[MD] Definitions

[david buchanan]

Arlo sadi to Ian:
..."Dictionary definitions", by the way, is a ridiculous straw man (and I'm a little surprised you use this). Of course the "meanings" of individual "words" (and the shared use syntax) evolve over time, who has ever suggested otherwise? The point is not that such-and-such a word is forever etched in iron, but that we can never "think" outside "language", any more than we can "breathe" in a "vacuum" (aka, "our intellectual description of nature is ALWAYS culturally defined" [emphasis added]).

dmb says:
"The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is."

Pirsig's idea (that we can't get outside the mythos) is another way of saying of saying we can't think without language or reason without definitions. The meaning of words is dictated by dictionaries; dictionaries are just a record of common usage, a record of what people mean when they use them in actual life. Language is a shared space, an intersubjective world of agreed meanings. Who was it that said, "the limits of my language are the limits of my world"? Wittgenstein, I think, and it's roughly the same idea. 

Our eyes can detect only a very small portion of the total spectrum. We are constrained by them in that sense, but do we want to pluck out our eyes because of this limit or are we just grateful to see at all? The anti-intellectual stuff posted here is analogous to this eye plucking mistake, I think. To mix metaphors, it's also like killing - rather than curing - the patient.

You can't get out from under that giant pile of analogies we call reality because that's what you're made of; a complex forest of static patterns on an evolutionary journey. This building of analogy upon analogy is a cultural process but everyone learns this beginning in infancy...

“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 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." "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.”

It begins with very simple deductions but grows into everything we know, as Pirsig puts it in another passage, earth and sky, science and religion, art and politics and this is the intersubjective world we share, the mythos transformed into logos, the intellectual descriptions that are always situated within a culture. "To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is," Pirsig writes. "There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane.”"

This is what it means to say that DQ is the source and substance of everything. All these patterns have evolved in response to DQ. DQ is the generating force behind intellectual patterns too. Pirsig even talks about his own MOQ in terms of "static latching". The idea with language like this (static, stable, patterned latched, etc.) is to convey of sense of preservation, particularly the preservation of creative innovations and the evolutionary gains of the past. This is the heart of the evolutionary morality, right? The code of art protects these innovations, gives them space to occur. And the intellectual level is the most flexible and open to change. That's what makes it superior. That's why we see it at the top of all static values. You know, it's VALUE-FREE science that has to go, not science itself. It the cold voice of objective reason that has to go, not excellence in thought and speech.