[MD] humpty dumpty

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 5:25 PM, ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Dan]
> It was missed because it is wrong. The MOQ isn't about belief or faith. It says the world begins with experience. Direct experience.
>
> [Arlo]
> It does, but that does not make Peirce, or Ron, wrong.

Dan:
Hi Arlo! Always good to hear from you!

It may not make Peirce wrong about his pragmatism but I think Ron
might be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to saying that
Buddhism and the MOQ espouse belief over direct experience.

>For Peirce (and I gather James, although DMB may want to correct me if I am wrong), belief is what enables action outside the immediate moment of experience.
>
> In other words, it is the anticipation built from observation that allows us to go beyond the moment of pure experience and act in purposeful and strategic ways. For Peirce, 'belief' was critical in 'activity' if activity was ever to be more than immediate responses to the ongoing stream of experience.

Dan:
I have no quarrel with this. But Ron wrote:

"Now if MoQ is an extension of Pragmatism and also an extension of
Bhuddism (an American form) forwarded as such by Ant, then it stands
to reason that both Pragmatism and Bhuddism share an inclination
toward belief. Interesting. Too bad this was missed."

Dan comments:
It could well by that Pragmatism leans toward belief but Buddhism does
not. It leans away from belief and instead says we must approach the
world through pure experience, unfiltered by beliefs and assumptions.
I offered a quote from Steve Hagen to back this up. And this is also
where the MOQ says that value arises as well. Robert Pirsig clearly
states that thinking will not bring us closer to reality. It leads us
away from it.

>
> So, you are right that the immediate moment of perception, the immediate zen-point, the flux of experience, the NOW! moment does not require 'belief' or 'faith'. But the range of purposeful activity (agency) enabled by symbolic representation (semiosis) required a fixation of 'belief' for that activity to best align with experience. This essay is about aligning 'belief' with 'experience', and I think it's core demonstrations a pre-Pirsigian rejection of S/O reason (a priori) as the best basis for fixing belief. What he calls "inquiry" is sort of an ongoing re-iterative re-adjustment/re-alignment of observation/projection derived from experience.

Dan:

This Peirce statement seems to contradict what Robert Pirsig says
about value arising with direct experience and not from our belief
sets concerning it:

"We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences,
the last of all our faculties..."
[http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html]

The full possession of our power is exactly this moment! As soon as we
begin forming beliefs we begin the
reiteration/readjustment/realignment of this moment now passing us by.
By fixing our beliefs we deny ourselves the very thing we seek;
instead of aligning  with experience we form a belief system about it
and align with that.

>
> [Dan]
> Belief involves intellect.
>
> [Arlo]
> Not always, and this is a key point in Peirce's essay. Belief can fix on intellect (S/O or non-S/O), or on social authority, or on a biologically comforting tenacity.

Dan:

But yes I got that too. I didn't say belief fell entirely within the
domain of intellect, however. I said it involves intellect, which it
does. In the MOQ ideas come before matter so belief starts with our
ideas of the world and not with the world itself.

>
> [Dan]
> By waking up to direct experience we no longer believe the world is this way or that way. We know.
>
> [Arlo]
> Well, "knowing" is for Peirce the "fixing". I'd make the argument that 'knowing' and 'believing' are not, from an experiential-pragmatic view, different. Our 'experience' is no more 'knowing' than it is 'believing', Dan, both are secondary to direct experience. Both involve interpreting a symbolically represented history to project an anticipation trajectory of activity. Whether we "know" or "believe" the sun will rise tomorrow, that an apple dropped will 'fall' to the ground, that a motorcycle will propel us from point A to point B, seems to me a difference without a degree.

Dan:
I assume the sun will rise tomorrow based on the idea that the sun
will rise tomorrow. I cannot know the sun will rise tomorrow until I
directly experience the sun rising tomorrow. At that moment, I know.
Until that moment, it is a conjecture, a belief, an opinion that I
hold albeit dearly.

Knowing is direct experience while belief is secondary. Knowing does
not involve anticipation or interpretation. That comes later, after
the direct experience. The long-running dog dish discussion between
Matt and me centered on this.

>
> [Dan]
> A belief isn't knowing. It is an assumption based on opinion. When you know something it is unshakable.
>
> [Arlo]
> This troubles me, and it sounds like a nod towards an Absolute I know you aren't arguing for, Dan. I don't want anything I believe to be unshakeable that experience, when divergent, won't rock it towards something better.

Dan:

Of course you don't. But neither do you want to be swayed by unfounded
belief secondary to direct experience, do you?

What you seem to be saying is that we can form an absolute belief with
the mystery that is direct experience. We cannot. As soon as concepts,
beliefs, assumptions, and opinions arise there is no direct
experience, only a memory of... what... there are no words. If you
want to name it, you can. I prefer to just call it the mystery.

>
> And, of course, to Peirce, believing based on 'opinion' is maybe a tenacity fixed belief, but certainly NOT what his idea of inquiry, in the pragmatic tradition, points to.

Dan:

Yes I gather that too. But Robert Pirsig adds to pragmatism in this way:

"What the Metaphysics of Quality adds to James' pragmatism and his
radical empiricism is the idea that the primal reality from which
subjects and objects spring is value. By doing so it seems to unite
pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single fabric. Value, the
pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience. The
Metaphysics of Quality says pure experience is value. Experience which
is not valued is not experienced. The two are the same. This is where
value fits. Value is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial
scientific deductions that puts it somewhere in a mysterious
undetermined location in the cortex of the brain. Value is at the very
front of the empirical procession." [Lila]

Dan comments:
What RMP seems to be saying is that value doesn't start with a set of
beliefs like pragmatism or radical empiricism or even the MOQ. It
starts with pure unadulterated experience. That tree doesn't lean
towards belief at all. It falls away from it in the same way Buddhism
does.

>
> So, I'll step back for a second, I know Peirce did some distancing from James, but I always felt his core continued without major disagreement from James and the pragmatic tradition that Pirsig aligns his ideas with. Maybe DMB can offer better insight into this, I'll wait to see what he may say.

Dan:
Yes, a call to authority always helps to bolster one's belief system. :)

Thank you,

Dan

http://www.danglover.com