Dear John,
I owe you my reply, sorry for my delay. I had no time to read all the recent
posts, so sorry if I have missed something.
J:
> I hope you are not seeing me as a mystic.....
M:
Indeed, you are not a mystic: as well as everyone else here, you "yelp too
much about God" :-)
J:
> You challenge me as to whether I "achieve evidence without thought?"
> Actually this is a tricky question, as evidence seems to presuppose
thought.....
M:
well, I was kidding a bit. Seriously, ICBW, but the "thought without
evidence" charge to metaphysics seems to me more positivist than mystic.
Positivists hate speculations.
I don't know if metaphysics is really "thought without evidence". As you
point out, we should firstly agree on what evidence is. Anyway, is mysticism
a solution? I agree that "introducing thought is moulding [DQ] into static
quality", but IMO even evidence is, per se, static quality. A product of
thinking, sensing, feeling and so on. So, do the mystics achieve evidence? I
doubt that. So, either you consider evidence something important (and you
have to think, and bye bye mysticism), or you don't consider evidence
important, so why bother if metaphysics is without evidence? I guess that
from a mystic viewpoint even science is "just thought"...
J:
> As to the reality of words and systems, your example of Europe is
> helpful.... Arguing pragmatically, though, you or I might well have
> ideas about Europe that are able to be shown to be false.
M:
Indeed we all can easily agree that a statement about Europe is false
(example: There are no rivers in Europe) or that another statement is true
(Paris is in Europe). But it's a fact that the most interesting and dynamic
statements about reality are those we can't agree upon.
J:
> ... Your idea of Europe and my
> idea of Europe will certainly differ in detail, and putting them together
> will probably give a fuller picture of Europe than either alone, yet that
> does not mean that we cannot be wrong....
>... I do not see that putting all these and millions of other
> ideas together then defines the EU. That would just be a confused mess, a
> mass of contradictions.
M:
IMO it does not define Europe, but it is closer to what Europe is than any
single definition. More than a mass of contradictions, I'd call it a big
paradox. Actually all reality is paradoxical. We all are very rational and
intelligent, yet we don't agree on what Europe is. The diverse our history
and our angle, the diverse the result. We analyze and define, and create
maps, often contradicting each other... paradoxes, if you look at them as a
whole. Actually, the only paradox is that we are not able to create a
complete and coherent map of reality.
But, more than this, my point is that every statement about Europe is part
of Europe. What is the intellectual level of reality if not the total sum of
the statements about reality? With the result that talking about reality is
also creating and modifying reality.
J:
> But the point I am making is that a term like EU is
> not without ambiguity and as such its value is less immediate than the
> value of actual experience.
> You may not even be able to find a word to label your experience, yet it
can
> profoundly affect you. You can read thousands of words about a 'system'
like
> the EU and still be unsure of its value. But you will have no doubt about
> the value of sitting on a hot stove.
M:
The old famous hot stove. Well, firstly it is an immediate experience as it
affects directly our biology, so it calls for our response with no need of
any other more complex filter ("Nothing beats biology!" Bo once said).
Then, it is sort of the biologic version of the "false" statement above: its
low value is so sharp that we all agree we have to jump off the stove. Under
different more complex biological threats, we could have different
evaluations and responses.
J:
> The mystic asserts that all our words
> and systems are ultimately a bit like the EU, in that they are our
> creations, our fantasies, while some things are real beyond dispute.
Pirsig
> calls this reality quality. I argue for a more complex analysis, but I
> basically agree with him on this.
>
> So I am surprised when you say
>
> "The world we know... (pardon, experience :-) ) was not built by mystic
> atoms, genes, families and ideas. It was built (just to simplify) step by
> step by real genes upon real atoms; by real families upon real living
> beings; by real ideas upon real societies. Experiencing is just being part
> of the flow of interactions that is connecting all these "things"."
>
> You seem to be saying that the world, the map we make of our experience,
is
> real, and experience is "just" part of the interaction between these real
> things. This is not Pirsig's view, as I read him, and it is certainly not
> mine.
M:
Well, it is possible this is not Pirsig's view. I had already problems with
other MOQers on it, so maybe you are right. Actually, reading Pirsig's
comments to Lila's Child I find I have other problems with the "pure MOQ".
On the other hand, I can't find a better way to look at evolution. Let me
try this metaphor: we are walking inside the flow of a stormy river, and as
we are risking to drown we have to step setting our feet over the stones
settled down on the floor. We can't clearly see if there are stones under
the surface. We just see the flow is not perfectly regular here and there,
so we imagine there is something. And we hazard a step. We could be wrong,
and drown. Or we could be right, as there is something. It doesn't really
matter if it was a stone or not, the important thing is that it is solid
enough to allow another step. Sometime, we pick up a stone and cast it in
the water, just to set up the direction. Reality, the flow, is not purely
dynamism. The stones are part of the flow as well as the water. Every new
step is possible thanks to the immediate experience of the flow AND to the
past steps. And if we create stones, well, the only way to use them is to
make them part of the flow.
J:
> Experience is the dynamic fundamental reality. Atoms and such like
are
> the static quality derivatives from that experience that we use to talk
> about our world. They are, as Pirsig says, high quality descriptions, but
> they are not ultimate reality. The mystic asserts that ultimate reality is
> one, unified, whole; which we then cut into bits and label with words. Our
> words are one result of our attempt at making boundaries, and our using
> these to describe and control our world. A pragmatist would argue that are
> are valuable insofar as they are effective. But even our assessment of
> effectiveness is tied up in the boundaries we have created, and the mind
> sets that flow from these boundaries. The mystic argues that all words are
> ultimately less than real. Of course they are useful. Just as the idea of
> atoms is useful. But ask a physicist "What is an atom?" and you will not
get
> a description of 'reality', but a mathematical structure that works in
> certain predictive ways very effectively, but leaves out the bits that are
> most important to us. That is why so many of the greatest physicists of
the
> past century were 'mystics'. They clearly saw that the mathematics was not
> 'reality'. Or, in the old saying, 'the map is not the terrain'.
>
> So I am saying your 'real reality', from which you can take bits to make a
> 'new reality', is technically a fantasy. The only reality that is not
> fantasy is our immediate experience of 'quality'. The trouble with the
realm
> of the intellect is that the apparent quality of ideas etc is only as good
> as the ideas. Like a computer; garbage in, garbage out. People have died
for
> ideas that most of us would now think crazy. These fantasies can get
really
> serious.
M:
I think you have the answer. If people die for them, it's hard to state they
are fantasies. When they get serious, they are real. I agree that an atom is
a mathematical structure, but the inhabitants of Hiroshima died thanks to a
mathematical structure. We also can cure cancer thanks to a mathematical
structure. When we discuss the morality of nuclear technology, we discuss
the real possible effects of a mathematical structure. Could be that the map
is not the terrain. IMO, it becomes anyway the new terrain.
thanks for reading, and sorry again for the delay.
Marco
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