[MD] Emptiness & Quantum Mechancics

[david buchanan]

Andre said:

The MOQ is arrived at through radical empiricism. Without an understanding of this it would seem, to me, extremely difficult to get a grasp on the MOQ, and for that matter, those concepts named 'truth' (a high quality intellectual pattern) and 'emptiness' or 'nothingness' ('There is nothing in the sense of no 'thing', that is, 'no object', and the Buddhists use nothingness in this way, but the term Dynamic is more in keeping within the quotation, 'Within nothingness there is a great working' (from the Zen master, Katagiri Roshi' in Anthony's PhD, p 35.)   Hence my confusion re Marsha's insistence that all is unpatterned...bla bla...whilst maintaining that the intellectual level is SOM.



dmb says:

I think confusion is the most appropriate reaction to Marsha's formulations. They are contradictory and incoherent. By defining the intellectual level of static quality as SOM and then asserting that all patterns are ever-changing, she has defined the intellectual level as fixed and rigid (unable to be anything except SOM) and she has defined those same patterns as fluid and ever-changing, which is, of course, the very opposite of fixed and rigid. 

There are many such contradictions in her interpretation and they all seem to flow from the way she conflates and confuses the MOQ's primary distinction, namely the distinction between static and dynamic. She defines static patterns as "ever-changing" but that's the opposite of what it means to be static and patterned. It makes sense to say dynamic quality is ever-changing but saying that about static patterns makes a huge conceptual mess of the MOQ. The MOQ defines truth as static and intellectual but Marsha defines the intellect as SOM and reification so that static intellectual patterns become the enemy of truth and the epitome of falsity. 


At the beginning of chapter 8 Pirsig says, "The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation. The MOQ satisfies these. The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists ..regard such fields such as art, morality, religion and metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, no empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It's just an assumption." (Lila, page 99.)


Here we see the establishment of the test of truth and, at the same time, we see the rejection of SOM. This is exactly where it pays to investigate the pragmatic theory of truth and radical empiricism. James's writings on pragmatism explain what "agreement with experience" actually means within pragmatism. That's where you'll find a richly detailed explanation of what truth means. Likewise, the Essays on Radical Empiricism provides an explanation as to why we should reject the assumption held by "most empiricists", why we should reject SOM. Since these guys are both pitting their notion of intellectual truth AGAINST the assumptions of SOM, it would be more than a little foolish to equate intellect and SOM. It shows that rejecting SOM's notion of truth is NOT the same thing as rejecting the notion of truth. It rejects the notion that there is a single exclusive truth, it rejects the theory that says our subjective ideas are supposed to correspond with the one and only objective reality. But it still maintains that truth is an idea that, among other things, agrees with experience. It certainly sets a limit on logic-chopping and rationality and yet the pragmatic theory of truth still demands logical consistency and coherence. 


At the end of chapter 29 Pirsig said, "DQ - the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether. DQ is a higher moral order that static scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress DQ as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." (Lila, page 366) 


Now, here is where we see the proper relationship between DQ and static intellectual truths. He is saying that dynamic quality is the key to continued intellectual progress, to the ongoing evolutionary process. And here again we find that the tests of truth are the same as they were 21 chapters earlier. Even though Pirsig's original goal is met here - namely making static intellectual truths subordinate to DQ instead of the other way around - truth still makes it's demands. It still needs to avoid confusion and incoherence. It still needs to agree with experience, to agree with the facts. Maps that use polar coordinates are based on the exact same facts that maps with rectangular coordinates are based. They both work and so they are both true, pragmatically speaking. One is more useful than the other, depending on whether or not you're trying find your way around polar regions. It's not that the truth or falsity of these maps depends on one's personal history or cultural outlook. Their truth is a matter of whether or not they work AS MAPS. It depends on how and when it is used. A polar map simply doesn't work very well on the Amazon river. No matter who you are or what you think, it's just the wrong tool. Period. Newtonian mechanics are true and useful in certain contexts but if you use that to try to explain Einstein's theory relativity, which is also useful and true in certain contexts, you'd be picking a very laborious and confusing way to handle the issue. Again, this is not just a matter of perspective or interpretation because experience will smack you down. Experience is the ultimate bullshit detector. If your formulation fails in experience, fails when the rubber meets the road, your formulation does not work, which means it is not true and it's not good. In that case, brilliant, conclusive and elegant are not a words we could right'y use to describe that formulation. Quite the opposite. 


See, DQ is not something we choose INSTEAD of intellectual truth. It is an integral part of the ongoing process of truth-making. The idea is to improve and expand rationality, not kill it. It's about improving our intellectual formulations. Somehow, Marsha has construed all this as a form of anti-intellectualism and foolish nihilism. And she does this right at the point where the MOQ's moral hierarchy achieves it's highest point. Instead of using the MOQ incorporation of DQ into our intellectual evolution, instead of using undefined Quality to protect the creative cutting edge of science and philosophy, she uses it to kill all intellectual patterns, to kill them completely. If I understand the MOQ rightly, this is not only incorrect, it is also immoral. And sadly, this error and confusion persists despite the mountain of textual evidence that's been presented against it. (Not to mention the unkind, unfair, dishonest and evasive tactics she uses to maintain that bogus position.) It all adds up to a big batch of very unpleasant and useless nonsense. It's NOT just that it's jarring and bad the way it would be jarring and bad to say two plus two equals five. It also paints empty, nihilistic picture of reality that literally makes me sick to my stomach. It's not just stupid. It's nauseating.