[MD] Static patterns are ever-changing?!? i

[David Morey]

dmb: Try to persuade you?! Dude, I just dished up a pile of evidence but you 
have not said anything about it. Why are you not persuaded by the 
explanation I already gave or by the quotes from Pirsig and McWatt, etc.?

DM: Because they are clearly not conclusive, yes they go close to saying 
what you claim but they do not say it. I think your conclusion that all SQ 
is conceptual goes too far. I believe I understand why you make this step 
and that there are some advantages to it, but I think the I see 
disadvantages outweigh it. Even if the quotes were conclusive I would then 
argue this step is an error and was not a step clearly taken in Lila. I have 
no objection to the step being taken if it was an improvement on Lila, you 
are right to look at building on Lila and Lila needs to be built on, and it 
needs to be shown how MOQ can relate to and intervene in the wider 
philosophical debate, but I think there is a better way forward in the MOQ 
direction, in the non-SOM direction, and that is to see that whilst we have 
to begin with experience, we can refer to pre-conceptual SQ that we can 
recognise in experience, this is a perfectly coherent suggestion I am making 
about how to make sense of a non-SOM and non-dualistic understanding of 
experience, one that I think is better able to engage and intervene in 
current mainstream philosophy to get people seeing a pre-SOM understanding 
of experience that can make good sense of both experience and the world 
beyond experience that experience allows us to recognise, SOM also allows us 
to recognise the larger world but introduces the objective versus subjective 
dilemma that is so problematic. Now this is a very simple proposal, it is 
simply yes there is pre-conceptual SQ that we can experience contrasted to 
your all SQ is conceptual version (by the way is all SQ therefore impossible 
without language and culture in your view or are you using conceptual in 
some strange and over-extended way? Please answer this question if it is not 
too awkward for the weaknesses in your position). Now where you start saying 
my proposal is incoherent or makes no sense or is really a version of SOM, 
this to me looks like cowardice, defensiveness, evasion or fear, of course 
it may be stupidity, but I prefer to assume not. I have no problem 
understanding what you are saying and why, I even see the advantages, but 
the disadvantages are too great for me. If there are disadvantages in my 
suggestion I would be glad to hear them, but you seem to prefer evasion, 
which is a shame dude. Two examples of advantage from me: Firstly, look at 
the Galen Strawson essay I posted  this week, it proposed that naturalism, a 
doctrine most philosophers espouse, is at fault that it promotes physicalism 
whilst ignoring the most naturalistic element of all reality, that reality 
is inescapably experiencial, this should be at the heart of any true 
naturalism that can only more on to explore what physics is able to tell us 
about reality in this fundamental experiential context. This opens a very 
useful door for MOQ and its basis in experience, but it goes on to give a 
key role to physics and its study of patterns. Now I think an MOQ with 
pre-conceptual SQ rooted in experience can engage in this conversation and 
engage with a revised naturalism as proposed by Galen Strawson, but a 
non-realist and idealistic MOQ, as I see your version is very unlikely to be 
able to do this. The other opportunity I see in the wider philosophical 
world, you should really get out more dude, is the new materialism or 
speculative realist debate, here people like Paul Levi Bryant are suggesting 
we need to stop all talk of dualistic subjectivity and objectivity, and 
adopt a flat ontology, that fits well with how anti-dualism and SQ is 
understood in the MOQ, but it fails to put experience at its centre, instead 
a move is made to rethinkg materialism and allow objects to possess all the 
qualities that MOQ highlights in experience. Now an MOQ with pre-conceptual 
SQ, realist SQ that gives a realist flat ontology can engage with this sort 
of speculative realism, an MOQ where all experience is exclusively DQ until 
a rather idealist form of conceptual SQ is brought into being is never going 
to engage with the realism, naturalism and new materialism that is the best 
sort of thought there is in the current mainstream, current that are 
challenging dualism, but are missing the depth of understanding of DQ that 
Pirsig and MOQ can offer. If MOQ goes your way it goes so far from the 
mainstream I fear it is going to be lost and forgotten. Now that is my 
motivation, I look out at the wider world and propose non-conceptual SQ to 
save the MOQ from obscurity and marginalisation. Now if this proposal is 
adopted what do we lose? I do not see that this approach diminished DQ and 
its centrality, but ignoring this proposal takes MOQ towards anti-realism 
and idealism and I think these are dead ends. The only advantage of "all SQ 
is conceptual" is that this allows you to defend your position as some sort 
of ultimate retreat from SOM, there is only DQ and ideas, but is this a sort 
of inverse physicalism? -instead of there is only matter and an add on 
called culture/ideas/mind, you drop the matter and get back to a sort of 
flux coloured idealism. DQ plus SQ ideas? Sure this is clever, and easy to 
defend, but I find it less challenging to orthodoxy and less radical and 
easily dismissed as just idealism over again. Now if you have some good 
reasons for your view other than Any says this or Pirsig says this, some 
actual intellectual reasons or values that you think your version delivers 
and mine does not then please let us hear them. If you want to say you are 
confused, or it is not logical, or this is just a return to SOM, or this is 
not coherent, save it as I have heard all that evasion a thousand times 
already.

