[MD] Dog Dishes and Direct Experience

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

Hi Matt

Thank you for taking your time in putting this together. I've been
considering this carefully over the past couple days and it's occurred
to me that perhaps we're treating New York City and dog dishes as "objects" in
the sense that we pretty much agree the concept of object permanence
applies to both. Within the framework of the MOQ, that is wrong, and
it may help explain my reticence (though I might label it uneasiness)
in applying such methods of reasoning to these concepts.

New York City is a social pattern. It exists subjectively, in the
mind. New York City is not a collection of inorganic buildings sitting
on an island on the east coast that we can see if we fly over it in a
plane or that we can pick out on a map. RMP goes into this quite
extensively in LILA during his visit there to meet Robert Redford. The
same applies to the discussion of dog dishes. Dog dish is a social
pattern with which we are all familiar.

However, when we assign a dog dish as the possession of a person, say
Don, then it appears to become an inorganic object that Don can put
dog food into so that he isn't worried about Fido starving to death
while he is gone. Don can see his dog dish. He can pick it up and
examine it to see if it is wearing out and might need replacing. When
he sets this object down and walks out of the room he assumes it
continues to exist the same way we assume New York City continues to
exist when we are no longer flying over it.

In a sense it has now become a social pattern but in another and
deeper sense it always was a social pattern as well as an inorganic
pattern... in order for Don to recognize "dish" as an object in which
he can place dog food he had to incorporate social quality patterns
and use those patterns to put an inorganic "object" to use. Fido
doesn't care. Dogs will eat food off the floor or out of the bag. They
may in time learn that the object Don puts food into is a symbol for
food, however, which is itself interesting to me.

We know New York City and dog dishes exist whether we directly
experience them or not as they are part of the social quality patterns
from which we build our notion of reality. The concept of object
permanency is itself a social quality pattern every infant learns to
abide by during the course of growing up. No one has to tell us these
things... we learn them on our own. It is common sense. And if we
don't learn to agree with such common sense notions it might be
assumed we suffer a kind of mental impairment preventing such
learning.

These common sense social quality patterns appear to butt up against
the fanciful... notions such as unicorns, werewolves, vampires,
trolls, and other mythical creatures that we all know don't exist as
such, but rather exist as deeply rooted cultural symbols of our
desires and of our fears: the mythos. It is what guides the logos, our
logical way of viewing the world, the empirical reasoning that informs
us how the world operates in scientific and materialistic ways.

In a sense, the mythos seems to refer to our subjective side... the
collection of social and intellectual patterns we call culture, things
we know but we can't point to and say just how we know. The logos in
the same vein of thought would seem to refer to the objective side...
the collection of inorganic and biological patterns that make up our
senses. This seems to abide well with the MOQ when it states that the
idea of matter comes before matter.

What we seem to have been doing during the course of our conversation
is conflating the two. Hopefully this will help answer the questions
you've raised in your post but if not feel free to push back. I am not
exactly sure of my reasoning...

