[MD] Consciousness & Moq.

[david buchanan]

Dave said to dmb:
I thought this was a discussion of Pirsig's work. ...Your pattern here has been to interpret Pirsig's mention of "pragmatism" as meaning he adopts the entire field from Pierce to Putnam. ... It allows you to defend almost any point by claiming that Pirsig subscribes to that position because is subscribes any notion related to "radical empiricism" and "pragmatism."

dmb says:
Sorry, but I think this complaint is not legit. I've never likened the MOQ to Pierce or Putnam and have tried many times to point out key differences between the MOQ and Rorty's neo-Pragmatism. Matt and Steve will testify to that. Secondly, Pirsig is very clear and explicit about aligning the MOQ with James's Radical Empiricism, making equations right down to the most central terms (Quality, static and dynamic). Pirsig doesn't just "mention" pragmatism, he says the MOQ is a form of mainstream American pragmatism. On page 363, Pirsig says "it seemed that James' generalizations were heading toward something very similar to the MOQ. ..Everywhere he read it seemed as though he was seeing fits and matches that no amount of selective reading could contrive". After a few pages presenting James's ideas, on page 366 Pirsig says, "The MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream of 20th century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good." To suggest that there is something wrong with using James or pragmatism in a discussion of the MOQ seems pretty weird to me. Since Pirsig identifies the MOQ with pragmatism and radical empiricism and since there is a mountain of scholarship on pragmatism and radical empiricism, it would be downright foolish NOT to use James and pragmatism. 



Dave said to dmb:
Did question say anything about "thing", "entity" or "substance" or anything about what I though about "consciousness" at all. I asked about what the MoQ says about "consciousness." Which as of now, you have failed to address.


dmb says:
This complaint seems quite illegitimate too. You don't think the status of the subjective self is relevant to the question of consciousness? You don't think it's important to be explicit about what James is denying when he denies the existence of consciousness? James and Pirsig attack SOM in the same way and they both take the Cartesian self to be a fiction. This issue is simply unavoidable if you want to talk about the MOQ's view of consciousness. The suggestion that it fails to address the question is hard to fathom.


Dave said to dmb:
I will not deny it, Chalmers is a very tough read for me. He is a mathematician first, analytic school philosopher of the mind, functionalist, with a strong bent towards scientific materialism and reductionism. And yes he does use the words subjects and objects. The problem slapping SOM label on any work that happens to mention subject, object, subjective, objective, or mind, mental is that it eliminates 99.999% of all scientific or philosophic work old and new. Great defense.

dmb says:

I agree that is doesn't help to go around slapping the SOM label on stuff indiscriminately. But obviously these assumptions about the subjective self are going to make a huge difference. If Pirsig and James are rejecting those assumptions and you want to compare them to what Chalmers is saying, then we have to know whether he joins in that rejection or not. If he's coming at the issue from the position of scientific materialism and reductionism, it's very likely that he disagrees with Pirsig and James in a fundamental way, at the level of basic assumptions. 


It seems to me that all three of your complaints are really just a product of being unable to see the relevance. Your objecting to my answer by asking what James or pragmatism have to do with it, what does consciousness as an entity has to do with it and what SOM has to do with it? If you want to know the MOQ's view on consciousness, you simply can't avoid these things. The are entirely relevant. And yet you construe its use as some kind of dirty trick? 

For a guy who can't even formulate a specific question, you're being WAY too picky about the answer.


I thought this part of his Wikipedia page was most relevant:
"Chalmers .. makes the distinction between "easy" problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the standard strategy in philosophy of mind: functionalism. Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physical explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist.  ...Though Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries."


Hmmm. The FEELING with accompanies awareness. Hmmm. Panpsychism. I'm not so sure your description of him as a scientific materialist and a reductionist is very accurate. I think I like this guy.