional and asthetic feeling of rightness. I see within them a coherence that is appealing both rationally and empirically. If I were pressed on why I would accept these assumption of over some others I would say because the first argument in the MoQ is over monism versus dualism. The MoQ sides with monism.

dmb says:
Yes, there is a rightness. I know what you mean and agree with it too. But maybe that feeling doesn't come from the SOM assumptions so much as the empiricism, the precision, the clarity, the orderliness and the relative lack of uncertainty. We can have all those things without SOM. Also, the MOQ is a kind of Monism, but it also has a dualism in the static/Dynamic distinction and the levels give it a kind of pluralism. These finer distinctions are contained within the Monism. In a pragmatic, conventional sense, it even contains SOM. I suppose this would make a philosophologist poop his pants, but the MOQ can take any side in that kind of debate. It just depends on the scope of analysis. Anyway, rejecting the assumptions of SOM is not a rejection of dualism as such.

Krimel said:
You suggest some implied dualism when you say, "The dualism exists here in the form of the source of the sense data and the physiological transduction of the data. In other words, the objective reality and the reception of it by the subject." But what is happening is that energy from the environment, (thermal energy, light, chemical energy, etc) is being transduced into electro-chemical energy. Energy changing form is not dualistic. Even matter or the dreaded "material substance" is a form of energy.

dmb says:
I fail to see why it makes any difference to call it the environment rather than the objective reality or the independent reality. Isn't the "transducer" the same thing as a subject? I understand that you're saying its all about the energy passed from one to the other, but sir, both are still involved and considered to be the basic arrangement of reality, no? That's pretty fancy footwork, but you're still standing in the exact same spot. 

Krimel said:
I would say that materialism, in a broad sense of the term, provides a monism that, as it is being pursued by science, offers a fairly comprehensive view of the life the universe and everything. Thousands of the brightest and best in a wide variety of disciplines over the past 400 years have united in the task of providing explanations of how and why we are here. I see no serious flaws in either the approaches being used, the assumptions being made or the results that poor forth from them.

dmb says:
You're gonna have to get a little more subtle about things to see the flaws with materialism. I mean, my thing in college was intellectual history, particularly the period you mention here. You don't have to sell me on the scientific revolution, the enlightenment or Modernity in general. Germ theory alone has saved millions of lives. Nobody is saying we ought to take it all back. But I think you have to look at this in terms of the philosophy of science and in terms of epistemology rather than the history of science or science per se. Again, the data it produces is not in dispute so much as the metaphysical assumptions behind science, which determines how that data is interpreted or understood. Here, for example, you offer materialism as a fairly comprehensive view of life, the universe and everything. But I'd say the material sciences offer a fairly comprehensive view of material, and that about it. Scientific materialism is something like physics going out and trying to colonized domains where it has nothing of value to say. You know, when a hammer is your only tool everything looks like a nail. SOM makes a great deal of sense in our macro world and when doing classic physics, but the so-called orderly universe has become impossibly small and impossibly big for our instruments to reach. The more we learn, the more we realize how incomprehensible the universe has become. I mean, our previous concepts and assumptions are becoming increasingly inadequate even within physics. And if we use that model of inquiry to investigate the human world, there are all kinds of problems, not least of all reductionism. (Skinner has always struck me as the classic example.) Pirsig's musing on anthropology, of course, are meant to get at the problems with taking an "objective" approach to the social sciences. In terms of SOM, that is a case of treating a subject as if they were an object. This simple point is that this doesn't work. Sure, we can some learn things from the observation of behavior but if you really want to lift the hood and find out how these things called people work, you have to talk to them, not just look at them or measure them. Physics does fine with that monological gaze, but it takes dialogue to study the human world. In that sense, physics and the material sciences are simpler and easier. The clarity and exactitude this allows has a nice clean feel to it, but when pushed beyond it proper domain this doesn't clarify complex things so much as it reduces them to simple, observable things...  

Krimel said:
...Consider even the secondary issue of levels in the MoQ. We begin as does science with the inorganic level. Within science this level of physics and chemistry was the first to yield its secrets and the best understood. This is so in part because the relationships at this level, inorganic patterns are the most static. Inorganic patterns and the laws that govern them exist in simpler, more stable patterns than at any other level. The inorganic moral order as far as we can tell is invariant. The forces and patterns of space/time and energy are fixed and/or predictable within a very narrow range of probability.

dmb says:
I'd say the inorganic level is extremely persistent rather than fixed or invariant, but I won't quibble about that difference. I just want to add the idea of a monologue versus a dialogue. Its not just that patterns get more complex and less predictable at the higher levels, although that's true too. But at the social and intellectual levels understanding requires an interrogation rather than just an observation. You gotta get inside, if you will. See, one of the ways of expressing the ideas about the power of language to effect our perceptions of "reality" is to say that reality is inherently interpretive. This is not apparent at the so-called physical level and the invisibility of this dimension leads to of the central complaints of postmodern thinkers. The rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, where subjective beliefs correspond to the objective reality, rests in part on this insight into the nature of language. Others has called this "the myth of the given" and in Pirsig's terms this is the false idea that inorganic nature comes to us directly, without the mediation of language and the world view it inherently contains. In that light, maybe Pirsig's assertion that there is something like an interior even at the inorganic level makes a little more sense. You could say, roughly, it is his version of the postmodern saying, "its text all the way down". You know, in the MOQ physical laws are more like extremely persistent patterns of preference. By putting this in the place where causality used to be, you get this picture that some kind of consciousness, some ability to interpret the situation that reaches down into every part of the universe. Consciousness, in the widest possible sense of the word, becomes increasingly apparent as we move up the evolutionary ladder but there is no place completely devoid of it. We can't interview electrons, of course, and one could never "prove" that particles make choices even if we stretch the word like its never been stretched. But again, this is only a way to interpret the data we already have from the physical science. I mention this move because it is roughly parallel to the colonization move by physics. To put it in terms of SOM, instead of pushing subjectivity all the way down, they pushed objectivity all the way up. That lead to the Wittgensteins of the world saying we can never make meaningful statements about goals, values and ethics. They say that's "just subjective" or "private". 

Krimel said:
...This is the value of reductionism. It is not that understanding the laws of physics predicts the rules of chess. But the rules of chess are constrained by the laws of physics and biology. They set limits on the kinds of rules that are possible the materials that piece and board can be made of the complexity of the rules etc., etc. Biological patterns are more fluid, subject to change and are able to adapt to change within certain limits. In other words to biological level depends on stasis at the inorganic. We can say all kinds of things about biology without reference to physics or chemistry. But understand the laws of physics and chemistry greatly enhances our understanding of biology and the kinds organisms that can exist and the finds of relationships that can exist among them.

dmb says:
Well, I'd just point out that understanding things from the ground up is not at all the same as reductionism. Reductionism is when emergent properties are explained in terms of that from which they emerged. It reduces things back down to the ground, so to speak. I'd say your materialistic monism does exactly that. But why would the emergent phenomenon be less real or less important than the background from which it emerged? Isn't that where we find all the stuff we care about? There's a trillion cells in your body and I'm betting you're fond of the way they stick together in an "organized" way. Or would it not matter if those cells were spread out evenly across the oceans? Nothing important would be lost, right? You'd just be kinda wet and very, very thin. (like Obama)

Krimel said:
I think the MoQ levels break down at this point because both social structure and intellect, even language appears in our species as biological adaptations.

dmb says:
That would be another case of reductionism. This time culture has been reduced to biology. Seems obvious to me that bird songs and dog barks resemble human language simply because that's the place from which it emerged. We are still animals, after all. We can admit that animals are expressive and communicative and still draw a line between that biological function and the kind of language that humans do. Everyday I say to my dog, "Dog, tell me a story." So far that little bitch has said so much as, "once upon a time". 

Krimel:
You spend a lot of time talking about language related issues from a philosophological perspective. I think much of that debate is misguided. Language, as I just said is a biological adaptation. It allows members of our species to communication complex ideas. It facilitates the formation of complex ideas. But rather than limit the range of our perception, it vastly enhances them. Nor does language as such fix our perceptions into some rigid mold. Language changes and adapts to meet changes in our conception of the world. We add new words and phrases constantly. We change usages and the vary structure of the spoken word to accommodate new concepts.

dmb says:
Well, its not clear to me why, in your view, the language debate is misguided. And your complaints here seem almost entirely unrelated to my claims. As I understand it, yes, language vastly enhances our perceptions but that is not the opposite of saying language limits or determines our perceptions. The extent of that enhanced ability is exactly the limit. It determines the range of possibilities, the terms within which we must think, the thoughts and conceptual categories through which we "see" the world. Also, nobody said that language couldn't evolve or that it stays fixed. C'mon, anybody whose ever read Shakespheare or the bible knows that it changes and linguists have it figured in terms of percentages of the language per century. If memory serves its just under 10%, unless you're talking about obsessively preserved languages like Latin or Sanskrit.

Krimel said:
You seem to claim that somehow this view has crippling limitations that render it and those who advocate it blind to some larger truth. You seem to think that the scientific study of the brain for example has nothing of value to tell philosophers about our perceptions and how they are formed. And yet all you seem to offer in return is some vague nattering about esthetics of solitary feelings of oneness based on purely private experience.

dmb says:
Man, you really tossed a softball over the plate there. Yes, the crippling limitations of SOM have blinded you such that philosophical mysticism looks to you like "vague nattering" about solitary, private experience. But if people all over the world have had this experience and reported, in what sense it that "private"? In what sense is it not real? See, this is why Pirsig says the traditional scientific empiricism isn't empirical enough. It doesn't just privilege sensory experience over other kinds, it practically dismisses all other kinds. Those SOM assumptions preclude certain ways of seeing and dismiss a large range of experience as merely subjective, as merely private. One of the other effects, beside the blindspot with respect to mysticism, is heard in Pirsig's description of the terrible secret loneliness that crept into the culture after WWI. The loss of meaning, of values, the onset of alienation, the transformation of everything to a commodity, even art and religion. All these existential human issues grow out of the scientific world view. In various and subtle ways it has destroyed the quality of our lives. 

And these are just some of the problems with SOM. In philosophy it is the source of many fake problems and dead ends.  

Krimel said...
But Pirsig does not stay that we are forced to wear any particular pair of such glasses. We can trade in one pair of specs for another. We can polish the lenses, wipe away the smudges. Even you with just a little effort can get a new pair.

dmb says:
That's right. The MOQ is offered as an alternative, as another pair of glasses. That why I disagree with Bo's equation of SOM and intellect. But I would point out that the MOQ was derived from the culture too. He had to put it together from more obscure, relatively hidden aspects of the culture, but he was still working within the limits of language. How could anything else be possible? There is novelty and emergence and evolution, but this occurs at the edges and in terms of what's come before. Was it Yogi Berra who said that anything that was 100% new had to be 90% old or people would never understand it? In any case, that's a crude version of the idea. 

Sorry about the length of this post and kudos to anyone who read this far!





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