DMB said: And I'm familiar with the thought experiment but I fail to see the 
relevance, especially the way you've misconstrued it. The experiment is 
suppose to highlight the difference between experience as such and our 
conceptual understandings. So we are supposed to imagine a person who has 
never seen color. Mary is an expert and knows everything there is to know 
about color and yet she  lives in a black and white and has never actually 
seen any color. So the question is, when she steps out of her black and 
white world for the first time and sees color, does she "know" something 
new? Has she learned something from experience that she could not get from 
words and concepts. There are arguments to the contrary, but the thought 
experiment was invented to illustrate a certain  inadequacy of conceptual 
knowledge. It was invented to make a point in a long-running debate about 
the status of "qualia", as the philosophers call it.

DM: Yes as usual I know all that, you never fail to state the obvious and 
miss the point. My point is given this standard thought experiment how would 
you describe what happens when the girl first experiences colour for the 
first time, I think explaining this event in MOQ terms requires 
pre-conceptual SQ, how would you describe it without pre-conceoptual SQ, I 
think that is impossible, but would be delighted to be proved wrong if you 
can give up the evasion and offer such a description, come on you can do 
better than this dude, if you actually risk engaging with the issues here 
you never know you might persuade me you are right, but go for evasion if 
you prefer, no skin off my nose. Of course you could accuse me of evasion 
instead, I'll let others judge who is really the most evasive if you adopt 
that tactic once again.

DMB said: But, David, you are exposing a conceptual error about the MOQ's 
terms when you say "she experiences a new pattern, the SQ of colour". If you 
use the terms "experience" and "static patterns" as they are used in the 
textual evidence below, that statement is totally incoherent.

DM: Here we go evasion time, I stated quite clearly I am challenging the 'SQ 
is all conceptual' belief or proposal, it is a bad idea, it losses too much 
and adds too little, I prefer to keep pre-conceptual SQ,  now if that is a 
bad idea, let's hear why, I am all ears if you have good reasons.

DMB: It can't make any sense. It's like saying "she experiences a new 
pattern of unpatterned Quality". According to SOM, tomatoes and the color 
red are not just concepts, they are mistakenly believed to be physical 
realities that are also conceptualized. In the MOQ, all objects are just 
concepts.

DM: Evasion as usual plus the old you are an SOMist accusation, nothing 
SOMist about pre-conceptual SQ, or experienced patterns, this implies 
nothing about physicality, it is pure experience, but you think all 
experience is unpatterned DQ, fine but there is value to be had from 
accepting pre-object, pre-conceptual patterns in experience, it allows there 
to be an evolution from simple patterned experiences to the full complexity 
of making sense of these patterns via culture and concepts, it also allows 
us to understand how our bodies evolve and handle pattern recognition long 
before culture and concepts come along, if you ignore all patterns before 
concepts, how in your version of MOQ can you make any sense of evolution, 
life and experience prior to language, concepts and culture, of course you 
can adopt the idealist position that none of these processes 'existed' until 
recognised conceptually but this is an idealist and anti-realist dead end 
the MOQ takes at the risk of becoming so irrelevant.



