[MD] Reifying carrots - corrected

[MarshaV]

On Sep 12, 2010, at 11:03 AM, david buchanan wrote:

> 
> Marsha said:
> 
> Ooops.  That should have been anti-intellectual in the first sentence. 
> For me, the MoQ represents Quality (unpatterned experience/patterned experience). Once the analysis starts the discussion becomes reification-caused subject/object thinking. But I don't think intellectual patterns are bad. I don't understand the position as anti-intellectual. As stated: "How do we deal with the complexity of experience? Well, we 'seek and find, or project, a simplifying pattern to approximate every complex field ... by lumping (ignoring some distinctions as negligible) and by splitting (ignoring some relations as negligible). Both ... create discreet entities useful for manipulating, predicting and controlling ... [but] may impose ad hoc boundaries on what are actually densely interconnected systems and then grant autonomous existence to the segments' (p. 108). Even the contents of our own consciousness have to be dealt with in this way, resulting in our array of fragmented self-concepts, and we just put up with the anomalies that arise. Buddhism, he explains
> , agrees that discovering entities is conventionally indispensable, but attachment and aggression arise through reifying them, which violates the principle that all things are interdependent, and all entities are conditional approximations."  I agree conventionally created entities are indispensable.
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> 
> I don't know where "anti-intellectual" should be in that first sentence. I guess your correction needs a clarification. 
> 
> For some reason I cannot fathom, you are seemingly oblivious to the central objection. Your response does not even mention it, despite the fact that it was the main point in the post you're responding to. It seems like lots of people have been trying to get you to see it for quite a while. Months ago it was vividly put in terms of confusing the patient with the disease. That's just another way to imagine the same objection that I voiced yesterday, in the post you're supposedly responding to. Like I said, if anyone who uses the intellectual level is participating in reification-caused SOM thinking, then so is the guy in the video and so are you. So, by your definition, even if one makes an intellectual case against the mistake of reification and SOM, the case itself is inevitably an SOM-based reification. Even if those ideas are used to criticize and condemn reification and SOM, they're still reifications because that's just what ideas are. So there is no escape and any idea that ever was or could be is inherently false and fundamentally wrong. That means the whole point and purpose of the MOQ would be impossible. We have Pirsig on record about this, you know? He thinks that equating the intellectual level with SOM undermines the MOQ. That's the objection you're not hearing, Marsha. 

Marsha says:
I am hearing the objection.  I understand the MoQ differently than you.  Yea me!!! 


> I think this is what Andre was getting at too. 
> 
> Andre said to Marsha:
> 
> ... We are talking about Mr. Pirsigs MOQ, and this simply states that 'Quality destroys objectivity every time' (ZMM, p351). ...The MOQ asserts an anti-reification, an anti-objectification. It asserts static patterns of value . It asserts Quality, not objectivity!
> 
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> 
> Right, one of the key points I keep hammering on is the radically empirical idea that subjects and objects are secondary and conceptual rather than the discrete entities that make experience possible. That's just another way to say they are abstractions rather than concrete realities and that means that radical empiricism is all about condemning the reification of subjects and objects. And how is that task accomplished? With the intellect. If we use your definition of intellect, that task would be impossible, what James and Pirsig and Dewey have done would be impossible.
> 
> But they did. And so it's obviously NOT impossible. We are not hopelessly trapped inside SOM or forever doomed to reify all our concepts. The patient is not identical to his disease. If the patient is inherently diseased or if the defect defines the intellect, then Pirsig's aim of expanding and improving rationality would fail before it even got started. Your view not only dismisses the MOQ's solution, you've ruled it out as impossible in principle. To say this undermines Pirsig's work is actually quite an understatement, unless one uses "undermine" in the original military sense, as part of a siege. 
> 
> I wonder if you understand this objection. Gimme a sign.

Marsha says:
I say to you the same thing I said to Ron:  As far I've experienced it, my explanation leaves plenty of room for expansion into a new level of quality awareness.  If my explanation is inadequate, I will try to find better words.  Meanwhile, you are free to disagree. 
 
 
 

 
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