[MD] SOM is what?

[david]

In a different thread...

John said to Arlo:
SOM is a social pattern.

...successful intellectual patterns are those that are chosen by a majority of a group.  An intellectual pattern that resides in the head of one person, dies quickly and is forgotton, so there has to be a society for intellect to happen as much as there have to be biological beings in order to make up a society. When a society has evolved out of a chosen (at some earlier time) set of metaphysical premises, it gets labeled by the premises it follows - thus our social system is SOM because that's its king.

...SOM is a Western European evolved construct, with so much intellect woven into it's social patterns which has given it power over objects. ...You have to bow down to the powerful subjects with objective power - they rule.


dmb says:
I think that doesn't make much sense, John.
The following article does a pretty good job of explaining subject-object metaphysics and its role in Modern Western philosophy - and it does so without even mentioning Pirsig or pragmatism. It's freshly pressed and mercifully short. I hope you read it and I sincerely hope it helps.

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Kant’s idea that one can never see what the world is really like “underneath” the phenomenological world we are in, whilst a great departure, is still minimally in the tradition of the Empiricists before him: it still had a veil of perception model. His world was still a bit like the world of Hume, were we had a subject receiving bits of information – it’s just that Kant gave us a way in his Transcendental Subject of preserving objectivity, causality and so on across this series. He gave an account of how experience can be structured objectively and reliably.
This system still has certain minimal metaphysical commitments: there is a subject, there are things in themselves (which we might call objects), and there is the symptomal phenomenal which we have direct contact with. There is still what we call a subject-object distinction. An “out there” that becomes an “in here”. A world that enters a mind.
This model is explicitly rejected by early 20th Century continental philosophers in the Husserl-Heidegger-Sartre lineage. For these figures, there is no God or external world pumping the mind with information through the senses; the world is just the world, and we should infer things about it using the phenomenological method. We should make no global assumptions about where it “comes from,” but just treat it as it is: as we are in it. Of course scientific ideas about the brain and so on are perfectly consistently with this (though the account varies considerably among Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre).
Further to this line of reasoning, we might even get rid of the transcendental subject and just say the world is already as part of its being, structured and meaningful (the Hiedeggerian insight). It isn’t in a mind being processed for us: concepts, beliefs, knowledge, rules, goals, and so on – features of conscious reflection are not the prima faschie way in which the world is.
To motivate this starling conclusion, let’s take a few examples and begin from the Husserlian point-of-view, that is, phenomenologically.
When I arrive in a room, and reflect, finding myself in it, do I have memories of turning the door handle to get in? Do I remember walking here, that is, putting one foot in front of another? No. Yet these things are historically necessary to connect the memories I do have – memories of being in a place before this room and now being here.
Let’s be more immediate: When I’m typing quickly on a keyboard, am I representing the keys in my mind, forming beliefs about them and acting on these beliefs? Is, in other words, my engagement with the keyboard mediated through my consciousness, through mental representations of what’s going on? No. However, were a key to break – or become stuck – suddenly I would engage with the key in this fashion: I would create models of what’s going on (“it’s broken,” “it’s sticky,” etc.) I would respond to these models based on conscious reasoning.
What is the state of the world before these kinds of problems are introduced: before the door handle sticks, or they keyboard breaks? It is a kind of flow – a “being in the zone” – in which there is no self as such. The world is just moving seamlessly my body and the world are responding to one another in an unmediated way – I’m not “loading the world” into consciousness. When things break in fact, I really have no memory of being in this flow and have to form retrospective beliefs about what was happening.
This pre-reflective moment has a characteristic which we might call transparency. Things in the world do not show up as things, as objects about which to form models/beliefs, etc. They are transparent.
The classic example of the first, is a hammer. A hammer, phenomenologically speaking (of course!) – does not show up to us as merely a piece of wood and metal. One can relate to it as a piece of wood and metal, but that’s not the immediate nature of its being. Compare here a piece of wood laying about on a floor, with the very same piece of wood placed in a doorway – it becomes transformed from something much more like a material or substance (“wood”) into a piece of equipment (“something used”). These two modes of being which Heidegger calls present-to-hand and ready-to-hand are quite useful in clarifying the “phenomenology of scientific realism” – that is, precisely what is going on when a realist goes about making claims about atoms. He sees very well that there’s a door in front of him but nevertheless insists that it’s just wood, or worse, strings of hydrocarbons. This is because the realist is always inclined, upon reflection, to opt to relate to things as substances (present-to-hand).
-Michael Burgess

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