[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Hey Dan, Matt, Abbot, Costello and all:

How about if I push the reset button? Scratch Don's dog dish and the hypothetical tree. Let's talk about the nature of objects less complex than New York City. Let's look at the formation of objects and the idea of object permanence as it relates to empirical reality. Let's get back to MOQ basics and otherwise take a couple of baby steps.

"“If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to Dynamic Quality [the primary empirical reality] he will soon begin to notice differences and then correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that 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."


dmb comments:
The object is derived from what we notice in experience, especially the similarities and distinctions that repeatedly appear. We learn to deal with empirical reality by way of these derived objects even before we can speak. And because they're so basic and because these "objects" are taken from and married to what we notice in experience, it's tempting to confuse the object with the empirical reality itself. That's what SOM does. It says subjects and objects are the causes or conditions that have to exist for experience to arise in first place. Pirsig's baby illustrates the reverse idea, that experience comes first and objects are secondary formations. Objects are produced by a chain of deductions, he says.  

"Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values called an object and found this pattern to work well he quickly develops a skill and speed at jumping through the chain of deductions that produced it, as though it were a single jump…in a very short time it becomes so swift one doesn’t even think about it….only when an “object” turns out to be an illusion is one forced to become aware of the deductive process. …In this way static patterns of value become the universe of distinguishable things. Elementary static distinctions between such entities as “before” and “after” and between “like” and “unlike” grow into enormously complex patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation to generation as the mythos, the culture in which we live.”


dmb comments:
Please notice that these deductions, these objects, are based immediate experience of the kind that can be had even by an infant. The idea of objects works so unproblematically and so automatically that we don't even think of it as a deduction. It is derived from experience and it operates in experience and that's what I mean by saying the concept is "married" to empirical reality. That when an idea agrees with reality in the MOQ's sense, as opposed to subject-object agreement, which is otherwise known as the correspondence theory. As the mythos grows, of course, our ideas might not be so concrete, so married to empirical reality. Ideas that work at a practical level can cause big problems when they are elevated and used abstractly. That's how the simple idea of an object gets way out of hand and becomes metaphysical, becomes a fixed and eternal objective universe. That's a more fitting candidate for the label "illusion". But basic objects, the one's you deal with in your own experience, are empirically based and that's why they work. The MOQ has some realism in it has no quarrel with empirical science as such. 


“The Metaphysics of Quality agrees with scientific realism that these inorganic patterns are completely real, ...but it says that this reality is ultimately a deduction made in the first months of an infant's life and supported by the culture in which the infant grows up.” SODV


The MOQ has a dispute with the metaphysical assumptions of empirical science but it is based on experience and that's what makes it work. As a radical empiricist, one cannot reject the empirical data. In that sense, the MOQ retains an element of realism. We carve out everything, as James says. We sort experience into all kinds of concepts but experience itself does not bend to our will. Experience as it is immediately felt and lived in the concrete comes with real resistances against which we must struggle and we don't always win. Empirical reality pushes back such that concepts like sharpness, heaviness, and redness can be put to use in experience without any problems for a whole lifetime. That resistance is what gives rise to concepts about objects in the first place. I'm the kind of realist who sometimes burns his hands on the oven and I do not think it was an illusion when the broken drinking glass nearly sliced my pinky off. "Red" might be a deduced concepts that only has meaning in relation to human eyes, but the redness of the blood was real enough for me. Such concepts are pragmatically true rather than objectively true. Again, the pragmatic truth is one that agrees with empirical reality in the sense that it successfully operates within experience, not in the sense that it corresponds to an objective world of physical things in themselves or an ideal world of eternal Forms or anything like that.