[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Dan said to Matt:
I would say in the common sense everyday world we all use the notion of object permanence to great advantage... so much so that we tend to overlook it and assume objects are real and independent of our experience. And that's fine when it comes to common sense. But I also believe the MOQ (philosophy) states that objects are not independent of experience and there is no way to verify if they continue to exist or not when we are gone.   ...and I have been questioning the common sense notion that objects exist independent of experience. I've admitted I'm not well-versed in philosophy but I assumed that's what we're up to with this discussion.

dmb says:
Oh, I think I see the problem. It seems you're suffering from a misconception of the claim that says "objects are not independent of experience." To put it crudely, you think this means that objects only exists when we're looking right at them or otherwise experiencing them. I'm fairly certain that this is a misconception of the claim.
As we saw in Pirsig's description of the infant's development, objects are derived from the force of DQ, from experience, from that complex bundle of sensations, desires and other phenomenal realities. This reverses SOM's conception of objects as pre-existing, independent realities which we may or may not come to know. According to SOM, experience is caused by objects, experience is the subject's encounter with these independent objects. According to the MOQ, objects are the products of experience. The existence of objects is DEPENDENT on experience. It is in that sense that "objects are NOT independent of experience." Reality as we know it intellectually is entirely dependent on experience all the way down. You know, the whole pile of analogies was invented as a response to Quality, was derived from experience. 

I'd also point out that the idea of "object permanence" includes the idea that objects stay put even when we're not looking. In the MOQ we could say that this feature of things is derived from the same complex bundle of sensations and desires, is abstracted from the same experiences. The dog might get up and run away but the dog's dish won't. I suspect that kind of distinction is about as old as humanity itself just because it's important to know which things will fight back when we try to eat them.  


This is why I think common sense notions of objects will come first. They're old and basic and practical. Maybe these practical ideas don't exactly count a "foundation" for subject/object object metaphysics or scientific objectivity but I think it would be safe to say that the latter evolved out of the former in some sense. The fact that "object permanence" is learned so early in our individual development suggests that this idea was invented early in our collective evolutionary development. Like Matt says, I think the trick is to explain these common sense ideas in terms of the MOQ - as opposed to the SOM picture - but we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. 


Dan said:
...I understand we all operate under the common sense notion of object permanence. On the other hand, to assume because that notion works well in the real world it represents a fundamental part of our reality seems at odds with the MOQ.

dmb says:
But the "object permanence" lesson comes from Lila and I've been explaining that objects are secondary products of experience, not fundamental parts of reality. We are talking about static patterns of quality that are derived from Dynamic Quality. We're talking about static patterns of quality that have worked unproblematically for countless generations, worked well enough to persist into our own time. I've been trying to explain objects in terms of the MOQ rather than in terms of the metaphysics of substance. According to the MOQ, the common sense notion works well because it agrees with experience, because it fits with the world of our sensations and because it makes sense in relation to or harmonizes with the rest of the mythos. That is all that pragmatic truth can mean. That's what it means for an idea to work, to be true. It doesn't require any kind of metaphysics to believe the arrow head still exists even after it has buried itself in your chest. "Hard" and "sharp" and "heavy" are not philosophical ideas, you know? They're practical ideas about concrete and particular experiences. These qualities are not simply what objects are like in and of themselves - but rather that's what things are in relation to us. A rotting corpse is disgusting to us but the vultures love it. To say that objects are independent of us is a metaphysical claim, a claim involving two distinct ontological categories, us and the independent, objective reality that we hope to gain knowledge of.