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

[Jan Anders Andersson]

Hi DM

Interesting piece of 8 250 characters (1456 words) ordered in a complex Static Quality Pattern there, but I must say, it's very much to read for lunch. I don't have that time to tell if it will be of high or low quality or if it will last for a long time without desorder.

Jan Anders


3 maj 2013 x kl. 13.29 skrev 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.
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