[MD] What is SOM?

[Krimel]

dDmb,

I have a few other observations on this excellent post.

We have been having this feud over Dreyfus and AI. I don't know what he says
or why you think it matters. I will add that I don't know whether the IT
folks will make an AI or not. But I think anyone who makes definitive
statements about what is and is not possible with information systems just
hasn't been paying attention. I can't say what is to come but I know what
has been. 30 years ago the amount of time the average person interfaced with
a computer each day could be measured in nanoseconds. Maybe, I have seen too
many amazing things take life grow old and die in computer field, dot matrix
printers, dial-up connections, 8 inch floppy drives, punchcards... One of
the things I have learned watching CRTs morph into plasma and dial-up turn
to fiber is not to be dogmatic about what is possible.

I think the fact that the very experiments you think ought to be done are
being done rather takes the edge off of your claim that science can't study
mystical experience. A more serious problem seems to be your insistence that
mystical experience is entitled to special treatment. Radical empiricism
invites all kind of experience to the table but it's a round table all
seated are on an equal footing.

You no sooner invite the mystic to take a seat than all other experiences
are subservient to it. You say, "When the mystical reality is the primary
empirical reality, you have an empirically based mysticism that simply
doesn't need anything supernatural."

Who elected "mystical experience" to the status of "primary reality"? On
what basis do you claim it deserves this? Admitting mystical experience does
not mean everything said about it gets taken at face value. 

If you take the attitude that mysticism must be treated thus and so and
understood exactly thus... then you are right to avoid science. It does have
a way of upsetting our preconceptions. I think your conception of the
pre-intellectual is especially vulnerable.

You say, "You could say that Modern Western scientific worldview is one big
collective tight-ass control-freak ego-maniac." 

I say, real scientists are more like the Lone Gunmen from the X-Files with
students. Not long ago someone mentioned a Nova episode on the quest for
absolute zero. I thought the program highlighted the sheer joy and devotion
of the scientists involved. I really got the sense that for them science is
a mystical experience. Their love of adventure and delight in discovery
reminded me of the early days of NASA when the entire nation looked toward
the stars.

If science ever turned into its back and ignored its own values I would say
that is tragic. Scientific values are among the highest we have; honesty,
the pursuit of knowledge, making that knowledge available to all. If that
knowledge is abused who is to blame? Did Marconi give us Limbaugh? Is Edison
responsible for Kenny G? Did Bell cause telemarketing? It is not the
scientists who determine how knowledge will be used. If people are shallow
materialists why are scientists more worthy of blame than businessmen,
politicians, artists, priests or philosophers? 

Krimel







-----Original Message-----
From: david buchanan [mailto:dmbuchanan at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 6:51 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] What is SOM?


Krimel said to dmb:
All I keep asking you to do is state honestly what you think mystical
experiences can tell us about our place in the world. ...The point I have
repeatedly asked you to address is what does your "enlightened" view of
mystical experience tell you? How does it build upon or supplant the
insights derived from a scientific understanding.

dmb says:
Well, you've mocked and challenged the idea of mysticism. Its romanticism,
it resorts to the supernatural, its new age nonsense, its a misreading of
James, it can't offer insights into physics (huh?) and probably some other
stuff I don't recall at the moment. I guess you could call them questions,
but I still don't think you're sincerely interested in learning anything.
You're just trying to stump me, probably because you'd like to change the
subject. That's okay, I'll just pretend you're sincerely interested. Feel
free to change the thread name to "What is Mysticism" when you reply with
eager comments and further questions, oh great seeker.

If the Buddhist are right enlightenment extinguishes a certain kind of
suffering, the end of clinging and grasping and striving and the opening of
a more spontaneous way of being. I think they have a point and you can see
this in the MOQ too. The code of Art, the emphasis on dynamic quality and
the analogy where the dirty old sock gets turned inside out. But I guess
your questions are more specific than than. You want to know what we can
learn from it, what it can tell us about ourselves and how that relates to
our scientific understanding of the world. Is that about right?

I'll start with the science, specifically the difference between the
traditional empiricism of SOM and the expanded empiricism of the MOQ. Here
you'll see that Pirsig subscribes to the traditional form but then he also
goes further. This does not supplant the insights dervied from science. It
supplants the limits which had been placed on empirical science, thereby
expanding the range of possibility for further scientific insights. This
would obviously be a case of building upon what has already been achieved. 

"The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all
legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what
the sense provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge
gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical
reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and
metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying that the
values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and
that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not
empirical reasons."

As you know, later in the book he adopts James's Radical Empiricism. There
we see him supplant the same limits of sensory empiricism by saying that
experience of every kind has to be accounted for in a legitimate
philosophical account of the world. Conversely, we can make no claims about
anything that is beyond or outside of experience. In fact, he says, nearly
all the fake problems and metaphysical fictions in philosophy are the result
of ignoring certain kinds of experience. And this is not just about their
expanded empiricism and its relation to science, what it would mean for
science. James's "pure experience" is very similar to Pirsig's "primary
empirical reality" and they both talk about this undifferentiated awareness
in terms of being prior to the distinction between subjects and objects. And
there are many kinds of mystical, but Oneness, unity, identity, unification,
wholeness and words like that are a recurring theme in the accounts from far
and wide. The terms that
  these pragmatists use, such as pure, undivided, immediate and
undifferentiated, also announce this theme. You know, the Buddha walked up
to a hot dog stand and said, "make me one with everything".

