[MD] Metaphysical issues: DQ

[david buchanan]

Christoffer said:
The Question we need to focus on here is "what should we say about DQ in order to make the MOQ work best?" We want the MOQ to replace old SOM as a metaphysical basis for human activity, and thus it is of course crucial that the MOQ in no way I perceived as standing in contrast to scientific understanding and method. And it won't do that either, unless we start to talk too much about DQ. If we say "DQ is that part of reality that we can't put into any kind of static understanding" that works. Because when someone experiences something new or invents something new (say Stephen Hawking finds a new small thingie in some lab) we just say: "Oh, right - you took something that before was DQ and incorporated it into our SQ understanding. Good."

dmb says:
Actually, Hawking is a good picture of what's wrong with science. He's like a mythical figure, a disembodied mind pondering a mathematical universe that is indifferent to humanity. There is no place for anything like DQ in such a scientific world view. What you describe here as new experience or new inventions sounds a lot more like an undiscovered fact. Such a scientific worldview is an interpretation of the facts, a particular way to construe the data. As I understand it, the data themselves are considered valid because they are derived from experience but there is more than one way to understand them. As you probably know, the idea of scientific objectivity is one of the central problems that the MOQ addresses. 

The trick, I think, is to realize WHY the MOQ says that DQ can't be defined, WHY we can assert the reality of DQ even though it can't be captured in a static formula or otherwise pinned down. 

Chris said:
Now, Krimel got angry at me for saying that DQ is constant, but the reason I say that is because if we say DQ is some force or something that swoops in and makes stuff happen, we will be at odds with science, and we will have become mystics. If we however say that DQ is the part of reality that - at any given moment at any given place - hasn't been incorporated into SQ understanding - why then we aren't at odds with anything.

dmb says:
Don't worry about Krimel. He and his anger are only virtually real. He also tends to be scientistic and, as a result, fairly clueless about the MOQ.  

I think its important to see that DQ can't be incorporated into a static understanding, no matter when or where you are. And even more importantly than that, the MOQ is a form of philosophical mysticism and DQ is the mystical reality. 

"The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had call 'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions." (Lila, page 64)

Because this Quality or value comes before anything else in experience, Pirsig calls it "the primary empirical reality". (Lila, page 66)

As the Pragmatist Dr. Sandra Rosenthal explains it, the Radical Empiricists (James, Dewey, Pirsig) assert that this reality is too thick, too rich, too overflowing to be captured in words or concepts. Language, she says, is about the way we BREAK UP experience into small, manageable packages. In doing so, we always leave out most of that reality. That's why guys like Hawking seem so precise and exact when they describe the universe in mathematical equations; because the richness of all the details are left on the editing room floor. To physicists and chemists, water is nothing but H2O but such assertions forget to mention that water is experienced as wet, cool, slippery, thirst-quenching, crop-saving, cleansing, flowing, etc.. The felt quality of experience simply doesn't enter into descriptions based on the periodic table of elements. It is in this sense, I think, that science ignores value. And it is in this sense that Quality is constantly known in all experience. It is not consistent, it is always new and changing, flowing and fluxing but it is always at the front edge of every experience. The trick is to attune yourself to those felt qualities. In that sense, Pirsig's philosophical mysticism is MORE empirical than the empirical sciences.

"Reality, which is value, is understood by every infant. It is a universal starting place of experience that everyone is confronted with all the time. Within a MOQ, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are NOT the reality they describe." (Lila, page 103)

Just driving by,
dmb



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