[MD] Putting SOM back into the MOQ by excluding SQ, let's not do that say some of us

[David Morey]

Hi DMB and all MOQers

I'd just to correct some further misunderstanding of my position contained 
in DMB's latest post:

"Dynamic Quality is defined constantly by everyone. Consciousness can be 
described is a process of defining Dynamic Quality. But once the definitions 
emerge, they are static patterns and no longer apply to Dynamic Quality. So 
one can say correctly that Dynamic Quality is both infinitely definable and 
undefinable because definition never exhausts it." -- Robert Pirsig

DM: I entirely agree with the main point of this quote: we experience 
dynamic quality, but we don't simply keep silent about it, we want, we need 
to talk. But talking about dynamic quality is pretty hopeless, you can't do 
much more than gesture at it, or maybe say what it is not. As soon as we 
start talking and using concepts we are dealing with SQ. So far so good. I 
also strongly agree that looking for something determinate, looking for 
properties of objects, or any form of certainty in experience is hopeless, 
this is key aspect of all the talk about DQ and what it means, DQ's 
indeterminateness, DQ's indefinability, the clear rejection of SOM in the 
MOQ. There is much the same emphasis on openness, endless interpretation and 
unfolding in Derrida and postmodernism, this overlaps with MOQ and I 
strongly support it. I am strongly against reduction, determinism and 
scientism in the way the philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar is. I am against 
all closure and put a great emphasis on openness like the philosopher Hilary 
Lawson does. I have a quite unusual and not very well known or understood 
philosophical position, and this seems to be very difficult for people here 
to realise and understand. I also recommend Iain McGilchrist's The Master 
and His Emissary, a work that looks out how the two halves of the brain 
battle between 2 perspectives one more whole and open, and one side of the 
brain more analytical, reductive and controlling. I also recommend Terrence 
W Deacon's Incomplete Nature where he looks at how absence and nothingness 
works in nature to constrain possibility and enable purpose and order (SQ) 
to emerge in nature and evolution, showing how dynamic possibility is 
primary and is reduced to give us something rather than everything (as 
opposed to nothing, it is the absence of everything that gives us our finite 
reality). So I am not presenting myself as doing anything greatly original 
here, but I am trying to see if it is possible to get Pirsig's MOQ to 
connect to some other thinkers, the ones who I think are some of the best 
and most promising around. For the long term survival of a thinker and their 
ideas connectivity to other thinkers offers the best prospect for survival 
and longevity. Where others here are trying to keep the MOQ pure and 
untouched by other ideas, I think they are condemning it to disappearance, 
but that is only my view. So back to SQ, SQ is a very open and fluid 
reality, we can unfold and discover new SQ all the time, SQ is forever 
changing, SQ comes and goes, SQ emerges and disemerges, there is very little 
to hold on to, it is elusive and evolving. Where I am saying that we should 
recognise that there is SQ prior to conceptions and language I am not 
looking at resurrecting dogmatic or rationalistic metaphysics or positivism, 
or non-radical empiricism or the quest for certainty or non-critical realism 
(Bhaskar is a critical realist by the way), or giving science some sort of 
cultural supremacy. But I am struck by the arguments of Qunetin Meillassoux 
in his After Finitude (Speculative Realism as a group or school is very 
interesting in places especially where it connects with Bergson and 
Whitehead like Iain Hamilton Grant), he attacks the bad side on 
postmodernism, not where it gives us openness, but where it has lost contact 
with ontology, science  and reality. Bhaskar too supports realism and his 
arguments are very convincing if you'd like to take a look at them. I think 
the arguments for realism of these thinkers can be applied to the MOQ, and 
the only reason the MOQ is currently looking non-realist, it seems to me, is 
the failure to see how conceptual SQ needs a hook in experience to explain 
why we are ever about to move from endless change and flux to talk of 
possible patterns and regularities. Now does this move us back to 
dogmaticism and scientism and away from openness? Bhaskar and Meillissaux 
say no, and so do I. This is because they have moved away from SOM. Without 
scientism, substances and determinate objects you can retain openness. But 
nonetheless we have some persistence, regularity and patterns in experience. 
There patterns very much come and go, get reinterpreted, continue to emerge, 
etc. Why are there these patterns, why do they persist for a while and 
disappear? Who knows we have nothing to hang any thoughts about this on, as 
Meillissoux says, it is all contingent, it just is. Pure emerging and 
disemerging, it all sounds like DQ to me. And where DMB and Dan are 
emphasising this openness and change I agree with them.  SQ patterns are 
very temporary islands in a sea of DQ. But nonethe;ess science is possible, 
it works well and certain patterns persist and stand out more than others. 
The patterns scientists like to call protons seems to have a certain mass 
and that does need seem to change very much across the time and space that 
we know (and even beyond what we can know). Patterns and regularities really 
do look like they have a life of their own, they go on in nature with or 
without human recognition. How else did all the coding that we find in DNA 
get there unless there are patterns interacting with each other at all 
levels of existence not just the intellectual and human ones that we use to 
make sense of the experiences that we are having. Now I do understand the 
point of trying to say that all primary experience is simply DQ, it protects 
the role of DQ, what it is like and how it works, the openness it delivers, 
the qualities we experience. But pushing all order, patters, regularity into 
an idealist realm of conceptions is just to disconnect the MQ from science 
and nature and the independent unfolding processes of DQ and SQ that have 
nothing to do with human beings or their conceptualisations of 
reality-experience. The world transcends the human, it is a reality over and 
above the human, so I reject this idealism, non-realism and 
anthropocentrism. If you do not want to that's fine and is up to you. It is 
perhaps a safer and more pure place to be, but I fear it is disconnected and 
isolating and takes the MOQ down a dead end, and removes it from what is 
happening in the culture and the best and most interesting thought that is 
going on, in places like this:

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/05/hilary-lawson-error-philosophy-and-ted

By the way Hilary Lawson, is a non-realist like DMB, but on this issues I 
think he is wrong, but I understand the problem. I think realism is 
incorrectly associated with Closure and SOM, I think that SOM can be 
rejected but realism can be re-found. I think it is hard for people to 
understand how you can have realism with openness and without the idea of 
objects based in substances, but once you reject this and the subject and 
subjectivism you can get to a new open form of realism. I also think it is 
dangerous for the MOQ to let idealism back in again, as this is to let the 
subject of SOM back into the MOQ. The new realism says that we really do 
experience patterns, and we can and do develop theories about how these 
relate to each other (fields, forces, etc), and quantify what forms these 
patterns take and how long they can persist, etc (it is called science), but 
we do not go any further and talk about substances or laws or materialism. 
The new ontology this implies and is our working assumption is that there is 
nothing underlying these patterns, everything is contingent (sound like DQ 
to anyone?). The new realism is non-reduction, emergent and 
non-deterministic and anti-scientism. This is more and more the position 
scientists are taking. Such new thinking needs new philosophy, and MOQ is a 
pretty good candidate to help with this. but not if it is an idealistic set 
of views that are detached from the realism and non-anthropocentrism of 
science.