[MD] The Hero's journey

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 12:00 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dan said to Matt:
> Right... for Don to "know" the dog dish exists apart from his experience of it is a high quality idea. It allows Don to go about his day without worrying whether Fido is starving to death at home. So we seem to agree it is a high quality idea that reality exists apart from experience but it is only an idea.  ...How does Don know if his dog's food dish exists when he's apart from experiencing it?
>
>
>
> dmb says:
> When James talked about truth in terms of "cash value", his critics mistook him to be saying that truth is whatever has practical pay off, that truth is whatever gets us the results we want. But I discovered that he was up to something else. Basically, he was talking about the empirical issue you guys have been debating in this thread. His point was that the vast majority of our empirically verifiable truths are purchased on credit, as opposed to cash. In this analogy, personally witnessing the dog dish with your own eyes is cashing out the belief in that dog dish. Your friend telling you that he has a dog dish would be a truth purchased on credit. If you can't, at least in theory, go over to his house and confirm the validity of his claim, then his credit is no good. If memory serves, James used the city of Tokyo as an example of a belief he held on credit. He'd never been there himself, he said, but he'd known people who had been there. He'd seen it on maps and in photos an
>  d otherwise had many reasons to believe that the claim could be cashed out, that all these second-hand reports could be verified in his own experience if he were willing to take a long journey. And James said that the vast majority of our beliefs are held on credit. It would simply be impractical to limit your scientific beliefs to the data that comes only from experiments that you personally witnessed.

Dan:

Yes, that seems to jibe with the vast majority of our beliefs being
high quality ideas.

>dmb:
> But, he insisted, actual experience by actual people is the cold hard cash. That's what supports the whole credit system, he insisted.

Dan:

That's basically what we've (Matt and I) agreed the MOQ points us towards...

>dmb:
> I'm not saying the existence of the dog dish becomes second-hand knowledge as soon as you leave the room, however. That would simply be a matter of not forgetting that you just cashed out that belief by filling the dish with food. There's no empirical reason to believe that the dish disappears when you leave the room.

Dan:

Of course not... but on the other hand there's no empirical reason to
believe the dog dish exists when we leave the room, either.

dmb:
>And if it seems to be where we left it every time we care to check, then I think we have to move to a very unreasonable level of skepticism to have any serious doubts about it's existence.

Dan:

What the dog dish scenario serves to illustrate is whether or not the
world exists before we personally exist, and whether the world will
continue to exist when we pass back. Call me unreasonably skeptic...
but how do we know?

dmb:
> It simply isn't a problem. The dog gets fed because there is a regularity and stability in experience such that we can fruitfully employ concepts like object permanence. This stability and regularity is what gives rise to the concept and it's what makes the credit system work. That's how there can be far more knowledge in the world than any one person could possible have, even by second-hand, even on credit.

Dan:

I'm uncomfortable with this for several reasons...  by shrugging off
this line of inquiry as not being a problem, you seem to fall into the
camp that says the world did exist before we personally do, that it
will continue to exist after we die, and that a tree falling in the
forest makes a sound even if no one is around. Yet there is no way to
empirically verfiy any of those notions... and the MOQ subscribes to
empircism. You're buying (either with cash or credit) into the notion
that imaginary ideas are concrete... you're introducing the concept of
object permanence to accord with an imaginary dog dish. I think that
is exactly what Robert Pirsig was getting at by answering the question
of whether a tree falling in the forest with no one around makes a
noise... what tree?

It may not be a problem in the practical world, but it seems a huge
problem here since the MOQ states reality begins with experience. If
imaginary dog dishes exist as conceptual objects of permanence, then
reality does not begin with experience and ideas do not come before
matter. The MOQ is a fallacy... it falls apart.

>dmb:
> Object permanence is a practical belief, one invented by "some remote ancestor" and learned by every infant. As a practical belief, it's been true for a very long time but it's much less ambitious than subject-object metaphysics, philosophical physicalism, the scientific belief in an objective reality or the metaphysical belief in, say, Kant's things-in-themselves.

Dan:

I would say it is more insidious than subject/object metaphysics,
etc.The concept of object permanence is a practical belief that
permeates our entire thought structure... so much so that when
something does disappear (whether stolen, misplaced, borrowed
unbeknownst to us) we are momentarilty flustered before we begin
intellectualizing a possible cause for the disappearance. That feeling
of "fluster" seems akin to the "dim apprehension" we feel sitting on
the hot stove.

dmb:
>You're going jump off the hot stove regardless of your metaphysics. Whatever particular concepts are used to explain the event afterward, they have to agree with the experience or otherwise answer to that (ouch) empirical rn eality. That's why we can give up on objective reality and the Cartesian self but still think it's a good idea to avoid cuts, burns, dog bites and atom bombs. It's a kind of mysticism that is decidedly NOT otherworldly, that brings philosophy down to the earth of things. The mystics will get off the stove first, he says, because Quality, the mystic reality, is not a metaphysical idea but the prim
>  ary empirical reality and that's what the mystic pays attention to rather than his ideas about empirical reality.

Dan:

We jump off hot stoves before forming intellectual patterns like
metaphysics, sure. And a mystic will (doubtlessly) say Don's dog dish
is imaginary... that it isn't empirical reality. The mystic will ask:
what dog dish?

Thank you,

Dan