[MD] SOM is what?

[John Carl]

David,

I accept Mr Burgess's assertions but do not see the relation his essay has
to my point - the giant works according to SOM rules.  We find this as
fact; now I wonder if this is of necessity.  That is, a comprehensive
social organization MUST operate according to subject/object metaphysics.

If so, we here are largely "kicking against the pricks" (Acts 9:5) of
inevitability.  I would appreciate your thoughts on this issue.

John


On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 10:55 AM, david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> ----------------------------------
> 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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