[MD] Static Patterns Rock!

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to Andre:
The static world is not an illusion, the static world is like an illusion. They [the atomic bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki] were/are as conventionally real, as "real as rocks and trees". 


Andre said to Marsha:
Ah, you're in the Lucy mode again: my question still stands: 'Do you believe that the atomic bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory?'


Marsha re-re-replied to Andre:
I answered your last question: The atomic bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were/are as conditionally real, as "real as rocks and trees". That's it. Bye.


dmb says:
You know for sure that it's going to be a thrilling and fruitful conversation if Marsha is involved in it. Yep, you can bank on it and set your watch to it. 

It's amazing how often she posts these kinds of assertions about what's illusory, hypothetical, conventional without ever once saying what that actually means. You know why? Because she has no idea what she's saying. She's just repeated phrases and slogans like a parrot or a broken record. If there was any thought or content behind the words, she'd be happy to share it. All you'll ever from Marsha are contradictory word salads, new age platitudes and empty slogans.
 The Metaphysics of Quality says "it is absolutely morally bad" when "society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes"  and "it is absolutely morally good" when that same society "represses biological freedom for its own purposes". "These moral bads and goods are not just 'customs'," Pirsig says, "They are as real as rocks and trees." The MOQ also says that moral reasonableness and human rights "have not just a sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis. They are essential to the evolution of a higher level of life from a lower level of life. They are for real."

These claims involve the biological, social, and intellectual levels of static patterns but the inorganic patterns get a similar treatment in the MOQ. We were recently talking about the status of "objects" in the MOQ. The short answer is that objects are "a complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience". The early development of a baby is used to illustrate this. When a baby is several months old "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.  …In this way static patterns of value become the universe of distinguishable things. Elementary static distinctions ..grow into enormously complex patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation to generation as the mythos, the culture in which we live.”  (Lila p.119)

Static patterns grow from the ground up, so to speak, so that the whole static world is "derived from primary experience". This is what it means to say that "Quality is the source and substance of everything". (ZAMM) This is what it means to say that "Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." (ZAMM) That's what it means to say that "Quality is the generator of the mythos." (ZAMM) The objects reached for are not primary realities but they are derived from and agree with that complex bundle of "sensations and boundaries and desires". They are derived from the "force of Dynamic Quality", from the "flow of perceptions".  Since the two main categories in the MOQ are concepts (sq) and reality (DQ), I think this is a fairly important point, one that  Marsha and DM totally fail to grasp. "Every last bit of it" goes right over their heads.  

“The Metaphysics of Quality agrees with scientific realism that these inorganic patterns are completely real, ...but it says that this reality is ultimately a deduction made in the first months of an infant's life and supported by the culture in which the infant grows up.” SODV 

Pirsig says inorganic patterns "are completely real". He says human rights and moral reasonableness are "for real" and "essential" to evolution. He says the moral goods and bads that distinguish social values from intellectual values are "as real as rocks and trees". This is Pirsig applying the term "real" to the whole world of static patterns, to all of the analogies we've created. And the MOQ itself is a set of static patterns. "Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that".

We have seen how David Morey wants realism. He wants some static patterns to be more than just analogies and so he wants to give primary ontological status to the taste of bananas or the hardness of rocks. And we've seen how Marsha wants everything to dissolve into a kind of anti-realism wherein everything is an illusion and "conventional" truths are construed as clouds of reified falsity - or whatever. But this is really just two half-baked versions of SOM philosophies, philosophies that still cling to the appearance-reality distinction, with David's being a kind of objective realism and Marsha's being a kind of solipsistic subjectivism. The MOQ is neither of those things.

Basically, Pirsig and James are saying that appearance is all the reality we'll ever get. What real in the primary sense is experience itself, not some supposed "stuff" that causes experience, not the conditions that make experience possible but just experience as such. Phenomenal reality IS reality and the whole world of static patterns is derived from that primary empirical reality. That's what makes static patterns "real" and that's what keeps our truths from being any old arbitrary opinion. This is a very robust form of empiricism that claims no ultimate or final truth but it's very good at eliminating nonsense and bullshit. And that's really all you want from a theory of truth, all you really need to get from epistemological standards. A conventional truth is much less grandiose than all those capital "T" kinds of truth, like Plato's fix and eternal truth or the one and only objective truth of scientific materialism but it is still the kind "truth" we can use to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas, from lies and nonsense and propaganda and bullshit and all the things we don't want or find morally objectionable.

And that is why, I suppose, Andre posed the question the way he did. Marsha's assertions about the static world being "like an illusion" should raise moral objections, I think, and it totally makes sense that Andre would frame his question with the use of atomic weapons and the holocaust. The question becomes, "in what sense is the murder of millions of innocents like an illusion"? Saying this is as conventionally real as rocks and trees is unhelpful as an explanation, of course, and the emotional coldness is more than a little disturbing. I mean, Pirsig is referring to social and intellectual values in that quote. Those moral codes are "as real as rocks and trees". Why is morality so strangely absent from the scene, even when question so obviously involves morality? I think it's very creepy.