[MD] The Hero's journey

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Dan,

Don and Chris with the Dog Dish:
Say Don's in the living room fretting about his dog not getting enough 
food because he isn't hovering around the food dish in the kitchen.  
Without that direct experience of the food dish, Don worries the dish 
won't be there for Fido.  Don's buddy Chris gets tired of the moaning 
over Fido's fate and goes into the kitchen.  Chris then yells out from 
the kitchen, "Fido's dish is still here!"  Should Don be less fretful?  
Why?  He, after all, is _not_ directly experiencing the food dish: Chris 
is.  Don is only directly experiencing the noise coming out of the 
kitchen that comes in the form of a sentence expressing information.

Matt said:
My route through is to suppose that the evidence for New York and 
the evidence for dog dishes come from the same general area 
(first-person sincere reporting), and the fact that only two people 
have ever experienced Don's dog dish versus the billions that have 
experienced New York should not persuade Don or Chris that they 
should doubt the dog dish's existence more than New York.

Dan said:
If I suppose a skyscraper fell in New York City and no one was 
around, would it make a noise? We are not concerned if two people 
experience an occurrence or if a billion experience it... the question 
before us is if no one experiences an event, does it occur? What I 
sense in the route you take is a subtle shift in context. You're 
presupposing first person sincere reporting to an event that no one 
has witnessed.

Matt:
Hunh.  I did not think the question before us was "if no one 
experiences an event, does it occur?"  I would've fielded a different 
battery of MoQ-explanations about how trees can still fall in forests 
even if humans aren't around (following out from, e.g., "do 
inorganic patterns need intellectual patterns to exist?").  What I'm 
presupposing is first-person sincere reporting to events that people 
_have_ witnessed.  The difficulty of testimony for epistemological 
positions that use notions of directness and immediacy isn't, I would 
suggest, on questions about whether or not trees or dog dishes are 
around and have eventful lives when we aren't there, but what 
_our_ status is in making knowledge-claims about events we are not 
directly experiencing.  In my example, Chris _did_ directly experience 
the bowl being still in the room when he went back into it and 
reported to Don that it was still there.  However, what should Don be 
_allowed to know_ when he is not directly experiencing stuff?  That's 
a task for an epistemology to sort out.  Dave, in his reboot, gave 
Pirsig's kind of answer.  What I still can't figure is how New York and 
dog dishes in rooms one isn't in have different epistemological 
statuses when it comes to the kinds of implicit agreements we need 
in place to say "I know New York exists though I've never been there" 
or "I know my dog's food dish is still in the other kitchen though I 
haven't seen it in 30 minutes."

Matt said:
That seems almost like the reverse of the sentiment implanted in 
Pirsig's texts, which emphasizes direct experience over indirect 
testimony, meaning that even though Don's never been to New York, 
he has directly experienced his dog's dish, so isn't that something he 
shouldn't discount even though he's only one of two?

Dan said:
Yes, the MOQ emphasizes direct experience over indirect testimony. 
But Matt... you're asking me to accept indirect testimony that Don's 
dog dish exists independently of anyone verifying its existence. This 
is hearsay evidence at best.

Matt:
No, I'm requesting an articulation of why, on your account, Don 
should feel fine about his dog getting enough food, despite the fact 
that he isn't constantly directly experiencing the dog dish.  Don frets; 
Chris goes into the kitchen, yells "it's still here numbnuts!"; Don feels 
better.  That's Don getting indirect testimony _dependently_ of 
Chris's verification (bad grammar, but it mirrors your formulation).  
But what do we do when Chris leaves the room again?  Should Don 
start fretting again?  On the account Pirsig gives that Dave brought 
forward, no, we should not because we should've installed static 
latches, patterns of inference based on the fact 
that--typically--spatialtemporal objects do not just *poof!* out of 
existence when you stop looking at them.

Matt said:
Think of what you said on the analogy of how many people directly 
experience mystical enlightenment.  Pirsig's saying we _should_ 
include in our account of reality experiences that only a low volume 
of people have experienced--and you should particularly do so if 
you're one of the few.