Thank you,

Dan

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Best that I can tell, Dan and I have been discussing at cross-purposes,
> for the last month and a half, the relative merits of saying that New
> York City, dog dishes, and unicorns exist apart from our experience of
> them.  One good reason why the dial of the compass can swing so
> quickly from Yes to No in formulating piecemeal answers is because
> the ambiguity we necessarily encounter in the word "experience"--did
> I mean apart from _experience_, sans phrase? or apart from one's
> first-personal direct experience?  On the former, the answer seems
> from a Pirsigian standpoint clearly a No, since Experience is
> Everything: nothing exists apart from experience.
>
> However, what this exactly means for the Pirsigian might need more
> careful explication, as the latter, second question seems more
> complicated than one might initially think.  If "Quality is experience"
> and "Quality is the primary empirical reality" and "Quality is direct
> experience," then there's an opening for one to say: nothing exists
> apart from _my_ direct experience of it.  For those three slogans
> serve to blur the distinction between experience-as-reality and
> experience-as-my-reality.  Experience-as-reality conceives of
> experience as a field or manifold in which every individual thing
> exists.  Experience, in this sense, is like the Community Swimming
> Pool where humans, dogs, and rocks all swim around (as various
> kinds of static patterns).  When you assimilate "Quality is direct
> experience" to "Quality is experience," however, it can change your
> perception of the pool: now it's more like _your_ pool, and all the
> things in the pool have secondary existence in it, relative to you.  Is
> this what Pirsig meant by his direct/indirect distinction?
>
> One thing is for sure, though, and that is that a Pirsigian needs to be
> able to describe, using the vocabulary of the MoQ, all of the
> phenomena in existence, much of which often comes in differently
> packaged forms.  For example, the junk called "common sense."
> Dan and my original discussion popped off from a tangle we had
> about how to describe history.  Initially, it appeared that we agreed
> quite handily about what has since, in our conversation, come under
> the label "object permanence."
>
> Matt said (from Oct. 26):
> I think Pirsig in the end would argue that while it is silly to think that
> gravity existed before Newton made it up--because intellectual
> patterns are incumbent upon people making them up--on the other
> hand it is internal to the correct functioning of that intellectual
> pattern that it be true for all previous time, in the past.  Not all
> intellectual patterns have this flavor, but a lot of the one's out of the
> natural sciences do.  (Principally, I think, because a lot of the stuff in
> "nature" was around before we personally were.)
>
> Dan said (from Oct. 27):
> Now, I see that [i.e., the parenthetical] as a problematic statement.
> While I think it is a high value idea that lots of stuff in nature was
> around before we personally showed up how do we know that with
> any certainty? Isn't this idea a culmination of social and intellectual
> patterns informing us as to the nature of the world we inhabit?
>
> Matt:
> I then said, "Yes, the idea is a 'culmination of social and intellectual
> patterns.'"  The stumble was that Dan didn't read enough scare into
> the scare-quotes I had around "nature," or that I perhaps should've
> had the scare-quotes around the entirety of "stuff in nature" to be
> clearer.
>
> The point, though, is that there is agreement: it is a high intellectual
> pattern that lots of stuff in nature was around before we personally
> showed up.  This, I think, is what we might call "object
> permanence."  For the flipside of it is that lots of stuff in nature will
> be around after we personally leave.  But while Dan seems to
> endorse the idea here, he suggests a line of thought about history
> that eventually leads to dog dishes.
>
> Matt said (from Oct. 26):
> So we should make a distinction between _my_ personal history
> (born in Wisconsin, 1980, etc., etc.) and the histories of _groups_ of
> persons that extend beyond the range of a single person's lifespan
> (like the US, born in Pennsylvania, 1776, etc., etc.).
>
> Dan said (from Oct. 27):
> I think that the MOQ views those histories as the same. What we as
> living beings have inherited is the culture in which we are born and
> which informs us as to the nature of the world.
>
> Matt:
> At the time I said that I couldn't tell the difference between what I
> had said and what Dan said.  But I'm coming to think that Dan might
> be pressing his finger on the ambiguity I pointed out as preface to
> this rehearsal from the archives.  For if the first-personal point of
> view is the primary empirical reality, then it makes sense to push
> back against attempts to differentiate them.
>
> For in the midst of my attempt to convince Dan that I was not hiding
> a Realist-SOMist notion of "reality" into my notion of "history of
> groups" (or as I also called it "longitudinal evolutionary history"), I
> said "I think that we believe, as a high-valued intellectual pattern,
> that 'there exists a world apart from us' is true." (Nov. 3)  One will
> notice "as a high-valued intellectual pattern" modifying the claim,
> which simply repeats common sense, that "there exists a world
> apart from us."  This was my attempt to use the MoQ-vocabulary to
> translate other phenomena.  Dan took issue with it, with this
> rhetorical question: "How does reality exist apart from experience?"
> Notice its modulation from what I said.  In Pirsigian terms, the
> answer should be "it doesn't."  But what if you were out with friends,
> non-philosophers who don't care to talk philosophy, and one of them,
> drunk, says, "does the toilet exist apart from my pissing in it?"  This
