Hi Platt, 3WD, and others,
Sorry for the delay, but I had some car trouble this past week.
GLENN:
He says science should be subservient to social morality, and
unless you can find more examples in Lila, it is the only one he
cites that goes against the grain of the moral hierarchy between
the social and intellectual levels. This in itself is telling.
PLATT: (Gave a number of examples to show science not
subservient to society.)
Actually if you look over the examples you gave you'll see they are
of intellectual patterns that aren't about science (human rights) or
are very general in nature and don't mention science.
GLENN:
No, I was asking for cases the other way round. Perhaps you
misread my paragraph above?
PLATT:
Here’s another:
PIRSIG:
The Metaphysics of Quality says that science’s empirical rejection
of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is
also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science
are of a higher evolutionary order than the old biological and
social patterns. (Lila, Chap. 29)
He doesn't mean this entirely. He doesn't like it when science rejects
social values if those social values are rejecting biological values.
To do this is not morally justifiable. This is why he thinks science is
on the side of criminals. Of everything that constitutes the intellectual
level, apparently only science is guilty of this type of infraction.
GLENN:
He thinks science is undermining social morals, and according to
the MOQ, you can go against the grain of the moral hierarchy in
cases where a higher level undermines a lower level. I thought we
agreed on this.
PLATT:
To say “science is undermining social morals” is correct. But
“undermining” and going “against the grain” is not the same as
being “subservient to.”
I stand corrected. Subservient is too strong.
PLATT:
What Pirsig objects to is the use of science’s intellectual pattern in
social matters because the scientific pattern rejects morals. It
rejects morals for good reason, as Pirsig explains:
PIRSIG:
This opposition of levels of static patterns offers a good
explanation of why science in the past has rejected what it has
called "values." The "values" it has rejected are static social
prejudices and static biological emotions. When social patterns
such as religion are mixed in with the scientific method, and when
biological emotions are mixed in with the scientific method these
"values" are properly considered a source of corruption of the
scientific method. Science, it is said should be "value free," and if
these were the only kind of values the statement would be true.
However, the Metaphysics of Quality observes that these two kinds
of values are lower on the evolutionary ladder than the intellectual
pattern of science. Science rejects them to set free its own higher
intellectual pattern. The Metaphysics of Quality calls this a correct
moral judgment by science. (SODV paper)
Except for hypothesis making, scientific methodology is objective, and
scientific data and conclusions are published in a morally neutral and
emotionless style, regardless of the scientist's personal opinions on the
matter. Science doesn't "reject" morals, period. This misleading
characterization of science is troubling; or this characterization is made
out of ignorance, which is almost unbelievable, considering Pirsig was
trained as a chemist.
Here Pirsig is saying that science can reject a static social prejudice
like original sin, and is morally justified because original sin is a
static social pattern, a church value at a lower level. Now, if a scientist
ever published this conclusion, and I don't care if the scientist is a
physicist or an anthropologist, he would be roundly and rightly censured
to the extent his career would be jeopardized. In fact I've never heard of
such a thing happening.
In Pirsig's SODV quote above, the first and second sentences are incorrect.
His third sentence is correct only if it bears no relation to the second
one. He is clearly mixing up the notion of science being "value-free" in
its methodology, with science rejecting values as a scientific conclusion.
One doesn't follow from the other.
PLATT:
Should the scientific intellectual pattern retreat from the study of
man and restrict itself to studying rocks and jellyfish? Pirsig’s
answer is Yes and No—Yes if science is going to stick to its
assumption that reality consists solely of measurable substances
and forces, but No if science recognizes reality as patterns of
value. Here’s how Pirsig put it:
PIRSIG:
If science is a study of substances and their relationships, then
the field of cultural anthropology is a scientific absurdity. In terms
of substance there is no such thing as a culture. It has no mass,
no energy. No scientific laboratory instrument has ever been
devised that can distinguish a culture from a nonculture. But if
science is a study of stable patterns of value, then cultural
anthropology becomes a supremely scientific field. A culture can
be defined as a network of social patterns of value. As the Values
Project anthropologist Kluckhohn had said, patterns of value are
the essence of what an anthropologist studies. (Lila, Chap. 8)
Pirsig is suggesting something ridiculous here - that a social science
like anthropology really *is* a study of substance like physics is. His
interpretation of SOM says it must be, but his interpretation is wrong.
Pirsig says Boas started the problem in anthropology by only allowing
dry facts and figures to be published, effectively suffocating the
discipline. If this characterization is accurate, I agree. He also says
Boas influence continues to this day. This is probably true to some extent,
but now some middle ground has most certainly been reached. My guess is
the good parts about objective methodology were preserved, but
allowances have been made to develop an hypothesis about a culture's values
and then defend that hypothesis by a careful examination of the data. The
data itself may require an understanding of cultural values, and this is
also permitted by today's standards. If the Inca study and NY Times article
are any indication, cultural studies are no longer hamstrung as they
presumably were 80 years ago.
GLENN:
I'm trying to develop a motive for his attacks on science, since the
attacks don't make sense to me.
PLATT:
In spite of all the quotes I’ve cited, I guess there’s no convincing
you that Pirsig isn’t out to destroy science. His attacks (if you want
to call them that) are aimed at the use of the scientific pattern of
amoral objectivity to study, change or organize society.
Communism and socialism are examples of social orders
dominated by the scientific intellectual pattern.
I never said Pirsig was out to destroy science. What I've said is he's out
to "discredit science enough to allow for explanations of reality that are
unscientific."
GLENN:
Getting back to Margaret Mead - Pirsig isn't really blaming her as
much as the amoral science she stands for. He thinks she came
to this conclusion (free sex is OK here, so it's OK there) because
she thought her scientific facts proved it, but how could she have
thought that? *Maybe* her facts show free sex works in Samoa,
but how can she say they work in America, a completely different
culture? If she bases her science on the precepts of cultural
relativism, she can't be making this statement with the authority of
her school of science. She must have known that she was
speaking her own beliefs here, not ones arrived at by objective
evidence. So, if she were acting like a proper amoral scientist, she
would have kept her mouth shut and kept her personal beliefs to
herself. The blame falls on her, not amoral science.
PLATT:
Nowhere can I find in Lila or elsewhere that Margaret Mead said
any of things you attribute to her. I haven’t read “Coming of Age in
Samoa” but I doubt if Mead said anything about free sex being OK
there so it’s OK here, nor did Pirsig say she arrived at such an
“amoral” conclusion.
Look in the middle of Ch. 22.
GLENN:
What I'm after are specific examples of how science and
scientists are responsible for the moral decay in the 20th century.
The only one I can find is the Margaret Mead citation. Usually an
argument is based on a preponderance of specific examples
which are all in support of a general conclusion.
PLATT:
Reread Chapters 4 and 24. And again, keep in mind it isn’t
science and scientists who are responsible for the moral decay
but the materialist, subject-object intellectual pattern when it is
applied to societies.
Why should I think it *isn't* science or scientists who are responsible for
the moral decay when the the words "science" and "scientific
intellectual pattern" appear over and over in the book? I'm sorry, Platt,
but this kind of back-peddling says there is something phony going on
here. 3WD says I'm missing the big picture, that the SOM culture has
persisted for 2500 years. It's very difficult to defend an SOM that is not
of your definition, and over so much history, and whose influence is said
to be imbued in the collective consciousness.
But Pirsig is not complaining so much about the 2400 years that preceded
Armistice day. Indeed, he's clear that science has been the problem since
then. I've heard this kind of retreat to SOM many times before, and it's
just a slippery tactic as far as I'm concerned. It always comes back to
science.
PLATT:
You seem to believe that Pirsig hates science and that the MOQ is
a thinly disguised screed against science and scientists.
I think he's deeply conflicted about science, and that a part of him hates
it. I know you disagree strongly about this, but I believe I'm correct. I
wouldn't call MOQ a screed, not by any means. Lila is, on the contrary, a
very lively book with many interesting ideas.
Lila is about a lot of things, but I do agree that Lila is a thinly veiled
treatise against science. It's also a thinly disguised treatise *for*
mysticism. It's no accident these two themes are in the same book and in
opposition, and it's also no accident they are both thinly veiled.
More than anything, Pirsig wanted Lila to be viewed seriously by his ZMM
critics, and he bent over backwards to present his ideas in a mainstream
fashion. Pirsig was hoping to hit the big time in academic circles:
PIRSIG: (Ch. 26)
James is usually considered a very solid mainstream American philosopher,
whereas Phaedrus's first book had often been described as a "cult" book.