DMB: LOOK AT THE EVIDENCE! You might not understand it and even if you do 
understand it, you don't have to accept it. But we're talking about Pirsig's 
meaning, right? If we want to know what Pirsig says about static patterns, 
you have to honestly examine the evidence. And we can put this next to other 
kinds of evidence, namely the meaning of static concepts as it's understood 
by a Pirsig scholar, a Buddhist scholar and the pragmatist that Pirsig 
quotes on this same topic. If you sincerely want to discuss what has been 
asserted here, why would you say nothing about it?

DM: I am not evasive like you, I see it, I understand it, I accept it moves 
very close to what you are proposing, but it does not go all the way and is 
contradicted in places where there seems to be room for pre-conceptual SQ, 
and even if it did I am suggesting reasons why it is a miss step and a dead 
end, and what I would like but do not get from you is why there are good 
reasons for banning pre-conceptual SQ from the MOQ, or what advantages there 
are to only having conceptual SQ. Sure all patterns imply some sort of 
comparative, but we regularly compare things in our experience that are 
right there unavoidably, a tree is full of branches, the branches resemble 
each other, such is SQ, the branches differ from each other, such is DQ, no 
concepts required at the most basic level, only when we come to think deeper 
about this SQ and DQ or wish to talk about these experiences. I see no 
problem with such simple pre-conceptual SQ, with babies recognising faces 
before they can even speak. I have asked how babies recognise faces without 
conceptual SQ before, to date you have evaded this question that does not 
fit your position in my opinion, going to take up the challenge at last or 
evade it once again?


DMB said: The thought experiment is a very confusing way to frame questions 
about the MOQ because it implicitly contains the assumptions of SOM.

DM: Pure evasion, yes the experiment is described using SOM concepts, the 
challenge -given you can understand the outline of the experiment- is to 
describe what is happening without pre-conceptual SQ, my challenge and fear 
is that an experiment that can be though in SOM or with pre-conceptual SQ 
cannot be thought or described by an MOQ devoid of pre-conceptual MOQ, which 
I suggest shows that it cannot handle a situation that could clearly occur 
in  experience, a terrible failure, you seem to recognise this failure 
because you evade seeing it or trying to genuinely resolving it.

DMB said: It's designed to assert the importance of subjectivity against the 
assumption that objective knowledge is the only that counts. That kind of 
question doesn't make any sense in the MOQ because it rejects objectivity 
and the "experience" it talks about is not subjective. As the quotes s how, 
experience is prior to subjects and objects.

DM: Boring and obvious, yes MOQ helps to overcome the issue in this 
experiment because experience is prior to subjects and objects, you really 
should learn to accept where our common ground lies, theMOQ has few enough 
friends, but how can we describe the introduction of colour in this 
experiment, the girl with the concepts of colour has no experience of 
colour, I say she comes to enjoy the pre-conceptual experience of colour 
when the tomato enters the room, how do you describe what happens in terms 
of conceptual SQ alone? You can try to avoid the proposition the tomato 
enters the room as incoherent, but that is evasion at its worst is it not?


DMB: Oh, and I honestly have no idea what that first sentence of yours is 
supposed to mean.

DM: Evasion or stupidity, can't help you with either I am afraid, by the way 
I understand everything you have said, no evasion or pretend stupidity on my 
part.



DMB said:What reason does anyone have to think that static patterns are 
anything other than the concepts derived from experience?

DM: I give you pre-language babies recognise faces, please explain this with 
something better than pre-conceptual SQ. Sure once you get language and 
concepts there will dominate everything, but we need pre-conceptual SQ 
(prior to all SOM concepts too) to make sense of concepts I believe.

DMB said: They are called analogies, ghosts, static patterns, forms of this 
world, etc and in every case they are contrasted with reality, which is just 
pre-conceptual experience. That's why its called ever-changning, 
unpatterned, undivided, pre-intellectual, and Dynamic.

DM: I say yes pre-conceptual, yes dominated by flux and change, yes 
pre-intellectual, but there are SQ patterns here too in experience, look 
down at your hands, you have 2 the same, hard not to notice this before all 
language and concepts I'd suggest, sure this is sort of proto-conceptual, we 
have to recognise a link, a similarity between the 2 hands to have an SQ 
experience, but truly conceptual, I say no.