> would be a version of the abstract question Dan asked.  One could
> lead into an abstract philosophical conversation, much like James did
> with the squirrels.  However, one could _also not_.  This would be,
> then, trying to provide a construal of the question such that the
> philosophical problem does not appear.  It would mean simply giving
> back common sense: "Of course it does.  How else would everyone
> behind you be able to piss in it once you're gone?"  _Also however_:
> a Pirsigian, even passing on the moment for philosophical reflection,
> must be able to construe the common sense in Pirsigian terms.
>
> To Dan's rhetorical question, "How does reality exist apart from
> experience?" I originally responded
>
> Matt said (from Nov. 6):
> Same way that this is true: "The way I read it, since the MOQ states
> reality begins with Dynamic Quality experience, it is the idea that
> reality exists that comes before the existence of reality."
>
> You said that in the earlier part of your post to explain how "reality
> existed before we personally did" within the frame of the MoQ.  So if
> one is moved to say a variation of the statement "well, Don, you
> know reality does exist apart from our direct experience of it," the
> explanation of this statement is not a metaphysical variant of SOM,
> but rather that Don, for some reason, was suggesting that his dog's
> food dish didn't exist when he wasn't in the room with it (and then
> all the attendant worries about whether his dog was starving to
> death).
>
> How does reality exist apart from experience?  Well, not in any
> metaphysical way, but only in the high-value assumption way we use
> to deal with retail items like dog dishes, baby cribs, and downtown
> supermarkets.  Our dogs are getting fed when we leave the room,
> our babies are still resting albeit fitfully when we aren't there, and
> it's generally safe to plan your visit downtown around the assumption
> that the Safeway is still there.
>
> Matt:
> So that's where Don and his dog's food dish came from.  My "not in
> any metaphysical way" was meant to say, "No, I'm not denying the
> Pirsigian platitude that 'Quality is experience.'"  I also modulated to
> "our direction experience of it" to emphasize just how I was
> construing "how reality exists apart from experience."  Here is how
> Dan responded to Don and his dog
>
> Dan said (Nov. 6):
> How does Don know if his dog's food dish exists when he's apart
> from experiencing it? It seems a bit like the zen koan that asks of a
> tree falls in the forest with no one around does it make a sound? I
> think RMP answers that along the lines of: what food dish? But what
> exactly does that mean?
>
> It seems to indicate that imaginary trees and dog dishes exist only in
> the mind. We learn to assume the dog dish exists even when there is
> no empirical evidence of its existence. In the same way we assume
> there is a history to the world that existed before we personally
> appeared and will continue to exist after we pass away even though
> there is no way to empirically verify this notion.
>
> Whether or not Don's dog dish exists apart from the empirical
> evidence of its existence is a question rooted in the conviction that
> there is a real world out there. Take away that conviction and all
> that is left is the imagination.
>
> Matt:
> What I want to suggest is that, currently, there is no difference
> between Dan's response to Don and mine.  Rather than responding
> to Don directly, Dan took the opportunity to gloss philosophical about
> just what kind of existence the dog dish has.  The differences
> between Dan and I only appear when one looks more closely at what
> counts as "empirical evidence of its existence" and how one grades
> highness and lowness of assurance of these Quality-patterned things
> existing outside one's current first-personal direct contact with them.
> The grading is what the full thought-experiment is for
>
> Matt said (Nov. 7):
> Say Don's in the living room fretting about his dog not getting enough
> food because he isn't hovering around the food dish in the kitchen.
> Without that direct experience of the food dish, Don worries the dish
> won't be there for Fido.  Don's buddy Chris gets tired of the moaning
> over Fido's fate and goes into the kitchen.  Chris then yells out from
> the kitchen, "Fido's dish is still here!"  Should Don be less fretful?
> Why?  He, after all, is _not_ directly experiencing the food dish: Chris
> is.  Don is only directly experiencing the noise coming out of the
> kitchen that comes in the form of a sentence expressing information.
>
> Matt:
> In facing down the thought-experiment, one's answer to why Don
> should be less fretful should take the aspect of translating common
> sense into the MoQ's vocabulary of static patterns.  For what the
> thought-experiment makes the Pirsigian confront is just how one
> should grade empirical evidence of reality _given_ an interpretation
> of the direct/indirect experience.  For in addition to the ambiguities
> created in the three slogans I began with, it adds the ambiguity of
> what is meant by "empirical," of what counts and what not.
>
> I think the thought-experiment is well-suited to this task because of
> the route mine and Dan's conversation.  How does one translate the
> existence of New York City, unobserved dog dishes, and unicorns?
> These are aren't silly questions, but necessary for proving the power
> of the MoQ in its boasts to be able to explain reality.  Additionally,
> how does one confer relative assurance to the status of existence of
> these objects given MoQ conceptual resources?  Dan's surprising
> answer that there is more assurance of New York City existing than
> the fork in his own kitchen suggests that a Pirsigian should answer
> that question, too.
>
> Matt
>
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