ROG JUMPS IN WITH THE MARCO/ELEPHANT DISCUSSION
ELEPHANT:
> Your commitment to the materialist idea of static
> patterns out there is extraordinarily strong - although
> this is not, perhaps, extraordinary in this culture.
MARCO:
I will start from your point that the *outside* reality is dynamic,
while *inside* the world is static.
ROG:
I reject this split. In and out are static divisions as well...probably the
primary static split. I don't think Elephant was suggesting this division, I
think he was suggesting it as a common materialist view. I better let him
speak for himself though.
MARCO:
You offer (and Roger seems to agree completely) that the fence between
*inside* and *outside* is dividing all what's intellectual (the
concepts) and all what's not intellectual (the Dynamic reality).
ROG:
William James explains how direct experience can be "taken twice." Certain
aggregations of experience can be taken to refer to "external reality" and
other combinations of experience as internal states. In "Does Consciousness
Exist? he writes that ..."pure experience...act in one context as objects and
in another context figure as mental states." He goes on to write that (like
Pirsig's learning baby) we learn to trace lines in the "chaos of experiences"
to form both "the inner history of a person" and an "impersonal 'objective'
world." Both are static concepts derived from pure experience. ( 3WD care to
add anything?)
MARCO:
According to this vision, language is in some way on the door and
introduces the dynamic perceived reality into the realm of concepts. So
language, you state, precedes all the world: the static world of
concepts is built by language.
ROG:
I think that all living things simplify and extract meaningful patterns from
reality. Language just takes it to a new level and allows conceptual
labeling and sharing. I could be wrong though.
Elephant:
> So there's an essence of seagull that is a functional reality,
> and as a conception held in a mans head, a static
> entity in a net of language. That's the essence. Then along
> flies a birdy thing fitting the description. Wallop: existence.
> Essence precedes existence.
MARCO:
And all what's *outside* is dynamic and flowing. All what's *inside* is
static.
ROG:
No, pure experience precedes the division. Let me jump ahead now......
MARCO:
Given that we could agree on the staticity of what's *inside*, what
about the *outside*? This staticity does not explain why and how my
concepts, as soon as I create them, can't stay still more than one
millisecond and run *outside* to interact with the dynamic world. If
this is the Dynamic/static split, it doesn't tell me a lot about what's
*outside*, therefore I need something else to understand the *outside*.
ROG:
All this "in" and "out" confuses the issue. "Concepts" and "rocks" are both
static patterns assigned to reality/pure experience. We can assign one as
"in" and one as "out," but they are both our divisions of reality. (The
concept of a concept is of course recursive)
MARCO:
So, what about the *outside*? Are we sure that it can be fixated only in
concepts? Where does it come from the distinction between "this cat" and
"this dog"? Is it merely an inter-subjective agreement we reach for when
we share and build together our respective *inside* concepts?
ROG:
I think that seeing a medium-size discrete mammal pattern is an evolved
skill. Animals that couldn't recognize this set of experiences as a living
potential enemy, mate or food source would not have much chance of staying
alive. Again, Pirsig explains how babies learn to develop this innate ability
and how it spreads into the shared mythos in Chapter 9.
MARCO:
In one question: is the *outside* completely dynamic and flowing?
ROG:
Reality/Pure Experience is dynamic and flowing. This precedes the in/out
distinction though.
Jumping ahead again.....
MARCO:
Not diversely by concepts, these social protocols have been created to
manage the flow. While concepts are built upon language within the
intellectual environment, there must be something the social environment
uses to build its "protocols" upon.
ROG:
The protocols are derived from reality. We share Billions of years of common
-- in fact identical -- evolutionary history with each other. Consider the
metaphor that every living human is just a recent spin-off from a common
past. Every human's history merges and becomes one within less than a
hundred thousand years. Add a common social environment to our common
biological background, and it is no wonder we tend to make the same common
distinctions from reality.
