[MD] What is SOM?

[Krimel]

dmb,
With regard to the suckiness of philosophy I think irrelevance is perhaps a
better word. But it is really a matter of "philosophers" abandoning the
discipline. Instead they move on to other field. Primarily science but also
political science, economics, and the like. Witness the number of
philosophers on academic faculties. Large universities have small
departments but in smaller colleges philosophy is in the humanities or
religion departments. With the possible exception of ethics classes
philosophy is not generally a required course. 

As to our disagreements on assumptions I don't think there really is any
disagreement on the first point. You say experience is your first assumption
I say thinking is mine. I am happy to adopt your term. There is a possible
problem with my reformulation of "I experience, therefore I am." Because I'm
sure you will object to the "I". By that I mean this particular locus of
experience. You may also be correct to the extent that for me at least this
is not an assumption. As Descartes rightly claims this is a matter than none
can reasonably doubt. Whatever "I" am; whatever "experience" is; it happens
here and now. It is in my view the only toehold I have on certainty.

Unfortunately it is a slender and slippery toehold. It says nothing about
the nature or source of the experience. It leaves open the question idealism
and realism. As Descartes says it could be the product of clever demons or a
dream and as it is all I have to go on and anything I have to say about its
nature and source will of necessity be an assumption.

I think you are mistaken and a bit dogmatic to claim that experience IS
reality. I will concede that experience is my reality but I think any thing
beyond that requires further assumptions that can not be asserted without
some level of doubt. Anything further is an assumption since it can not be
verified except by reference to experience itself.

With respect to my next to assumptions you start making all kinds of
assertions about them that do not necessarily flow from the assumptions
themselves. To say that I think saying "there is an external world" is only
to say that I reject solipsism. My experience is not the all that exists. It
says nothing at all about what does. This applies also to my assumption of
other minds. 

Metaphorically I think this is a bit like the bubble in the head of a beer
image I mentioned to Ron earlier. As a single bubble "I" arise from and
exist as part and in relation to foam around me. I am holon to use a term I
suspect you have sympathy with. A whole made of parts and part of a whole,
in relation to other holons. For me this highlights the self similar fractal
nature of both existence and experience.

I believe that the next few assumptions I listed are in no way at odds with
the MoQ. I think that nature is orderly that it is "patterned." Pirsig's use
of the term "patterns" has been explored a bit in these discussions but I
don't think its importance can be over stated. A pattern is first and
foremost a relationship. It implies a distinction. It implies stability.
When Pirsig says that the first metaphysical cut is between the static and
the dynamic I agree. In order for there to be a pattern or for a holon to
exist there must be a distinction between parts and wholes. Those relations
must have a degree of stasis and the possibility of change. 

Stasis or SQ means persistence in time. It allows predictability. It is a
reduction of uncertainty. Change means a disruption of stasis or change in
relations. Pure change or a purely dynamic state implies increased
uncertainly. Among the things we learned in the last half of the last
century was that within a completely unstable or chaotic system, even I
would say, a system or set of relations as large as the universe; stability
arises spontaneously. I would say that what Pirsig calls DQ is this
spontaneous arising of order. In complexity theory it is called a strange
attractor. I will not insult your much vaunted command of the scientific
literature by describing these except to say that strange attractors display
constrained infinite variability. They are static in the sense that they are
limited to certain parameters. They persist in time in virtue of their
relationship to the surrounding unpatterned chaos or to their relation to
other strange attractors or persistant static patterns.

Evolution as a general principle is about how these static patterns or
strange attractor arise spontaneously and persist across time in
relationship to one another. One might say the evolution is "pulled" toward
these strange attractors or spontaneously arising configurations of order.
But as you are well acquainted with Prigogine I am a bit taken aback that
you have not commented on the significance of this yourself. 

Since the MoQ consistently refers to static patterns and levels of static
patterns I do not see the problem with attempting to understand in a bit
more depth just what they are and where they come from. Neither do I see how
the assumption that nature is patterned or orderly implies SOM or is
inconsistent in the slightest with the MoQ. There is nothing in this that
implies subjects or objects or even makes reference to patterns of "what".
The principles hold whether we are talking about patterns that are extended
in space and time or whether they are patterns of thought extended perhaps
only in time. In an abstract sense they do not even require an observer.
They are merely relationships of figure (SQ) and ground (DQ) or
relationships among distinctions, perhaps. Metaphysically all this is
patterned SQ and unpatterned DQ as distinctions in undefined and other wise
unknowable Quality.