He had a feeling the people who used that term *wished* it was a cult
book and would go away like a cult book, perhaps because it was
interfering with some philosophological cultism of their own. But if
philosophologists were willing to accept the idea that the MOQ is an off-
shoot of James's work, then that "cult" charge was shattered. And this was
good political news in a field where politics is a big factor.
But it didn't work out that way. Lila is *more* the cult book than ZMM, and
this website, and particularly its members, are testimony to that. The
sentiment against orthodox science and the beliefs entrusted in what is
often labeled pseudo-science and even the occult run right under the
surface at MOQ.org. People here take their cues from Pirsig and don't
discuss their beliefs openly, prefering a kind of coded language that
speaks of "expanded reality".
GLENN:
Can you cite where scientists "claim" only material things are
real? Do scientists claim that logic, mathematics, art and music,
cultural values, pain, morals, love, patriotism, awe, jealousy, etc
are not real? Scientists don't study these things because they're
too hard to study, not because they're unreal.
PLATT:
Many scientists claim only material things are real and that all that
other stuff is illusory or an “epiphenomena.” This “prevailing
wisdom” has been described by Daniel C. Dennett, director of
cognitive studies at Tufts University, in his book “Consciousness
Explained.”
I read this book some years back and I was left with the impression
that Dennett was more than a materialist - he was a determinist. In
other words, his claim was that free will is an illusion. I don't think
all materialist would believe this in light of modern physics and chaos
theory.
DENNETT:
The idea of mind as distinct from the brain, composed not of
ordinary matter, but of some other, special kind of stuff, is
dualism, and it is deservedly in disrepute today. The prevailing
wisdom, variously expressed and argued for, is materialism: there
is only one sort of stuff, namely matter – the physical stuff of
physics, chemistry and physiology – and the mind is somehow
nothing but a physical phenomenon. According to the
materialists, we can (in principal) account for every mental
phenomenon using the same physic principles, laws, and raw
materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift,
photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition and growth. It is one of the
main burdens of this book to explain consciousness without
every giving in to the siren song of dualism.
There's no denying that his claim is arrogant, and even though his claim
is made in principal, you can't help thinking that he thinks his proof
is right around the corner. It's not. He's extremely optimistic and I
really wonder if he appreciates the magnitude of work before him and the
breakthroughs required to realize his claim.
I'm not a philosopher so I'm weak when it comes to the definition of
philosophical schools like materialism, but the way Pirsig makes it
sound, a materialist believes a culture, for example, is like a possession
he keeps in his trouser pockets - that is, close to his biological
self - because materialists only believe in substance. This is a
strange analogy and I don't buy it. People who have not been introduced
to the ideas of MOQ think about culture as something "out there", just
as MOQers believe.
I don't understand your complaint about epiphenomena. If I understand the
evolutionary aspect of MOQ properly, society or culture evolved from
human biological patterns (people), and so culture is epiphenomenal in
MOQ as well. The real difference seems to be a matter of stress.
MOQers want people to consciously believe that a culture is more "real",
more "out there", and more independent than they've previously allowed.
Pirsig stresses that a level may have started out as an extension of the
previous level, but then it broke out to be its own thing, with its own
purposes. If this is his way of getting around being "epiphenomenal", it's
subtle, and requires the levels themselves to take on a kind of reality
beyond the model of reality for which they were originally intended.
Based on your definition above, I would have to say I fall into the
materialist camp. This sounds like a shocking thing to admit but it's
only shocking if you believe I think as an SOMer. In fact, I thought along
many of the same lines as MOQ even before I read Lila. The biggest
difference I have with MOQ is I'm not ready to accept DQ as an undefined
"something" that creates everything.
PLATT:
Now it’s up to you to cite a contradictory source. As for the things
you mentioned being “too hard” for science to study, they wouldn’t
be if they studied them as patterns of value instead of patterns of
substance.
Perhaps, but I'm doubtful. I'd be interested in seeing how an MOQ-based
science would study pain, for example, and remain supremely scientific.
I'm not talking about a rehash of the hot stove passage, but a theory about
pain that would have impressive explanatory power and be falsifiable. Or
how about a theory of intelligence, since this seems relevant to knowing
whether a person can "see" beyond the social level?
