[MD] Taking off the glasses?

[MarshaV]

Dmb,

Although RMP has stated Static Quality "refers to anything that can be conceptualized," I don't think static quality is based on concepts alone.  Appearances are built on patterns of perception as much as concepts.   It boggles the mind, but one picks out a tree, or automobile, as much from recognizing a visual pattern.  

Marsha 


On Oct 11, 2011, at 4:02 PM, david buchanan wrote:

> 
> dmb says:
> Please notice what they are saying about "reality" with the glasses off. The pre-intellectual reality is what James calls feeling, sensation, a collective name for all these sensible natures, just what appears. It makes sense that Suzuki would this pre-conceptual experience 'no-mind'. Now compare this sensory flux as reality with the basic problem of appearance and reality. An encyclopedia article begins by saying "the chief question raised by the distinction is epistemological: How can people know the nature of reality when all that people have immediate access to are appearances?"
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> The MOQ does not fall into this trap because, as you just saw, the reality described by Pirisg, James and Buddhism is the appearances to which we have immediate access. From this point of view, there is no "reality" more real than "just what appears". The encyclopedia says "responses to the question fall into one of three classes: Those that argue that observers are unavoidably "cut off" from reality, those that argue that there is some way of "getting at" reality through the appearances, and those that reject the distinction." The MOQ takes the latter view; it rejects the distinction. The MOQ makes a different distinction, a distinction between concepts and empirical reality not between appearance and reality.
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> Think of it this way. The traditional distinction between appearance and reality is a distinction between empirical or phenomenal reality and that world of experience is contrasted with some kind of trans-experiential reality, a reality beyond what we can experience. For Plato this would be the world of Forms, for Kant this would be the world of things-in-themselves, for scientific materialism this would be "objective" reality. But the radical empiricist does not allow any such extra-empirical realities. Reality is limited to that which can be known in experience so that, in effect, appearance IS reality.
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> That is why we can NOT rightly take the MOQ to be making any claims about that one true account of The-Way-Things-Really-Are. The appearance-reality distinction presupposes an objective Way-Things-Really-Are to which subjective philosophical systems should try to conform. But the MOQ's central distinction does NOT make that pre-supposition. In fact, Pirsig and James both explicitly attack and reject SOM as their starting point and their distinction between concepts and reality is built on the lot where SOM used to stand before they knocked it down. 
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