MARCO:
Dear Roger, I agree with you when you state that the concept of the rock
is created. I agree with you that the concept of "static pattern of
value" has been created by R.M.Pirsig.
In your famous "stand and be counted" (September 99 on MF) post you
asked:
> 1) Are all patterns of value also intellectual patterns?
I answered: "YES, everything we are talking about is also an
intellectual pattern". You asked ALSO, and we were in agreement. But if
the question is: "Are all patterns of value only intellectual
patterns?", my answer must necessarily be NO.
> 2) Were the 4 levels of the MOQ discovered or created?
I answered: "Created, by R. M. Pirsig. Just like gravity law, by
Newton". That is: the Newton law describes gravitation. The phenomenon
of gravitation is a static inorganic pattern of value, and Newton has
created an intellectual pattern to explain it. RMP has created the four
levels, but it does not mean at all that the four levels exist only in
our concepts.
ROG:
Sure it does. The concept of the levels is a concept. It is as simple as
that. Of course, the levels refer to reality, which is not a concept.
Reality really is real. Really!
To go back to James' Radical Empiricism, certain aggregations of
experience/reality can be taken to refer to each of the levels. We can agree
on these distinctions and label them.
MARCO:
Tell me: what kind of value is the "value that holds together a glass?"
A dynamic value or a static value? IMO the most sensible answer is that
it is a static pattern of value, and that this static value is not in
our concepts.
ROG:
In other words as in Ch 8 in the section that starts by his stating that
"substance is a derived concept," Mr P. writes: "Why do our experiences act
as if they inhere in something? If you pick up a glass of water why don't the
properties of that glass go flying off in different directions? ... That is
the question that created the concept of substance in the first place."
After the above quote he goes on to point out the benefits of associating the
derived concept of stable patterns of value with other "areas of experience."
My answer is that 'glass" and "substance and "stable patterns of value" are
all derived concepts that explain certain aspects of reality. The benefits
of shifting from SOM terminology to MOQ terminology is the metaphysical
consistency and enhanced understanding that can be gained that then allows us
to see the platypi in our prior conceptual divisions.
MARCO:
Of course you can offer thousands of answers, but my
answer is IMO the most simple and sticking to the common experience.
And IMO it does not contradict the MOQ. I could offer a lot of
quotations from Lila and SODaV to support my opinion, ...
ROG:
I think that once Pirsig creates the dynamic and static split that he uses it
in several different ways. He definitely does use it as a metaphor for those
aspects of reality that are static conceptualizations of
dynamicness/creativeness/versatileness. In other words, he is guilty (in his
own words) of attempting "to capture the Dynamic within a static pattern."
He chides himself for this in the middle of the last chapter. By this I
assume he is suggesting that if we choose to repeat this mistake, that we do
it cautiously and with full awareness.
MARCO:
Let me just say that it is true that seen from our Western SOMish
tradition, the MOQ seems very "similar to the similar to the Cittamatra
tradition in Buddhism which asserts that entities exist within the flow
of perceptions but not as independent external objects". But also it is
true that RMP ran away from India as it was impossible to accept in toto
such a vision of reality. So I guess that seen from a traditional
Eastern viewpoint, the MOQ is "very similar to the Western tradition of
empiricism". The point is IMO that the four levels of reality he
describes is something different either from Buddhism and from SOM.
ROG:
His evolutionary metaphysics/morality levels is a unique twist. However, I
would say it is overlaid on a synthesis of the basic division of reality
shared by the radical empiricists, the Zen Philosophers and process/event
philosophers such as Whitehead. But I am not a philosopher, so I could very
well be wrong. (Hell, if I WAS a philosopher I very well could be wrong!)
Let me know if I make any sense and help me see the errors of my ways.
Rog
PS -- A metaphysical map may be quite awkward in Football, and hamster sex is
a topic that I shy away from.
PPS -- Let me end with a quote from chapter 8...."..the patterns are NOT the
reality they describe." (Emphasis Pirsig's)
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