[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

A few further clarifications:

Dan said:
This is what the discussion between David H./David M. and myself has 
centered upon. Both Davids insist that we experience pre-existing pattens of 
value. This is the common way of using the term 'experience' as Robert 
Pirsig states: a subject/object relationship. It would appear to me that the 
correspondence theory of truth uses this same definition of experience.   In 
the MOQ, however, experience becomes synonymous with Dynamic Quality. There 
are no pre-existing patterns of value, or a pre-existing subject/object 
relationship.

DM:  I see patterns as pre existing language and conceptualisation in 
experience but not in any SOM terms, realism without SOM is my view. 
Patterns have value I say, we find them good or bad, etc, just because 
something pre-exists it is not an object being experience by a subject, that 
is SOM, it is just a pattern that preexists, food preexists for dogs and 
babies before they make any conceptions about it. The experience of a 
differentiation in experience, here green, there blue, does not give us 
objects or SOM, it gives us a differentiation or a pattern, which we then 
move on to conceptualise or name, there is great openness about what 
patterns we want to do this to, and where to make the cuts, but these 
cuts/differentiations emerge in experience, whether we make up concepts and 
language or not. And patterns emerge in nature before we conceive of them 
too, that's why there are levels: inorganic, organic, social, etc.

Ron said:
I think what Dave M is asking, and deducing, is that there must be a sort of 
relatedness our concepts MUST share with DQ in order for Pragmatic truths to 
exist.  ...Or else what the heck are we really saying about precision and 
clarity.

DM: Precision certainly kicks in when we start introducing science, maths 
and quantities, we can easily communicate and share these aspects of 
experience and make some progress about common understanding of patterns.

dmb says:
Yes, basically David M wants to find a determinate reality behind our 
concepts.

DM: No I don't, just patterns under concepts, these are very open and not 
determinate.

DMB: He doesn't see how concepts can make sense of an empirical flux,

DM: Make sense of flux? Flux is just flux, what we make sense of is patterns 
and SQ with language and concepts, but this is very open and changing,
you are right if you are saying change and DQ are always part of the 
experience, but in controlled experiments we minimise the DQ to get as much 
hold as
we can on the patterns, very artificial of course, and you can never get rid 
of DQ completely, quantum uncertainty of course.

DMB: he then considers this to be a problem that he's going to solve for us, 
and his solution is to construe static patterns as pre-existing things that 
we experience and then conceptualize.

DM: Yes I am trying to help you see the patterns in the flux, it is called 
SQ I think in the MOQ.

"Now you can do all this reasoning," Morey says, "only if you can experience 
pre-conceptual patterns and through culture and concepts make sense of 
these. If as Dan claims there are no patterns to make conceptual sense of, 
there is nothing but flux to make sense of, nothing to hook us out of change 
to see there are patterns and persistence."

DMB: David Morey is not only asking an ancient question, he is also giving 
us an ancient answer. We can't make sense of an unpatterned flux, he 
figures, so we MUST experience pre-conceptual patterns. How could the flux 
of experience be ordered and defined if there aren't "pre-conceptual 
patterns", if there aren't patterns already existing before we conceptualize 
them, he wonders? Kant's "things–in–themselves", which are the objects of 
reality as they exist apart from being images in the subject mind of a 
perceiver or an observer, are posited as an answer to that question.

DM: Ancient question, new answer. Now why do you think patterns implies 
things-in-themselves, you really need to give up SOM, it is not inevitable, 
luckily you can think of patterns without calling them things-in-themselves, 
just call them SQ. I claim patterns are experienced, I claim they persist: I 
see a pattern and call it mummy, she leaves the room, she comes back. I work 
out she still exists in between, I do not start talking about dualistic 
subjects and objects as this causes lots of trouble as we all know. You are 
mistaking realism for SOM, I am trying to prise them apart. I guess you 
think this is impossible. So OK what does MOQ say about the status of 
patterns like the moon when it disappears behind patterns like the sun, does 
it cease to exist? This is the nonsense that made people give up idealism.

DMB: "...though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves," Kant 
says, "we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in 
themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that 
there can be appearance without anything that appears." There must be 
something that structures our experience, some noumenal reality that limits 
and determines our experience, something that causes phenomenal reality to 
be conceivable and definable.

DM: That's Kant, I say whilst we can work out that patterns persist, we 
can't say anything about why, but we can do science and measure our 
experiences and make a great deal of sense about how these patterns 
interact.

DMB: "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things 
displaying themselves to the senses [...] that noumena and the noumenal 
world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's 
principal legacy to philosophy." —The Oxford Companion to Philosophy

DM: Yes Plato got this wrong, SQ, patterns, forms are found in experience, 
yes they seem to go beyond experience, they existed before human beings came 
along, but no need to invent things-in-themselves or ideal forms, or SOM 
dualism, rather we can find everything we need inexperience and via thinking 
and reason. We can do science and say how forms look like they interact and 
relate in our experience, and work out what happens when we are not looking 
(so no idealism for us). The great thing about maths and science is that we 
can speculate about many possible forms that we do not experience or do not 
yet exist and we can make sense of these too, and we can even create 
possible forms and make them actual, do you like ipads and smart phones?

DMB: For Aristotle, as Pirsig tells us, the real reality behind phenomenal 
appearances, was "substance". The observable, sensible properties were 
conceived as inhering in "sub-stance", that which stands below the 
appearances.

DM: Luckily in the MOQ, SQ is part of experience so we do not need to 
project ideas about objects behind the patterns that we experience, that is 
SOM.