DMB: It's a radical shift in basic ontological assumptions and yet the idea 
is really quite simple.

DM: Problem is too simple and does not agree with experience, just look at 
all those fingers on your hand, pure SQ.


DMB said: Reality is not conceptual and concepts are not reality.


DM: Too much like idealism, I prefer concepts are a higher form of SQ, real 
but at a level above pre-conceptual SQ,
there is inanimate SQ, animate and living SQ, cultural and conceptual SQ, 
all real, some pre-conceptual and cultural,
some not.



Reality is flowing and undivided but words chop it up and concepts are 
divisions.


DM: Yes but two fingers together being experienced have a joined up pattern, 
they stand out in experience
due to their SQ, they stand out from the flux, we add further SQ to this 
with concepts and make the division
from the flux more fixed and abstract, but there is clearly an experience 
that is had prior to the move to
conceptualise and speak of these patterns.

The analytic knife cuts it up well or badly. And these divisions and 
categories are so well carved that we mistake them for reality itself. 
That's what SOM does to subjects and objects. That's what scientists do to 
gravity and causality. These dialectician don't know that these are just 
analogies and they don't know that everything is just an analogy.


DM: Your view suggests that we are capable of not spotting that we have 
hands, we might carve up experience and ignore the experiencial reality of 
similarity between hands, this is both laughable and is anti-realist 
absudity.

The MOQ is one giant anti-reification program. DQ reality isn't nothingness. 
It is no-thing-ness. Why? Because DQ is preconceptual and all "things" are 
concepts. It seems that you and Marsha want there to be DQ, sq, AND also 
things like tomatoes and wooden ships.


DM: No just DQ and SQ in immediate experience, obviously we go on to have 
concepts and names and call some patterns ships or tomatoes, we can then 
imagine that when we turn our
backs these patterns still exist, you seem to want to imagine they cease to 
exist when you turn your back to stick with idealist anti-realism, I also 
adopt a flat ontology of SQ so that all patterns are real at all levels to 
avoid naive materialism or physicalsim

That is some weird mixture wherein the metaphysics of substance is being 
blended with Pirsig's replacement for the metaphysics of substance.

DM: I agree please stop suggesting it is my view, stick to SQ and patterns 
please. Dropping the metaphysics of substance is so much wider than Pirsig, 
you should know this by now having been to school, please try to read more 
widely it would help you with promoting the MOQ

Again, the cure is confused with the disease and the MOQ's central terms are 
horribly misunderstood. Take this post as a rope ladder. I've made it fairly 
easy to climb out of the hole. Grab hold of it. See if it works.

DM: Evasion, false accusation, boring... I accept your view is not SOM is 
not dualist, I just challenge that all SQ is conceptual, how simple is that, 
please cut out the straw men, you can do better than this.

If you respond to this post, comment on the evidence. Ask about the 
evidence. Respond to the actual ideas presented in it. C'mon, that's how any 
normal conversation works. A simple declaration of one's likes and dislikes 
is not the same as exchanging views, giving reasons, presenting relevant 
evidence or otherwise discussing philosophical ideas. Obviously.

DM: Please practice what you preach for a change. If you only have evasion 
techniques or want to accuse me of incoherence, being illogical, supporting 
SOM again, please do not bother to reply, you are wasting your own time too. 
If you want to genuinely engage and offer a real argument about the 
advantages or disadvantages of the 2 different ideas about SQ I will be glad 
to hear from you and would hope to learn something, when you are at your 
best I do find you worth talking too, but not often enough. If you have good 
reasons I am open to persuasion. I also think you are right to look to 
elaborate and develop the MOQ beyond what is in Lila, and you have made 
really good progress to date, but on this one issue of banning 
pre-conceptual SQ, I think this is a bad step, and I can't even see why it 
is even a good idea or is necessary, I think a better opportunity lies in 
the direction of DQ with both pre-conceptual and conceptual SQ, this is what 
the SQ levels should cover. Of course this can be tested in the wider world 
and see which approach can make the most progress, of course maybe neither 
will.