[MD] Dog Dishes and Direct Experience

[david buchanan]

Matt said to Dan:


Perhaps one of the ambiguities that has caused confusion is in the word "object."  ...When I use "object," I typically think of it in terms of grammar, like "The object of our conversation has been to figure out the length and breadth of Pirsig's idealism."  "Object," in this sense, is a semantic notion that picks out what "about" refers to, which means "New York City," "dog dishes," and "unicorns" are all objects.  However, in "the concept of object permanence," this clearly becomes blurred with "object" as denoting only physical objects.  For the easiest kinds of "object" to use in order to get a grasp of the concept are "purely physical" (or we might say, "purely inorganic patterns"--however, I'd note here that this idea of purity might be more complicated than we think).  If you want to get a grasp of the concept of "stuff in nature being around before and after we personally are" (as I implicitly defined "object permanence" in the first post in this thread), then the easiest thing to refer to is a rock.  But this definition also works just as well for New York City, even while we consider it to be a melange of all four patterns, since it was around before us and probably will be after us.  Now, however, the "concept" gets attenuated, since just _how_ New York City qua social/intellectual patterns is around after us will be in a different manner than New York City qua inorganic patterns.  This ambiguity in the "concept of object permanence" is not something I foresaw as causing a problem, but there it is. 
...Taking physical-object permanence to be a social pattern I think is right, as is treating New York City and dog dishes as being partly composed of social and/or intellectual patterns.


dmb says:

It seems to me that you are re-confusing the issue. I had been trying to explain the difference between "objects" as a practical belief AS OPPOSED "objects" as they are conceived within scientific objectivity or subject-object metaphysics. The practical belief is acquired in infancy, you will recall, and this early appearance indicates that the belief is very, very basic. This notion is used not only by our primate cousins but also my dogs, cats and some birds. They use it to catch food and hide food, etc., indicting that this belief is so basic that social patterns aren't necessarily involved. The infant learns by handling "objects" even before the acquisition of speech.


As Wiki says, "Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. This a fundamental understanding in the field of developmental psychology the significant subfield of psychology that pertains to the social and mental development of children. ...It is acquired by human infants between eight and twelve months of age via the process of logical induction to help them develop secondary schemes in their sensori-motor coordination. ...In Piaget's theory of cognitive development infants develop this understanding by the end of the "sensorimotor stage," which lasts from birth to about 2 years of age. Piaget thought that an infant's perception and understanding of the world depended on their motor development, which was required for the infant to link visual, tactile and motor representations of objects. According to this view, it is through touching and handling objects that infants develop object permanence."


"Experiments in non-human primates suggest that monkeys can track the displacement of invisible targets, that invisible displacement is represented in the prefrontal cortex, and that development of the frontal cortex is linked to the acquisition of object permanence. ..., many other types of animals have been shown to have the ability for object permanence. These include dogs, cats, and a few species of birds such as the carrion crow and food-storing magpies. Dogs are able to reach a level of object permanence that allows them to find food after it has been hidden beneath one of two cups and rotated 90°. Similarly, cats are able to understand object permanence but not to the same extent that dogs can. Cats fail to understand that if they see something go into an apparatus in one direction that it will still be there if the cat tries to enter from another direction. A longitudinal study found that carrion crows were able to reach the same level of object permanence as humans. There was only one task, task 15, that the crows were not able to master. Another study tested the comparison of how long it took food-storing magpies to develop the object permanence necessary for them to be able to live independently. The research suggests that these magpies followed the a very similar pattern as human infants while they were developing."


dmb says:
This is just about the notion of "object permanence" as we find it in developmental psychology. It was invented to defend the MOQ, of course, but it just so happens that Pirsig uses the notion for his own purposes. He uses it to explain "why we think of subjects and objects as primary", namely, because object permanence is acquired so early that "we can't remember that period of our lives when they were anything else." He uses this notion to explain the difference between the static beliefs and the force of Dynamic Quality from which they are derived. "When this reality of value is divided into static and Dynamic areas a lot can be explained about the baby's growth that is not well explained otherwise," Pirsig says. If the baby "is normally attentive to Dynamic Quality," he explains, "he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an OBJECT to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values DERIVED from primary experience." (Emphasis is Pirsig's in the original.) Please notice how the infant's learning process involves being attentive to DQ, to primary experience or the world of sensations and feelings and grasping and handling these so-called objects. That's not metaphysics, gents. That's not idealism. It's about empirical reality and the most basic static concepts we use to deal with empirical reality. 

To talk about reality existing before you were born and/or after you die is a much more complicated notion that does involve metaphysical assumptions and about time and history and such. In fact, scientists and fundamental will disagree about the age of rocks. They disagree with each other by billions of years. This is not the kind of dispute in which we're likely to find ourselves arguing with babies, cats or dogs.