DMB: Descartes famously held that two distinctly different kinds of 
substances exist; mental and physical. The common conception of science held 
today says that physical reality is what's really real and minds are a 
special property of matter. What used to be called materialism is now called 
physicalism because time, space, gravity, energy, etc. are physical but have 
no mass or substance in the usual, material sense.

DM: I reject materialism and physicalism, they are both attempts to go 
behind experience and the patterns we experience, these SOM ideas do still 
plague much of science, they try to reduce one bad idea the subject to 
another objects/matter.

DMB: All of these theories, following Plato, assume a distinction between 
appearance and reality. They all presume that experience is caused by an 
objective, pre-existing reality and that's what makes our ideas true or not.

DM: For me we only know experience, but we can make sense of experience and 
reason about it. I carefully avoid all talk of cause, all we can know is 
that patterns seem to exist beyond what we experience because we are finite 
in space and time as Kant correctly sets out, but we cannot leap to even 
claim there are things-in-themselves, they brings in lots of 
thing-stuff-substance thinking. But if we use our experience to realise 
there is DQ and there is SQ, then there is DQ/SQ-in-itself. This is realism 
without introducing the subjects or objects of SOM dualism. Experienced in 
this sense is caused by SQ and DQ, although better to say it just is, and it 
is real, and it is more than human. Sure we find SQ and DQ in experience but 
we can reason that flux and patterns go on everywhere, beyond the human, and 
in the inanimate levels/patterns of nature/cosmos. But we can remain neutral 
or agnostic about any causes or substances or things or objects of subjects. 
If we drop subjects we sure ouught to drop idealism too and not reintroduce 
it into the MOQ like Dan and DMB seem to want to. I say realism, I have some 
sympathy for calling this a hyper-realism by the way.

DMB: That's what the correspondence theory of truth says. There are 
differences between Plato's Forms, Aristotle's substance, Descartes 
substances, Locke's substance, Kant's things-in-themselves, and the physical 
objects of science, of course, but we can discern a pattern here. In each 
case, our concepts are supposed to represent realities as they really are.

DM: For me our concepts are about the patterns we experience not any-thing 
underlying, but yes patterns and DQ point beyond the realm of experience to 
patterns and DQ that make up a cosmos or hype-reality of forms/patterns but 
it all rests on our primary experience and this gives us no reason to start 
talking about subjects or objects and dividing experience up into these 
substances. Sure we experience a sea of DQ, and sure we experience some 
flickers of SQ to enable us to make some sense of our experience, but that 
is it, all else is speculation beyond experience, but clearly SQ and DQ 
unfolds, outside of human experience as inorganic patterns and other forms 
of life that cannot reason or make concepts or use language.

DMB: Truth is a correspondence between our mental images and the real 
structure of reality.

DM: For SOM dualism. I take an aletheic theory of truth. Truth is how we 
make sense of the SQ that uncovers itself in our experience. SQ is not 
dependent on us, truth is dependent on us as we have to find words and 
concepts to describe our experiences, but what we experience is what we 
experience, we cannot get underneath this, but we can reason that there is a 
larger process that is unfolding beyond our individual or species known 
unexperiences, hard to make sense of fossils otherwise.


DMB:  This is the basic answer that was always given in Western philosophy - 
but then came Nietzsche and the pragmatist. This is what our radical 
empiricists are rejecting, shooting down and replacing with something else. 
Their answer is quite different. We might even say that they don't answer 
the question so much as they reject the assumptions behind the question.


DM: Good on them, me too, love Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Whitehead, 
Heidegger, Bergson, etc. But not keen on non-realism, anthropocentrism, or 
idealism.

DMB: Please notice another pattern here. Plato says noumena "are the objects 
of the highest knowledge" and can be known only by the most accomplished 
philosophers.

DM: Plato undervalues experience and is very wrong here, but he is right to 
value reason and mathematics, because they can investigate possible forms 
and these greatly help us to understand actually experienced forms. Of 
course, we sort of experience possible forms when we imagine them, this is 
the true radical empiricism that says we experience many forms 
imaginatively, many possible forms that are not part of the SQ-forms that we 
actually experience. In fact if we do not recognise the actuality of certain 
SQ forms in experience, how do we distinguish these from 'merely' possible 
forms that we imagine. If you exclude SQ from primary experience how to you 
distinguish empirical SQ forms from imaginary-possible SQ forms? If you do 
exclude them why can't you imagine any reality you want? Well you can't 
there is something  given about SQ in experience, there is meaning in the 
word possible, actual, impossible.

DMB: Kant says, "we cannot know these things in themselves," but we must, 
"be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves". Locke 
says substance is just a general name, "being nothing but the supposed, but 
unknown support of those qualities we find existing". In each case, the 
so-called reality behind appearances is revealed to be a supposition, a 
concept posited as an explanation, a hypothesis offered as the answer to a 
question. Without positing some external, pre-existing, reality-in-itself, 
this theory goes, "we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there 
can be appearance without anything that appears".

DM: Well ditch the things but keep the persistence, otherwise as soon as a 
pattern stops being experienced then it ceases to exist, you are not here 
now but I am quite happy to assume you are still existing, annoying though 
you can be. Dropping persistence of patterns is really absurd that is right, 
or have you ceased to exist and cannot answer me?

DMB: This is the pivot point of the problem. This is the problem that gives 
rise to the answers supplied by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Locke, 
and scientific objectivity. These are all variations on the answer given by 
subject-object metaphysics. But Pirsig, James and others say that this is 
just a long history of bad solutions to a fake problem, that they're all bad 
answers to a bogus question.

DM: Yes bad answers, but the question can be broken down into a good and bad 
part, the persistence element needs and answer, if the MOQ avoids this 
question it looks absurd and falls into idealism which is one half of SOM.

Regards
David M