[MD] Why does Pirsig write everybody's right about mind and matter although his theses imply the opposite?

[Horse]

Hi Folks
This came through from Dave Buchanan but got messed up by the mail server:

On 24/10/2016 13:35, david wrote:
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >
 > Tuukka said to dmb:
 > I find it possible to interpret your reply within a subjective or
 > objective framework. Furthermore, according to the primary empirical
 > reality I experience there's nothing else I can do with your message
 > that would be useful. But you state that I'd render your reply unreal by
 > doing so. I don't wish to render your reply unreal, so I'm compelled not
 > to address the rest of your message.
 >
 >
  dmb says:

The inconsistency that you think you've found in the MOQ is, I think, a 
product of your own misconceptions and misunderstandings. Basically, 
you're trying to understand the MOQ from within the framework that it 
rejects. The questions and problems that you think you've discovered all 
pivot around subjectivity and objectivity, idealism and materialism, 
mind and matter. These are all features of SOM and they cannot be 
reconciled with each other within that SOM framework - but of course the 
MOQ isn't supposed to fit into that framework.

  Think of it this way. The idealists or subjectivists reject the 
primacy of matter or objectivity. The MOQ also rejects the primacy of 
matter or objectivity. In that respect, the MOQ agrees with idealism. 
BUT the materialist or objectivists reject the primacy of mind or 
subjectivity and the MOQ rejects that too. In that sense, the MOQ agrees 
with materialism. Because the MOQ rejects BOTH, it can agree with the 
critiques that idealist and materialist throw at each other. The MOQ 
says they both make the mistake of taking either subjects or objects as 
primary but the MOQ says they are both secondary and that NEITHER of 
them is primary. In the MOQ, subjects and objects are not real. They are 
concepts derived from Quality, from Pure Experience.

  Hear me now and believe me later. 😉

“The second of James’ two main systems of philosophy, which he said was 
independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant 
that subjects and objects were not the starting point of experience. 
Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from 
something more fundamental which he described as ‘the immediate flux of 
life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its 
conceptual categories’. In this basic flux of experience, the 
distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness 
and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged 
in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be either 
physical or psychical: It logically precedes this distinction” (Pirsig 
1991, 364-5).

-- 


"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Bob Moorehead


---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus