Hi Glenn, Hamish, Peter and all:
Glenn, thanks for another thoughtful post. Well worth waiting for.
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)
GLENN:
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.
I see your point, although you exaggerate in saying Pirsig thinks
science is on the side of criminals. When science looks at the
universe, it doesn’t see any morals. With scientific objectivity as
your guide, you try to remain neutral regarding criminal behavior,
secure in the knowledge that what is considered a crime in one
culture may be celebrated in another.
GLENN:
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. . . . 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.
You’ve put your finger on the problem: value-free methodology.
You take that outlook and apply it to social behavior and you get
the prevailing wisdom of today, neatly summed up in the single
word you hear frequently among young people: “whatever”--
accompanied by a nonchalant shrug. Maybe we can agree that the
“attitude” of a scientist in looking at scientific experimental data is
nonjudgmental or morally neutral. I think it’s this attitude, required
of the scientific method, that Pirsig sees as spilling over into
everyday life and causing problems. Certainly the ideal of the
reporters of news is to be “objective,” and the siren song of
business is “let’s look at this objectively.” I’ve never heard the term
“objective” disparaged by intellectuals. Even post-modernists who
insist there are no objective “facts” believe their conclusions are
reached objectively. (That they ignore the paradox never ceases to
amuse me.)
GLENN: (Speaking of anthropology.)
The data itself may require an understanding of cultural values,
and this is also permitted by today's standards.
Agree. In social science circles, one is permitted to “understand”
cultural values, but woe unto the anthropologist who says U.S
culture is morally superior to the headhunting culture of Bora-
Bora. It is precisely this scientific taboo against making moral
judgments that has seeped into general thought patterns of
Westerners and, according to Pirsig, accounts for a widespread
decline in moral standards. So long as “objectivity” prevails as the
intellectual holy grail, there’s no way to break the grip of
“whateverism.”
GLENN:
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."
This appears to bolster my statement in a previous post that
“scientists have become the high priests of our age, telling us
what and what not to believe.” Aren’t you implying that only
science can explain reality? You seem to say that nonscientific
explanations are intellectually out of bounds.
I can agree with your statement if you limit reality to the material
world of physics and biology, Pirsig’s first two levels. But you’ve
been arguing all along that scientists, like everybody else,
consider “logic, mathematics, art and music, cultural values, pain,
morals, love, patriotism, awe, jealousy, etc.” just as real as the
material world and that they “don’t study these things because
they’re too hard to study, not because they’re unreal.” So here we
have a lot of real stuff that science can’t study and can’t explain.
Are we then to shrug our shoulders and admit that any explanation
of these things is as good as any other and therefore all are
equally worthless? If one doesn’t allow for explanations that are
unscientific, such a conclusion seems inevitable.
GLENN:
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.
GLENN:
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".
Well, you’re much better at reading minds and ascribing motives
to people than me. Speaking for myself, I’m no mystic, though at
times I wish I had the discipline to have the mystic experience.
Long ago I concluded I would never have the discipline to master
mathematics so I could have the experience of understanding
super-string theory or the discipline of bio-chemistry so I could
have the experience of inventing a new life-saving drug. But I like
to think that I’m open to ideas from all sides and find in the
Metaphysics of Quality a degree of explanatory power that is
lacking from what I know about science, philosophy and religion.
Admittedly there is a certain “cult” aspect to the MOQ since there’s
only one leading advocate at the moment (though hardly
charismatic) accompanied by a scattering of disciples. But that in
itself doesn’t nullify the validity of Pirsig’s views. Thankfully, truth is
not a matter of mere popularity.
GLENN:
The biggest difference I have with MOQ is I'm not ready to accept
DQ as an undefined "something" that creates everything.
HAMISH
Well, in that last sentence, you'll find many a MOQer in agreement
with you.
Here’s at least one MOQer who buys the assumption that DQ
creates everything. Without that basic building block, the whole
structure of the MOQ collapses.
Generally speaking, all explanations of reality, including scientific
explanations, begin with one or more assumptions that can’t be
empirically verified. I’m not ready to accept science’s beginning
assumption that everything is created by chance from quantum
soup. As I’ve said before, it stretches credulity to believe that mind
resulted from mindless shuffling of primordial slime. By
comparison, life after death appears infinitely reasonable.
PLATT: (previous post)
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.
GLENN:
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 convention is that using “Quality” alone signifies undivided
experience prior to any form of conceptual elaboration. Quality is
what exists before splitting pure experience into parts, as Pirsig
explains:
PIRSIG:
What he had seen is that there is a metaphysical box that sits
above these two boxes (referring to subjects and objects). Quality
itself. . . . And once he’d seen this he also saw a huge number of
ways in which Quality can be divided. Subjects and objects are
just one of the ways. . . . There already is a metaphysics of
Quality. A subject-object metaphysics is in fact a metaphysics in
which the first division of Quality—the first slice of undivided
experience—is into subjects and objects. . . . Phaedrus finally
abandoned this classic-romantic split as a choice for a primary
division of the Metaphysics of Quality. . . . After many months of
thinking about it, he was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic
good and static good, which became the basic division of his
emerging Metaphysics of Quality. (Lila, Chap.9)
Quality is the box above the split, a “separate category” that
contains within itself both Dynamic and static quality. You might
define Quality as that which exists prior to lines, frames and
boundaries that the mind imposes on experience as required by
rational thought. In the MOQ, static patterns are thought-induced
forms of Quality, just as there are thought-induced forms (electric,
kinetic, magnetic) of the all-embracing abstraction, “Energy.”
Science says reality is all energy which leaves a lot of experience
unexplained. Pirsig says reality is all quality which, at least for me,
explains a lot more without relying on messages from a state of
mystic transcendence.
GLENN:
The danger about proposing teleological explanations for things
is that strong beliefs in these explanations have the effect of
closing off areas to scientific investigation.
Wouldn’t you agree that a strong belief in ANY explanation of how
things get created closes off scientific investigation, including the
strong scientific belief that creation of the universe happened by
accident?
GLENN:
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
writingis 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.
I’ve read about Sheldrake and was initially quite taken with his
ideas of “memory fields.” But since then I’ve become quite
suspicious of “fields” in general because they seem to be very
fashionable in scientific circles these days. I guess it got started
with Bohr’s quantum fields, then it went to Pribrams’s holographic
fields, Bohm’s implicate fields, and the latest (at least that I’m
aware of) from Steve Brand (referred to by Peter Lennox), who
says all is software and “Even though photons of light and
subatomic particles are rather different from ripples and
whirlpools, in an important way they are the same: each is a
disturbance in a field or fields (magnetic, electrical or Olympic-
sized), which persists through propagation.”
So undefined, mysterious “fields” keep popping up all over in
current scientific literature, which makes me wary. Likewise I’m
suspicious of systems theory, chaos theory, meme theory, and
any other theory that finds its way into cocktail party conversations
or college bull sessions. There are fashions in science that come
and go just as in other disciplines. I’m skeptical of them all, as I
am of pop psychology and New Age divinations.
Which is why I enjoy our exchange, Glenn. Your skepticism of the
MOQ is refreshing on this site.
Platt
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