[MD] MOQ levels

[Ron Kulp]

Magnus:

The problem with your SOLAQI is the same problem I've been talking to
Ron about. 

It assumes our reality consists of thoughts alone. Thoughts of eating,
thoughts 

of conspiring and then the grand thoughts of intellectual abstraction.

 

But if you, like Pirsig did in Lila, look at the world around you, write
what you 

see on small pieces of paper, there are not many of those pieces of
paper that will 

end up the "thoughts" box, right? A stone is not a thought, the computer
I type on 

now is not a thought, me thinking about what to write *is* a thought on
the other hand, 

and of course there's a thought involved when I'm about to write on each
piece of paper. 

But the vast majority of paper slips will not be thoughts.

 

Ron:

This is the central disagreement between us, I was of the same opinion 

Until a few months ago when with the help of David Buchanan and Dan
Glover

To name only a few, brought me around to the notion that Rocks and
computers

Actually ARE thoughts. Thoughts of a differing nature perhaps, but
thoughts

None the less. Basic assumptions on which to build abstract thinking on.

These basic assumptions are formed by social interpretation and taken as
reality.

 

What I mean by Objective Assumption" is the assumption that thoughts or
what we 

are thinking about is Totally objective, that your perception of a rock

is what any human being at any point in history would perceive as a
rock.

The term "a rock" has many meanings and forms just in one cultural
definition.

In our own culture "a rock" is interpreted given many subjective factors
of the

One perceiving it. Geography is just one consideration. 
What stored mental images you associate with the term is also associated
with past experiences.

A Rock to a desert dweller is different from a rock to a pacific
islander.

That's just inter-culturally some cultures may perceive rocks as living
entities

Or manifestations of ancestors. Some may have no word for it at all.

 

What we perceive as everyday common items, objectively absolute, are
culturally conditioned overlays.

Static patterns are perceived symbolically and associated with cultural
meanings that intellect manipulates abstractly.

 

 

 

Rueben Able "Man is the Measure":

 

"Visual perception is discontinuous, seeing consists physically

of separate glances, each lasting about a quarter of a second.

(the world may disappear in the intervals and we would never know it)

The brain pieces together these distinct stimuli to construct an image

of a stable and continuous world."

 

" What enters the eye is not really seen until it is organized by the

brain.

To see what is the case requires context, inference, concepts,

experience, interpretation."

 

he goes on to say:

 

" The selective nature of perception is also a consequence of the

fact that the number of sensory stimuli, or possible messages from

outside, is greater than we can receive and process. The channels

of communication to us are crowded and noisy; we must filter

stimuli. What we receive is usually what we expect, or want, or

believe, or are used to. Our eyes and brains coordinate how objects

look at different distances, from different directions, and 

under different light, and show us an object to which we attribute

a constant size, shape, and color. To perceive is to solve a problem.

Our capacity "to find strands of permanence in the tumult of changing 

appearances" (Polanyi) has survival value. Gestalt psychologists' stress

how we tend to perceive well defined patterns and wholes which are not 

really there, by integrating heterogeneous cues and filling in

contours."

 

 

>From DMB:

 

"For Rorty, "nothing pre-linguistic is conceivable" (Hildebrand 2003,
186). He shares the view with many 

that the world as we know it is "text all the way down". Interpretation
is bottomless, so to speak. But 

that is exactly what Dewey and the radical empiricists are willing to
defy. It hardly matters whether we 

call it "pure experience" as James did, the "undifferentiated aesthetic
continuum"  as Northrop did, the 

"whole situation" as Dewey did or the "primary empirical reality"  as
Pirsig does. A rose is a rose. The idea 

is simply that everything follows from that first and most basic
experience. All the conceptual distinctions 

are secondary to that, are derived from that. We are not talking about
some other realm or any kind of 

thing. And this is not meant to suggest that the world as we know it
suddenly pops into existence the 

moment a subject conceptualizes it. We are simply talking about
experience before one has a chance to 

think about it, before it has been interpreted by our conceptual
schemes.

 

 This pre-linguistic moment of experience has gone unnoticed as James
says, because only "only new born babes" 

and people in extraordinary circumstances have access to pure experience
(James 1912, 93). The infant also 

appears as an example in Pirsig's explanations (Pirsig 1991, 118-9). The
"unverbalized sensations" of 

experience are "identified and fixed and abstracted" into the shapes we
recognize as the world of things 

(James 1912, 94). For adults, arguably like myself, these abstractions
have been fixed for so long and are

 used so automatically and habitually that they are invisible. This
habits of mind have developed and 

evolved over long periods and are inherited by us from the culture in
the normal maturation processes, 

in the process of acquiring language in childhood. I think this explains
why SOM has assumed such a 

powerful role in Western conceptions of reality. The radical empiricists
are saying they are not reality, 

that SOM is a theory that doesn't look like a theory. Its a metaphysical
abstraction so old and pervasive 

that it has become common sense."