[MD] Intellectual Level

[david buchanan]

Marsha said:

I wasn't speaking of those on this list who are analyzing the physicists metaphysical notion of 'real'.  Most, of these physicists/scientists are scientific  materialist and they believe that the photon is an independent existing entity.



Dave T replied:

...Comparing the scientific materialist position to Pirsig's, Which would support a relatively higher degree of "independence" for "the inorganic pattern of value" called a photon?  That would be Pirsig of course. Pirsig suggests that this quantum indeterminacy of photons is a result of some tiny degree of "experience," they "feel" leading them to "show a tiny degree of freedom." Photons "feel" or "value", like every other pattern, it is good to be free to whatever small degree is available to them. The more important question is, "Which position is closer to reality?" ...




dmb says:

Well, it doesn't take a lot of fancy theory to re-frame this issue of independently existing entities within scientific materialism. We're just talking about standard realism, the standard operating premise of common sense and of science, at least as it's commonly conceived. When we talk about this view in more specifically philosophical terms, we call it SOM but it's not really a different view. 

DT's reply attributes the same kind of realism to the MOQ, asserting that static patterns are independently existing entities but they differ from the usual photons in having an ability to respond in some small degree rather than behaving in a purely mechanistic way. While it's true that the MOQ does ask us to re-conceptualize the "laws" of physics, I think it does so without reverting back to that kind of realism. If the MOQ's static levels are taken as a stack of independently existing patterns, then you're right back within the subject-object paradigm and all you're done is give new names to the independently existing objective reality.

But for Pirsig the idea of an independently existing reality is thee central idea being challenged. He says that reality as we know it is a giant pile of analogues, the effect of countless ghosts and every philosophy has never been anything more that one person talking from one particular place and time. His task is to get rid of the notion of a single objective truth about the one and only objective reality by reminding us that the landscape we sort and measure INCLUDES that figure in the middle doing the sorting. "To see the landscape without seeing this figure", he says, "is not to see the landscape at all". He says man is a participant in the creation of all things. And that means all things are dependent on man. We invented the idea of independently existing physical entities. That's the sense in which there is no independent reality, no objective reality. 


"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." 

...  We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.


Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.


The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way, and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles... sizes in different piles... grain shapes in different piles... subtypes of grain shapes in different piles... grades of opacity in different piles... and so on, and on, and on. You’d think the process of subdivision and classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn’t. It just goes on and on.


Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.


What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is what Phædrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.


To understand what he was trying to do it’s necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all. To reject that part of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the Buddha entirely.


"Man is the measure of all things." Yes, that's what he is saying about Quality. Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things." 


"Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James."  (Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Argentinian author. "The Nightingale of Keats," Other Inquisitions, University of Texas Press (1964).)