Pirsig call these relationships Values so you might conceive of a
distinction as a relationship between different Values of Quality. I have
never liked these terms even dating back to my first reading of ZMM. I am
forced to continually translate them into more sensible terms; Value in its
sense of quantity or relative dissimilarity and Quality of course as Tao. 

My fifth assumption is that "we can know nature". The problem here is not
about SOM or anything of the kind. The problem is, what does it mean to
"know". How does one pattern "know" another? It is only through this knowing
that the qualitative aspect of Quality arises.

Again we can look to the MoQ for some guidance as it begins with
establishing its hierarchy of levels. The MoQ claims that inorganic patterns
are at the lowest level. I really don't see were the MoQ has much to add or
subtract from the work of physicists and chemists in this regards. I would
argue that again argue that both the MoQ and science level the fundamental
reality status of inorganic patterns up in the air. Science holds them as
tentative statements about relationships. The MoQ merely comments on them as
static qualities. But the MoQ adds that it is the persistence of their
stasis that is critical. Inorganic patterns, whether they are described as
fields or forces or ideas are so fixed in their relations as to be regarded
as lawlike. Even scientists call some of these patterns constants, the speed
of light, the force of gravitational attraction and the like.

For the MoQ it is this constancy, predictability and dependability of these
patterns that gives them their status on the inorganic level. As a result of
these highly stabile relationships emerges the biological level. Biological
patterns while stable are static quality of a different order. They are
relationships that depend entirely on the underlying stability of the
inorganic level. But their stability or persistence in time is a product of
replication. The chief feature of the biological level is that patterns are
encoded configurations of inorganic patterns. That code is stable or static
to the extent that it is replicable from one iteration to the next. But it
has the added feature of being dynamically responsive to changes in the
inorganic relations that give rise to them. As the environment changes, both
the specific composition of the organic pattern and the relation of other
biological patterns, the encoding of biological patterns is plastic enough
to allow variation. But you are well read in the works of Dawkins, Gould and
Wilson so I won't go on with this other than to say that what the MoQ has
not quarrel with them other than to note the difference in terminology and
the underlying openness as to the "fundamental nature" of the patterns in
question.

The critical points at the biological level are that biological patterns are
susceptible to greater variation and greater kinds of variation than are
found at the inorganic level. Change in the orbital patterns of the earth
around the sun, cooling of the earth's core, the impact of space junk,
fluctuation of the energy output of solar radiation can upset biological
patterns. At the inorganic scale change is perceptible on a scale of
billions of years. On the biological level change occurs in millions of
years. 

Unlike inorganic patterns biological patterns participant in their own
persistence. The actively or dynamically engage the patterns in their
environment in ways that inorganic patterns do not. They can exhibit
tropisms where they are attracted towards something, light, heat, chemicals
or towards on another, food or sex. These attractions are values of a
different order than the quantitative values of the inorganic level. They
are much more probabilistic and sensitive to more subtle influences than
exist on the inorganic level. An organism might be attracted to a food
source but repealed by a predator thus the out come of its actions might be
less predictable than same a piece of irons attraction to a magnet or and
apple's attraction to the ground.

The process of evolution to date has been favorable to biological patterns
that can adapt or change to respond to increasing complexity and increasing
subtlety of influence. Human's, which of course is what this is all about,
can respond and adapt conditions everywhere on the planet. What is our most
outstanding capacity in this regard is an elaboration of a strategy the
works for almost all biological patterns. This is the ability to allow past
experience to influence present behavior.
 

















-----Original Message-----
From: david buchanan [mailto:dmbuchanan at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 10:21 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] What is SOM?


Krimel said:
Dave's author is confused when he says, "These are the scientific
specialists, scholars, Gelehrten, and all like-minded types who have
dominated philosophy for the past two centuries. For them, the problem of
existence has become a matter of cognitive science to be answered through
analysis of the brain-mind problem, using techniques borrowed from
neurophysiology, linguistics and computer science." ..First of all if it is
true that science has dominated philosophy for the past two centuries then I
would say it is because philosophers have had so little of value to say. But
he is confused when he says that the cognitive sciences are in the least
concerned with "existence". Cognitive sciences in a philosophical sense are
not concerned with ontology. Their concern is epistemology.

dmb says:
First of all, is it really your contention that the domination of the
scientific worldview is the result of philosophy suckiness? Are you really
that silly or are you just impersonating a 15 year old boy for kicks? More
to the point, you are apparently confused about what Ron's author means.
He's saying that "the problem of existence HAS BECOME a matter of cognitive
science" FOR these "like-minded types". And this point is very well
illustrated in our recent conversations, where you predictably and typically
trotted out neurophysiology as an answer in a metaphysical dispute. The
author is talking about people of YOUR temperament and worldview exactly, my
friend. And this worldview is no mystery to anyone. Its common sense among
educated Westerners. Its nothing to be ashamed of, but it just kills me that
you dish it up as if it were news. You're like the bible thumper who thinks
I never heard of Jesus.