GLENN:
You are puzzled because you think my views insist a disconnect
must exist. You are puzzled because you believe SOM, as Pirsig
defines it, accurately models the current state of beliefs, including
my own and those of scientists. I'm arguing it doesn't.
PLATT:
Pirisig defines SOM as the belief that “everything has to be an
extension of matter.” Can you support your argument by citing
sources that say scientists believe otherwise?
There are scientists I could cite who believe otherwise, but I cannot cite
a source contradicting this as the prevailing view. I agree it is the
prevailing view.
The key word here is "extension". There are many things that are not
material, such as emotions and numbers, that most people say are real. That
some of these are epiphenomenal or a figment, as Pinker would say about
color awareness, should not be that bothersome. People have evolved in
special ways to perceive reality, in particular to the features of reality
found on planet Earth, and even if some of these are deemed subjective,
these are real enough so long as there is consensus for them.
Pirsig takes a very strict stance on this view and refuses to say that
SOM's extensions or epiphenomena are real. While all the MOQ patterns of
value in all the levels are also epiphenomenal (from DQ at least), Pirsig
says these patterns *are* real. This difference in treatment about what is
and is not real allows him to overstate his case against SOM.
PLATT (previous post)
Perhaps you can explain what the difference is between saying all
things are forms of energy and all things are forms of Quality. How
does the data change?
GLENN:
Energy and dynamic quality are not comparable. Energy is a
quantifiable concept. It appears in equations of physical theory. It
has properties and types, as you say. Dynamic quality has none of
these. It is undefined. At the subatomic level it is not found. If my
understanding of MOQ is correct, it would say DQ is a precursor of
energy and in fact creates it. At the subatomic level DQ is faith,
simple and pure.
PLATT:
You misread what I said. I didn’t compare energy to dynamic
quality. I asked what’s the difference between forms of energy and
forms of Quality. In the MOQ, energy is explained as an inorganic
pattern of value, a form of Quality. You can quantify patterns at that
level, apply equations, specify properties and the rest. The data
doesn’t change in the MOQ.
Am I ignorant of a convention here? If you use the word "Quality" alone
does this always mean static quality? Does capitalization signify anything?
The reason I didn't think you meant static quality was because in this case
the difference between energy and an inorganic pov is only linguistic.
Their equivalence is true by definition and so is not open to argument.
PLATT:
I believe you’re correct in stating that DQ (dynamic quality) is the
precursor of energy and in fact created it. If you reject that as just a
matter of faith, perhaps you can explain what did create energy?
Science says energy can neither be created or destroyed, an
expression of pure faith in an eternal, infinite being which, though
called energy by scientists, might as well, by their own description,
be called God. Have you another view?
Scientists don't consider energy an expression of pure faith or an infinite
being like God, as you say.
Your question about what created energy is a different matter. Some
scientists would say God, for sure. Some remain non-committal. Now, this
business about being non-committal allows you to leave your options open
in case a better explanation comes along. The danger about proposing
teleogical explanations for things is that strong beliefs in these
explanations have the effect of closing off areas to scientific
investigation.
An example of such a teleological explanation is DQ. Another one is
morphogenetic fields, a theory proposed by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake
to explain the problem of morphogenesis in biology. This is the mystery of
how cells in a developing fetus, which all start out the same with
identical genetic material, differentiate so that some cells become eye
cells, others toenail cells, etc. Sheldrake's idea is that the information
that tells the cells how and when to differentiate is not contained in the
cell, but in a specialized field that pervades space, that contains a
memory of information about the species. Like a telly, the organism tunes
into the morphogenetic field for 'programming', and in so doing even
reinforces the field and strengthens the habits and attributes of the
species as a whole. The morphogenetic field explains much more than
morphogenesis, however, but also the habits and behaviors of species for
which Darwinian explanations were a stretch.
Biologists were furious with him, because if his idea took hold, it would
close the book on much of embryology and perhaps larger chunks of biology,
and scientific learning in these areas would be seriously crippled or even
cease. On top of this, biologists have a hard time attacking his theory,
because it is unfalsifiable. Essentially, Sheldrake has turned his back on
science. He's written a string of popular books, at least one of which,
The Rebirth of Nature, attacks mechanistic science mercilessly. His writing
is quite good and he seems to make a compelling case at least on a first
reading. His latest book is about doggie telepathy.
Platt, if you've yet to discover Sheldrake, I imagine his ideas would very
much appeal to you.
Glenn
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