[MD] Dog Dishes and Direct Experience

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Mark,

Mark said:
I enjoyed your [Dan's] perpetual machine story, I thought it was 
apropos.  However, I read into it perhaps more than was intended.  In 
my opinion, you were referring to Faith.  It seems to me that we 
survive on faith.  For example, I do not need proof through the night 
that the sun will rise in the morning.  In fact, it is not something that 
I think about.  This is synonymous with faith, in my opinion.  It would 
be no different from the certainty in a perpetual motion machine in a 
mountain.

Matt:
I'm not a huge fan of gerrymandering all moments predicated on 
assumption, projection, not-currently-questioning, and/or 
not-directly-experiencing (and many other statuses that fall under 
what we might just as well call "knowing") together into a 
homogenous pile called "Faith."  It seems to me that the inference 
from the fact that one doesn't "need proof through the night that the 
sun will rise in the morning" to that that's "no different from the 
certainty in a perpetual motion machine in a mountain" is a 
conceptual blurring that ceases to pay dividends quickly.  I think it 
might be important to see the analogies between the epistemological 
status of something called "faith" and other statuses (like the 
unquestioned assumptions involved in predictive knowing), but it 
doesn't tell you much about what is special about "faith" as a status.  
And you need to do that in order to say anything interesting about the 
cultural and political controversies that have always surrounded 
religious experience.  (I've tried to move toward one picture of that 
here: http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html)

Matt