Krimel summed it up:
Perhaps someone has claimed that science is free of assumptions but
certainly not me. I have in fact said point blank what my assumptions are.
1. I think therefore I am. 2. There exists a world external to me. (BTW,
this says nothing about its nature or source only that I am not all that
is.) 3. In that world there are other minds like mine. 4. Nature is orderly,
it contains patterns. 5. We can know nature. 6. All phenomena have natural
causes. 7. Knowledge is derived from acquisition of experience.

dmb says:
That is very clear and familiar. It also happens to be SOM, complete with an
allusion to Descartes. Did I mention how adorable you are?

Krimel continued:
Remember our chats about faith Dave? I believe I have been honest on that
score. How about you? Just what are your assumptions? Something you don't
like about these?

dmb says:
I don't think I understand the connection between our chats on faith and
your seven assumptions or my alternatives to them. And where the question of
honesty comes from, I have no idea. But let me say my temperament is such
that Pirsig and the other pragmatists seem quite right to me. For Pirsig,
experience is reality. As John McDermott puts it, "the drama of experience
is the fulcrum" of Dewey's work. And you know my fondness for James's
Radical Empiricism, which they all share. I don't know that it is an
assumption, but experience seems impossible to deny. If there is going to be
anything like valid knowledge about anything, it has to be based on
experience and tested in experience. If there is a reasonable way to avoid
this conclusion, I honestly don't know what it is. And if faith is a belief
that is not empirically based or can't be tested, then I have no respect for
it.

By the way, there is nothing supernatural about philosophical mysticism and
it fits quite nicely with radical empiricism. The mystics say that reality
is intellectually unknowable and radical empiricism explains what this means
in epistemological terms. If the primary empirical reality refers to a
pre-conceptual moment of awareness and conceptualization follows from it and
is distinct from it, then the most immediate reality is intellectually
unknowable. That isn't really very hard to swallow when you realize that the
claim amounts to. They're saying, basically, that reality isn't conceptual.
Or, as I said to Platt, having an experience and knowing you had an
experience are two different things.

If you assume "there is a world external to me" and "there are other minds
like mine" and "we can know nature", then you subscribe to the
correspondence theory of truth. You're using terms like mind and nature but
this is just another way to say that we are subjects in an objective world.
This is common sense realism. The things you see around in the world are
real and your perceptions more or less correspond to them. In this view,
experience is conceived pretty much as you explained it, a transduction of
energy. Ultimately these subjects who take in the world around them are also
objects in the world and their capacity to transduce is a physical
phenomenon too. Thus your essentialist monism.

But the MOQ says this external world is not reality. Its a concept. The
so-called things you see are not really things at all. They're concepts. 

Remember way back when I first jumped in with the Leonardo da Vinci story,
where he drew what he knew rather than what was "objectively" there? I was
trying to make the point, that we see with the mind more than with the eye.
That was a less sweeping form of the same idea. Read up on "the myth of the
given". This is another way of describing that common sense realism. The
idea here is that the things in the world come in through the senses and we
see them pretty much as they are, so that the external world is simply
"given" to the senses. They say this is a myth for exactly the reasons I'm
hammering on so annoyingly, namely the external world is NOT just given, its
a concept. You see only what the culture allows you to see because that
where all our concepts come from, see? This shapes the world as we know it
so profoundly that some people will even tell you it IS the world as we know
it, every last bit of it. Here's where I'd counter by putting experience
over language, beca
 use the latter is derived from the former. As John McDermott puts it, guys
like Rorty (who also call themselves pragmatists) think, or at least used to
think, that the task of philosophy was language and not experience, but
"that's not what James would hold at all, nor would Dewey" and Rorty "never
really, publicly recanted" on that point. There is a range of dispute about
HOW profound that influence is, but you're not even in the ballpark.

Romantically yours,
dmb