[MD] Idealistic static value patterns

[mail at tuukkavirtaperko.net]

Hi Matt,

I get your point. First of all, I admit that it's misleading to use  
the concept of "fundamental ontological category" in the sense I did.  
Static quality and Quality are both more fundamental categories than  
inorganic existence. I tried to use that expression to refer to "the  
bottom pattern, from which other patterns emerge". Apparently there is  
no pre-existing concept for that?

It seems like Pirsig is the inventor of patterned ontology. But he has  
not generalized the notion of static value patterns, so for him, "the  
bottom pattern, from which other patterns emerge" is just "inorganic  
quality".

Likewise, it's misleading to speak of the "ontology of the MOQ" as if  
that were to only contain LILA's static patterns and nothing else.  
Rather, LILA's patterns are more like a subontology of the MOQ.

If the normative patterns and idealistic patterns are valid  
constructs, also "static value patterns" becomes an ambiguous concept.  
We will not know whether they refer to LILA's patterns, or a more  
generalized notion of value patterns.

I guess we should sort out some terminology here. My suggestion:

---

"Pattern system" refers to such a set of patterns, that every pattern  
emerges from exactly one of the patterns, and the set goes "all the  
way up". This means that LILA's patterns form one pattern system,  
normative patterns for another pattern system, and idealistic patterns  
form a third pattern system.

"Bottom pattern" refers to the pattern from which other patterns  
emerge. Existence pattern is the bottom pattern of normativity, mental  
pattern the bottom pattern of idealism and inorganic pattern LILA's  
bottom pattern.

I could have also used "existence pattern" instead of "fundamental  
ontological category" or "bottom pattern", but that felt wrong,  
because earlier I was trying to introduce the notion of existence  
pattern. I felt I couldn't use the concept of "existence pattern" to  
introduce itself.

---

Matt said:
"True, it doesn't explain anything about the patterns themselves when  
we reach that level, but it precisely causes the assumption you stated  
to be invalid _because it is_ 'an informative metaphysical statement'  
by telling us 'what context we are thinking in.'"

I agree.

Matt said:
"That context, as I put it, is the context in which everything is  
already understood to be normative, and so follow the rules of the  
normative." and "The
material of reality in the MoQ is Quality, which means that it is  
normative, which means that it blocks attempts to reduce the normative  
to the non-normative ('reductive emergent physicalism') by finding  
underneath _everything_ the normative."

Like you said, this needs more explanation. My first intuition is that  
stating Quality to be normative can only be true if it means, that  
because everything is by definition Quality, the property of being  
Quality is normatively defined. This can be a valid thing to say. But  
it can lead to conflicting use of terminology.

If you were to say that everything is normative, and I were to refer  
to the descriptive pattern systems (idealistic and physicalistic) as  
if they were not normative (to distinguish them from the normative  
patterns) we would appear to disagree with each other. Apparently we  
don't, but our choice of words would make it seem so.

I'm not yet making a suggestion, just pointing out a potential problem.

Matt said:
"At the level of the theory of static patterns,
however, inorganic is "fundamental" because it is _temporally_ prior.
It is unclear to me what the difficulty with inorganic being at the
bottom is, though you insist that that is the level you were actually
making your criticism at.  Pirsig is a Darwinian naturalist in terms of
the rejection of God-terms to be used to explain the spatial-temporal
manifestation of existence.  That means that while he finds the
normative underneath all, it doesn't mean, I take it, that normativity
explains why the Big did Bang."

I don't think I've meant to say that it's a problem to have the  
inorganic level at the bottom. It needs to be the existence pattern of  
a physicalistic theory.

And sure, normativity hardly explains the Big act of Bang.

I have meant to say that there should also be idealistic and normative  
patterns in addition to the physicalistic patterns provided in LILA.  
Something like this: http://moq.fi/RP-1.png

Please take a look at the graphic. I consider "subjective quality" to  
be idealism, and "objective quality" to be physicalism. Pirsig is  
right in the SODV paper, if "Cartesian mind" is the union of romantic  
social quality and romantic intellectual quality, and "Cartesian  
matter" is the union of romantic inorganic quality and romantic  
biological quality. But the objective/physicalisic social and  
intellectual patterns cannot be Cartesian mind, and the  
objective/physicalistic inorganic and biological patterns cannot be  
Cartesian matter. This is because LILA's pattern system is a variant  
of emergent physicalism even though the rest of the MOQ isn't. But  
Cartesian dualism is inherently dual - not a form of emergent monism!

We could say that LILA's patterns are somehow bidirectional or contain  
also idealism as a direction that goes from "up to down". It's almost  
certainly possible to express their theoretical structure in such  
terms. My opinion is that it would be more complicated to do so, so I  
think it's better to treat the three pattern systems as separate but  
similar. In any case, LILA features neither separate pattern systems  
nor a bidirectional pattern system, at least not in clear terms, so if  
their existence is to be stated clearly, that must be done in some  
other work.

Merry Christmas!

-Tuukka



Quoting Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com>:

>
> Hi Tuukka,
>
> Matt said:
> To the operative claim in your philosophical criticism of Pirsig's MoQ,
> however, I think you make a mistake.  You say, "Their [the static
> patterns system laid out by Pirsig] primary disadvantage is, that they
> are a variant of emergent physicalism, because the bottom pattern,
> from which other patterns emerge, is inorganic. This isn't a
> disadvantage in itself. It's a disadvantage because Pirsig didn't
> develop a parallel system of patterns that would be idealistic."  You
> make "disadvantage" more specific by saying it is the "assumption
> that existence is fundamentally inorganic."
>
> I think it is a mistake to understand Pirsig as suggesting "physical
> existence as a fundamental ontological category."  Pirsig's first
> metaphysical move is to make Quality the fundament of reality.  On
> my reading, that exactly makes normativity the fundamental
> constitutive category that undergirds all further modes of
> understanding existence.  To my mind, Pirsig exactly agrees with you
> as you move to extrapolate a more fine-grained analysis of levels.
> (Dan Glover, in a conversation we've been carrying on for near two
> months, has in fact called this Pirsig's idealism.  I tend to agree with
> this sense of idealism as normativity.)
>
> Tuukka said:
> I was not referring to inorganic quality as the fundamental ontological
> category of the MOQ. To be sure, everything in MOQ is "Quality". But
> in and of itself, that is not an informative metaphysical statement. It
> is only informative as a statement on what context are we thinking in. ...
>
> But when we are already in the context of MOQ, saying that
> something is Quality doesn't mean much. Because in this context,
> everything is by definition already Quality.
>
> Matt:
> If I followed your critical argument correctly, then you were
> suggesting that Pirsig needed to "develop a parallel system of
> patterns that would be idealistic" to offset his isolated attention to the
> classic picture of the universe furnished by an ascending line from
> physics to evolutionary biology to X (a placeholder for whatever it is
> that furnishes a picture of the social and intellectual).
>
> I think that is, more or less, right.  Pirsig was lopsided in this respect,
> because what he needs alongside a picture of the universe that
> develops from the Big Bang to life on Earth in the Year of Our Lord
> Savior Jesus Christ 2011 (a "variant of emergent physicalism") is a
> picture of the development of those vocabularies that allow us to
> state that picture (a "parallel system of patterns that would be
> idealistic").  This would be the balancing of, as Dan might put it,
> materialism and idealism.  (And so people don't become confused,
> these are special uses of "materialism" and especially "idealism,"
> but I think we need a special sense of "idealism" to try and come to
> grips with Pirsig's notion of the idea, or intellectual pattern, coming
> before matter.)
>
> However, that being said, my point in suggesting that your criticism of
> Pirsig is defused by Pirsig because, in the MoQ, it is a mistake to say
> that an "assumption that existence is fundamentally inorganic" is at
> work, is that I think you are wrong to think that "saying that
> something is Quality doesn't mean much" in the MoQ.  True, it
> doesn't explain anything about the patterns themselves when we
> reach that level, but it precisely causes the assumption you stated to
> be invalid _because it is_ "an informative metaphysical statement" by
> telling us "what context we are thinking in."  That context, as I put it,
> is the context in which everything is already understood to be
> normative, and so follow the rules of the normative.
>
> The _implications_ of that metaphysical stance, I think, are left
> underdeveloped (or at least, there is a lot of room for further growth
> in understanding how deep that stance penetrates and what
> implications it should and should not cause to our thinking).  One
> implication is a balance between two systems, as you put it.  But
> Pirsig 1) does provide the conceptual resources for understanding
> this to be the case and 2) does show cognizance of the need for the
> two systems by virtue of the other philosophical work he performs in
> ZMM and Lila.  ZMM, after all, is the genealogical unearthing of the
> line of thought on the _idealist_ side of the equation that produces
> SOM's _reductive_ emergent physicalism.  This is paralleled in Lila
> by his discourse, for example, on anthropology.  The true
> lopsidedness of Pirsig's extant philosophical work, perhaps, is that on
> the idealist side, the side that deals with the history of humanity's
> attempts to develop ideas, it is mostly _deconstructive_, whereas on
> the materialist side, the side that deals with the nature of reality, it is
> both deconstructive and constructive (the deconstructive bits are his
> arguments against taking certain philosophical positions and the
> constructive bits are his metaphysical system-building).
>
> The special senses of "idealism" and "materialism" should be more
> fully apparent now.  For if one uses a typical definition, it does
> appear that I've just suggested that the system of the Metaphysics of
> Quality, the "side that deals with the nature of reality," is materialist.
> But that's not the conceptual position of "materialism": so defined
> here, _every_ philosophical system should, for comprehensiveness,
> have an idealist side and a materialist side, and the materialist side
> defines the _material_ of reality.  Descartes has two, res cogitans
> and res extensa (mind and matter).  Pirsig has one: Quality.  The
> material of reality in the MoQ is Quality, which means that it is
> normative, which means that it blocks attempts to reduce the
> normative to the non-normative ("reductive emergent physicalism")
> by finding underneath _everything_ the normative.  _What this
> means_ needs to be further explained, yes; but the conceptual
> apparatus is already in place to block the inference that the MoQ
> assumes that "existence is fundamentally inorganic."
>
> Tuukka said:
> Despite this, inorganic quality is not the fundamental ontological
> category of the MOQ, because static quality is more fundamental than
> inorganic quality. Inorganic quality is only the fundamental ontological
> category of Pirsig's theory of static value patterns. That theory is only
> a part of the MOQ, but right now, that was the part I was examining.
>
> Matt:
> I think you should beware the use of "fundamental" in these contexts.
> For in the context of Pirsig's theory of static patterns of value, the
> import of "fundamental ontological category" is completely different
> than it was when you used the phrase at the level "of the MoQ."  At
> the level of the MoQ, Quality is "fundamental" because it is
> _conceptually_ prior (one might have expected "experientially," but
> I'm speaking about the systematic arrangement of the concepts in
> the metaphysics, not the reason for why Quality is, after all,
> conceptually prior).  At the level of the theory of static patterns,
> however, inorganic is "fundamental" because it is _temporally_ prior.
> It is unclear to me what the difficulty with inorganic being at the
> bottom is, though you insist that that is the level you were actually
> making your criticism at.  Pirsig is a Darwinian naturalist in terms of
> the rejection of God-terms to be used to explain the spatial-temporal
> manifestation of existence.  That means that while he finds the
> normative underneath all, it doesn't mean, I take it, that normativity
> explains why the Big did Bang.
>
> Matt
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