[MD] Social Intellectual

[MarshaV]

On Jul 25, 2010, at 2:55 PM, david buchanan wrote:

> 
> Marsha asked how patterns and objects differ.

Marsha:
So you think patterns of inorganic quality are analogues?  
Is that correct?  Anything else you'd like to add to that 
definition?  

What is the nature of these value patterns?  Do you have 
any opinion on how they might work?   How?   





> dmb says:
> 
> Previously, I noticed that you've used (or rather misused) the word "reification" to make the same objectionable point, namely that static patterns are ever-changing and amorphous. Reification is a fallacy, a conceptual error wherein abstractions are mistaken for real things. You could call it the thingification of ideas. Plato's forms would be the classic example but this is also what James and Pirsig are saying about subjects and objects. When they say that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience but rather concepts derived from experience, they are saying that subjects and objects have been reified. They are concepts mistaken for ontological realities, for real substances. 
> 
> To say that objects are patterns of inorganic quality is to say that they aren't pre-existing material realities but rather they are among the many marvelous analogues we've created in response to DQ. Man is the measure of all things, not the measurer. That is to say we invented reality and so it's not pre-existing. Man is a participant in the creation of all things. Every last bit of it, he says. 
> 
> Now the experience from which we derive ideas such a rocks is quite real. That experience is what makes our reality seem so substantial and the idea of substance works quite well in many situations. But it's still just a secondary reality, a tool we invented to deal with experience. So is the so-called physical universe. It's just a very grand and elaborate analogue. Pirsig reminds us that "substance" or "matter" was invented by the ancient philosophers. He reminds us that the existence of such a thing is really just inferred from experience. It's a theoretical entity that is supposed to explain how the particular qualities set of qualities that make up a rock all stick together or inhere. Its roundness, heaviness, greyness or whatever are supposed to be features of a thing, then the thing in itself becomes more real than the experiences from which they were derived, the original experience that produced the "thing" in the first place is relegated to "merely" a subjective imp
> ression. James and Pirsig are flipping this idea upside down and that's their Copernican revolution.
> 
> And that's how patterns are different from things. See?
> 
> 
> 
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