[MD] e: Reading & Comprehension

[david buchanan]

Arlo asked Marsha:
Again, if ALL intellectual patterns are SOM, there is no conflict in ZMM as both the Sophists and Aristotle were peddling the same SOM-Intellect.

Marsha replied:   

What?


dmb says:

If you equate SOM and intellect, you also have to say Pirsig's book is pointless. He criticizes Aristotle and praises the Sophists. He makes a diagnosis about what kind of intellect we've had and what kind we want. He corrects Descartes, the hippies, the positivists, the empiricists, the romantics and the squares. Why? What the point of making such distinctions and corrections? To kill the patient? Of course not. The whole point is that subjects and objects are just one way to divide reality and there are other, better ways of cutting it up. When you pick up that analytical knife, you are skillfully manipulating abstract symbols and these conceptualizations make sense or they don't. They work or they don't. There is no rule that says we must slice things according to subject-object dualism. We cut it up after all, it doesn't come pre-sliced. 

"Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries ...as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. The myth of physical objects ...has proven more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience" (Quine, 1931:44-5).

"..imagine a state of pure experience before the hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux had been framed; and we can play with the idea that some primeval genius might have struck into a different hypothesis" (James, 1909:64).

If SOM and intellect were the same thing, how would Quine or James be even able to conceive of the relation between ideas and objects in any other way? And yet here they are saying so-called external "objects" are actually just concepts based on a hypothesis. 

The MOQ itself is enough to prove that SOM and intellect are NOT the same thing. It is an intellectual description that is very deliberately NOT based on those metaphysical assumptions. But when we add all these others, Dewey, Hildebrand, James and even Quine (which pleasantly surprised me). C'mon on! How does that NOT count as a total knock-out? How can there be such a thing as intellectual criticism of SOM if SOM is intellect? It's like saying the social level is equal to Christianity and then when I show you a bunch of pagans, pantheists, and anti-christian Gaia lovers, you say they're Christians too. I just scratch my head and then conclude that you have a very "different" idea about what it means to be a Christian. 





 		 	   		  
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