[MD] Metaphysical issues: DQ

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
Dave claims to be an expert on all things scientific but frankly I don't see how anyone who has read Hawking can come to his conclusion. I don't see how anyone can dismiss someone like Hawking, a man who has overcome extraordinary hardships in his life and yet remains at the top of his field. I just don't think he deserves to be trivialized...

dmb says:
I never claimed to be an expert, I did not "dismiss" Hawking, I did not trivialize him and was in fact barely talking about Hawking. His IMAGE was merely invoked as "a good PICTURE of what's wrong with science", to quote myself. You missed the point about five different ways. I guess you'd rather pretend to defend the man's honor than address the problem with science, but it sure looks like fake outrage from here. Who is the romantic in this debate? C'mon Krimel, if you're going to defend science you have to get a little smarter and a lot less emotional. And you really should stop pretending that scientific objectivity is NOT one of the central problems that the MOQ addresses. I agree that Pirsig was trying to "reconcile the romantic and the classic, art and science". But scientific objectivity is one of the central problems precisely because it stands in the way of that reconciliation.

Krimel said:
...In science all statements are dynamic and subject to change, revision and falsification.

dmb says:
I'd agree with this statement if "dynamic" were replaced with "provisional". Scientific truths are provisional. But it's quite absurd to say that statements are dynamic. Two of the labels for DQ announce this idea very clearly; pre-verbal and pre-intellectual. This is also reflected in the idea that "Quality is ahead of definition". Obviously, statements are verbal, intellectual and full of defined terms.  

"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)

Krimel responded to the quote:
This is an easily misunderstood passage and I suspect even Pirsig is confused about its significance. The process and order of human sensation perception and cognition are not perfectly understood but they are certainly well understood enough to specify what Pirsig is referring to when he speaks of the "pre-intellectual." It is not some far out cool nifty new age crap, it is emotion, pure an simple. Emotions are autonomic responses processed through the mammalian centers in the mid-brain. William James made early contribution to our understanding of emotion but the subject remained dormant for many years in part because of the attitudes in science that Pirsig criticizes. But as I said that battle is over and the emotions are ripe for study and have been for the past 20 years. The chief Quality of emotion that is of concern here is the property of valance. Emotions are positive or negative or somewhere in between. They occur instantly and without conscious intellectual processing. To the extent that they are conscious they are at a fairly low level of consciousness. They function, as James would have it, to remove us from danger and attract us toward that which sustains life.

dmb says:
That's hilarious in so many ways. You think Pirsig is confused about the meaning of his own statement and that's funny all by itself but then you also go on to describe DQ in terms of scientific objectivity. Either you are a very clever comedian or you are simply clueless. The first option seems possible because of the uncanny way you have enacted and preformed the problem I was getting at. See, here you have reduced the immediately felt quality of experience to "emotions", to "autonomic responses processed" in the brain and "fairly low level of consciousness". This is an almost perfect example of what I was complaining about. It is a disembodied view, a god's eye view, a view from nowhere. This is exactly the problem with scientific objectivity. Nietzsche says that to suspend affect as Science does, as philosophers from Plato to Kant do, is "to castrate the intellect". They all subscribe to what he calls the "ascetic ideal" and, like Pirsig, he opposes this with an aesthetic ideal. Instead of pretending that we can stand apart from the situation and gaze upon the scene from a bird's eye view, he insists that "there is ONLY a perspective seeing, ONLY a perspective knowing". See, this problem is not going to be solved or even addressed by studying what happens in the brains of others. The immediately felt quality of experience occurs in a particular situation, in a particular context of meaning, by a particular person. This quality has to be seen from within the experience, felt in the flux and flow of life. This is not otherworldly. It's an empirical reality. The problem with scientific objectivity is that is tends to dismiss this as new age gibberish or explain it away as low level consciousness or autonomic processes. It's like you are denying the existence of certain attitudes while, at the very same time, you are also exhibiting those denied attitudes.  

Krimel said:
This is our "sense" of Quality. It is this emotional valance. Claiming that it is mystical or other worldly just muddies the issue. Dogs do it, cats do it, even barnyard rats do it. It is a biological function not a spiritual pathway. Consciousness, awareness, the power to think rationally, emerge through to process of evolution by giving us the power to over write these pre-intellectual emotional responses.

dmb says:
You keep assuming (or rather insisting) that philosophical mysticism is otherworldly and somehow at odds with natural biological processes. But that's just not the case. That's what I like about Pirsig. He doesn't go in for any of the supernatural crap and neither do I. You've raised this point many times and yet there is no basis for this complaint in anything I've said. I'm an atheist, for God's sake. What MOQer bashes faith more than I do? 

More to the point, "the power to over write these pre-intellectual emotional responses" is a great tool. Science, philosophy and civilization couldn't even be without that power. But that power is also what killed Quality. The ability to repress our instincts and desires comes at a cost. We've become insensitive, cut off from our own feelings, cut off from a certain richness in experience. You know, Pan is dead. Dionysus has become the devil. We're too tame, too civilized. (Excluding all the sociopaths in prison and in congress, of course.) I don't know about cats and dogs, but why not? If infants know it, why not monkeys? But of course its wrong to reduce it to that and its wrong to want to regress to that. But the idea of philosophical mysticism is to get back in touch with this natural capacity to immediately feel the quality of the situation. Its not a feel-good idea, its not permission to be a pussy or an airhead. Its about developing a natural form of intelligence, a skill, a capacity to more fully engage with the world. Is that a "spiritual" pathway?  Yea, okay. If that's what spiritual means, then I'm fine with that.

Krimel said:
I take it from this that we are at least in agreement that Chris is dead wrong about DQ and should be formally asked to stop saying it is "constant".

dmb says:
Pirsig says Quality "is a universal starting place of experience that everyone is confronted with all the time" (Lila, p103). Universal, everyone, all the time. Sounds pretty damn constant to me. I think you are dead wrong about Chris being dead wrong. I could be dead wrong but I think you really should read more carefully. Especially, if you're going to set Pirsig straight on the MOQ and radical empiricism. 

Hilarious and adorable!





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