[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Matt and Dan:

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



Dan replied:
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?  ..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 replies:
It seems that you and Matt both breezed right past my main point. I think we have to be careful to distinguish between "object permanence" as a PRACTICAL belief and more ambitious and abstract systems of belief like subject-object metaphysics, the metaphysics of substance or the scientific belief in a pre-existing objective reality. I think the hypothetical unseen, unheard tree that falls in a hypothetical forest is very different from the dog dish you just saw and touched and filled little crunchy bits. I mean, we learn the practical value of concepts like "hot" and we successfully use it in connection with concepts like "stove" and "flame". As a practical matter we learn to sort experience into inner and outer on the basis of practical consequences. To use James's example, we quickly learn that imaginary water cannot extinguish a real fire, that imaginary knives may or may not cut imaginary skin but dream blades can't damage real flesh. The idea here is that the difference between inner and outer is based on empirical reality, that the distinction between inner and outer is based on what's known in experience. These practical concepts operate within the empirical flux of life so that we can act and respond.

But it is a very different matter to claim that practical distinctions between inner and outer represent the structure of the universe, to claim that all of reality is either subjective or objective. Cartesian dualism and scientific objectivity are much more elaborate, sophisticated and abstract than the relatively simple, practical beliefs from which they are developed. Think of the difference between the claim that says "I have nothing in my hand" to the cyrpto-theological, quasi-philosophical claim that says it's impossible for something to come from "nothing". The former can be checked and verified very simply while the latter is just one of those meaningless hypothetical questions based on an imaginary pure nothingness that is supposedly the opposite of all that is. It's based on the kind of nothingness that must have "existed" before creation. This is the kind of nonsense that radical empiricist find so embarrassing about viciously abstract philosophies. As it's worst, these philosophies derealize the only reality we CAN know in favor of some ideal abstraction that could never be known by anyone. That's why Pirsig keeps hammering on the point that Quality is not a metaphysical abstraction but rather a primary empirical reality. Like I said, the primary empirical reality is what the mystic pays attention to (rather than his ideas ABOUT empirical reality) and that's why he gets off the stove faster.


And I don't exactly agree that the "mystic will say Don's dog dish is imaginary". Since the dish can be easily observed and used daily as a dish, I think it's fair to say that one's idea of the dish is in agreement with empirical reality. The mystic might ask what dog dish you're talking about if you ask him about a hypothetical dog who burps even though nobody is around to hear it, but otherwise he chops wood, carries water, repairs his cycle (or his culture) and he may even feed his pet. I don't think the MOQ is supposed to lead us to the conclusion that ordinary life is an illusion so much as the abstract metaphysical assumptions we tend to attach to everything. Some people take the MOQ's rejection of the Cartesian, subjective self to mean that there is no self at all. But that is just another way to denigrate and de-realize the only reality we can ever have or know. Everything does have to begin with your own experience and if you are capable of doubting your own existence then you must in fact exist. That's the part of Descartes that Pirsig doesn't disagree with or try to correct. The MOQ paints a very different picture of the self and it's a process rather than a thing or an entity but I think it's misleading to say the MOQ's self is an illusion. We'd want to carefully rethink the self as part of understanding his rejection of SOM but I think a large part of the complaint is about the denigration of value and morals as merely subjective, as opposed to objectively real.  And a large part of the solution is to put "man" back in the center of things and re-establish the validity and importance of those so-called subjective values, of "whatever you like" and re-assert our own "affective domain" as a central part of nature. I mean, I think the MOQ is, among other things, a form of humanism, backed up by a very strong sort of empiricism. It definitely rejects certain conceptions of the self but the self is still quite central to the whole reconstruction project. He says Lila's battle is everybody's battle and his biography is practically inseparable from his philosophy. Given all that, it seems very misleading to be talking about illusory selves or imaginary dog dishes.

I don't mean to put all that in your lap, Dan. I'm thinking of Marsha's fondness for that sort of talk and just making some general points about what is and is not empirically real.

Thanks.