When the mystical reality is the primary empirical reality, you have an
empirically based mysticism that simply doesn't need anything supernatural.
This has a way of uniting science and mysticism. They explore different
areas of experience, both they're both based in empirical reality. The
problem of the scientific verification of mysticism, the disciplined study
of mystical experience is difficult. If the professor in my department are
right, those projects require interdisciplinary methodologies, team work
across disciplines and interpretive rather than observational skills. You
also need people who can have a mystical experience, who have some actual
experience and training. This is a tall order and its not a simple matter.
But its simple in principle. 

And what does this undivided experience tell us? Well, this experience is
characterized as pre-intellectual, pre-conceptual so it does not impart
intellectual truths or cognitive meaning. Its characterized as a state of
consciousness that is free of these things. Although I think the general
idea is that mystical experience puts such "truth" into perspective. It has
a way of knocking the naive realism out of a guy. It doesn't have to be a
full blown Buddha-like experience. Many lesser altered states of perception
have a way of knocking loose the static patterns through which we normally
see the world too. Hurricanes, art and LSD, for example. Its always good to
look around at other ways of being and otherwise try to overcome one's own
provincialisms, right? Well this is just like that, only more so. 

You could say that Modern Western scientific worldview is one big collective
tight-ass control-freak ego-maniac (No, Ian this is not about you). And
mysticism teaches us to lighten up, to loosen up and get groovy. I mean, on
some level I really think its about making our world less stuffy, less
square and more beautiful. The pragmatist thinks philosophy has to make a
difference in actual experience or it ain't worth much. And opening up this
realm of experience, and the re-examination of the assumptions that
prohibited it, would alter the culture in all kinds of ways. Heidegger and
Pirsig and others make a case that SOM has been a disaster for the culture.
They both make a case that it narrows our way of seeing the world in such a
way that the most delicious stuff is rarely tasted or even closed off
altogether. They talk about alienation from nature and each other, about the
pointless, frantic, fuck-you world of consumer culture. Apparently, there is
an entire sub-field in He
 idegger studies that examines the link between this alienation and
environmental degradation. I'd imagine there are any number of ways this
view could be applied to real world problems.

How many people in the united states take medicine for anxiety? How many
people medicate themselves for it? How many addicts, including alcoholics?
How many murders and suicides were there last year? Why can millions and
millions believe that Jesus is coming back to see us and that evolution is a
hoax? Ever see "Koyaanisqatsi"? The content of the film largely consists of
scenes from ordinary American life in the city in time lapse photography.
The title of the film is a word that means, "the wrong way to live". I mean,
there seems to be quite a lot of crazy bullshit and misery DESPITE all the
comfort that technology and science provide. I love my car, furnace and
water heater but then again they say we're presently experiencing the
largest extinction event since the dinosaurs died out. I'm not saying that
there is a magic bullet, cure-all but I think a lot of the problem come out
of the suffering that the Buddhists are talking about. Chasing mechanical
rabbits is just the mos
 t banal and mundane form of this insanity.

Personally, I really like the way it unifies things, the way all my
interests sort of feed into mysticism or grow out of it. The way radical
empiricism expands the range of science and includes mystical experience at
the same time, as explained above, is one example. Last semester I took the
philosophy of art and the philosophy of religion, to take another example,
and both courses assigned Plato's Ion for the first reading. We used it in
art to see the way Plato's demand for intelligibility puts a certain spin on
what art is, to demote art. We used it in religion to see the way he does
the same to religion. This is the same thing he does to the sophists, the
mystics. Basically, that's where the dynamic got knocked out of everything
and "truth" became a fixed and eternal thing. So I'm interested to ask the
question, what do these things look like when you undo Plato and put the
dynamic back. 

And even more personally, I've had some experiences that could probably go
in that category. I guess they feel like some kind of growth spurt. Insights
and epiphanies powerful enough to shake things up and re-arrange the
attitude, a new gestalt. Feels like an avalanche, like weight shifting of
its own accord. Once it felt like I heard the killer joke. Anyone who heard
that laughter must have thought I was insane. I think this sort of thing
happens to people all the time. Its completely natural and there's no good
reason to dismiss it. It sort of happens in the center of your being. It can
change the way you feel about everything. Sadly, we hardly know what to do
with these experiences or even how to talk about them. And again, I what do
these things look like when you undo Plato and put the dynamic back into
human development. What if our religions were all about cultivating the
mystical experience, creativity and a more spontaneous life.

Wouldn't that just beat the shit out of Pat Robertson's religion?

 



 
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