Dan said:
Again... it is the kind of evidence submitted and not the number of 
witnesses. If I see Matt breaking into a bank late one night and I go 
around telling a hundred of my friends what I saw... not one of 
those people I tell about the crime can testify... it is hearsay and 
totally inadmissible in a court of law. It is low quality evidence. And 
if I hear from a hundred different people that Don has a dog dish, it 
is hearsay evidence unless Don directly exhibits the dog dish.

Matt:
Right, the "kind of evidence."  I see that high bar appear again.  
Because, as I tried alluding to, it appears that your high bar has 
made all mystic experiences "low quality evidence," since they are 
near-unanimously declared pure private events that only can get 
indirect, analogical corroboration from others.  On your scheme, why 
on earth should I take seriously any reporting of a mystical 
experience?  Why should I take all that work James did in the 
Varieties of Religious Experience seriously?  I would've thought a 
Pirsigian would've treated the lone experiencer with a little more 
epistemological respect.

Dan said:
But even if I accept Don has a dog dish on hearsay evidence, there is 
no one who can testify if that dish exists when no one is around... not 
even Don. Isn't that what we're discussing here? I thought so...

Matt:
But shouldn't our static patterns latch us into place?  Suggesting that 
we shouldn't _worry_ about whether the dish exists when no one is 
around?  Dave and I have been trying to articulate, in different ways, 
what the theoretical justification of these presuppositions are for 
supposing that spatiotemporal objects exist after we stop directly 
experiencing them.  Granting that these are presuppositions based 
on inferences is the assumption of the philosophic idealism you keep 
pressing.  Once you grant the idealism, however, you still need to rig 
your system to explain how common sense works.  While we've been 
looking on to that stage, you keep pressing questions that only make 
sense to people who _do not_ grant the idealism.  This makes it 
appear that _you_ are Don: but I'm guessing that you don't fret over 
physical objects out of your line of sight, so where's your 
reconstruction of common sense?

Dan said:
I purposely chose a bizarre example to (hopefully) better elucidate 
the fallacy of presupposition. We are all familiar with dog dishes and 
trees that fall in forests so it is easy to accept the notion that there 
are real dog dishes and real trees that exist independently of any 
observation. But they are imaginary. We make them up in our minds 
and believe they exist apart from us.

Matt:
Ah, see, you say "fallacy" and Pirsig, as Dave has outlined, says "if 
you don't make these presuppositions, we might suppose the baby 
will be mentally retarded."  (Notice, I have revised Pirsig's account.  
I'm not sure how much hangs on it, but I'm supposing that rather 
than ignoring DQ, it is the inability to form static patterns that 
produces different notions of mental deficiency.  Given the state of 
the argument, this seems to be the parallel with Dan's case, and the 
hiccup Dave and I have been having.  It might be a side curiosity 
about what this revision means more generally to Pirsig's 
metaphysics.)

What Dave, Ron, and I have been struggling with is why you want to 
call this a "fallacy," which suggests "don't do this," even after we've 
granted that common sense is "imaginary" in the 
I'm-granting-Pirsig's-idealism sense.

So, when Dave says (later, as the conversation moved on), "The idea 
of objects works so unproblematically and so automatically that we 
don't even think of it as a deduction," to explain Pirsig's theory of 
object-construction and you say, "Yes, that is the difficulty I seem to 
be running against in discussions with Matt and yourself," we want 
to say, no, that is not the problem you've been running into.  We've 
wanted to _grant_ the demystification of "unproblematically and so 
automatically" to show its root in chains of inferences, which you call 
"imaginary" and idealism (why are inferences unreal, though?), and 
then to offer a _better_ description of how we come to believe 
things in an unproblematic way.  You, however, seem to want to 
leave nearly _all_ knowledge as _problematic_.  But why?  I'm 
guessing you negotiate the world quite successfully, which is to say 
unproblematically--and _that_ fact is a performative contradiction to 
your insistence on the problematic status of, e.g., dog dishes in 
empty kitchens.

Matt