[MD] Annotations to LC

[david]

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Tuukka said:

"Idealism states that "mind precedes matter" but materialism states that "matter precedes mind". Pirsig's MOQ states both are true. But they contradict each other. So, how do we know when should we believe in materialism and when should we believe in idealism? The only answer that can be logically inferred from Pirsig's writings is that when we believe in bad ideas that are true we may believe in idealism, and when we believe in good ideas we may believe in materialism. I think that's a weird answer."


dmb says:

Yes, that would be a very weird answer. Fortunately, that is not Pirsig's answer at all. I think you'll have to let go of a series of misconceptions and confusions if you want to see the MOQ's answer. One of the misunderstandings in this particular comment is the idea that we believe in materialism on some occasions and believe in idealism on other occasions, as if you can only have one or the other at the same time. This is very far away from anything Pirsig is saying.

The idea is that the conflict between the two schools is resolved by embedding both of them in a larger system and the MOQ is that larger system. Think of the way Kant combined Hume's empiricism with his own idealism. The MOQ is somewhat similar in the way it combines both schools. For Kant, there is an objective reality of things-in-themselves that are held to be a cause of our experience, like materialism says, BUT we can never perceive them directly. Our perceptions, according to Kant, are filtered and shaped by the categories of the mind. These categories are innate and exist prior to experience so that our reality begins with mind, as idealism says.

The MOQ differs from Kant in at least two important ways. 1) There are no things-in-themselves. For Kant, this unknowable realm is considered necessary in order to explain the resistances and restraints that we know empirically, i.e. rocks are real because it hurts when I stub my toe on them. But in the MOQ, we simply say that these empirical restraints are known in experience and experience is what reality is made of, not objects or minds. 2) In the MOQ, the categories of the mind are not innate but culturally constructed by our ancestors and inherited by all of us as we acquire language. They were constructed on the basis of experience by our ancestors and so they aren't really prior to experience. And for the same reasons, these mental categories evolve over time.

"In a materialist system mind has no reality because it is not material," Pirsig says, and "in an idealist system matter has no reality because it is just an idea. The acceptance of one meant the rejection of the other." In other words, they seem to be mutually exclusive IF one is operating within SOM. But in the MOQ, Pirsig says, "both mind and matter are levels of value" so that they are "descriptions of coexisting levels of a larger reality". As he says in Lila, "they are not two mysterious universes that go floating around in the same subject-object dream that allows no real contact with one another. They have a matter-of-fact evolutionary relationship. That evolutionary relationship is also a moral one". That's how the MOQ resolves the relationship between subjects and objects, between mind and matter, "by embedding them all in a larger system of understanding".

The mind-body problem is resolved by this enlarged context in the same way. They have an evolutionary relationship so that the mind grows directly out of the biological level. Although we don't hear anything explicit about it from Pirsig's work, this kind of evolutionary connection between body and mind has appeared in a new theory of mind called "embodied cognition" or the "embodied mind". This is an interdisciplinary field that includes linguistics, neurology, psychology and philosophy. As I have mentioned before, the philosophers used for support in this new theory of mind include William James and John Dewey. Even further, it is their emphasis on the qualitative dimension of immediate experience that really makes the theory work. In other words, Quality is central to a new picture of the mind in which cognition begins at the biological level. You don't have to sit on a hot stove to test this idea.


I'm sure there are still plenty more misconceptions to untangle but this is already long enough. Some other day, maybe.


Thanks,

dmb



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