From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jun 12 2005 - 21:29:58 BST
Bo,
Oh--my--god.
Is it just me, or are DMB, Paul, Anthony, and I all working together,
working the same side?
Who woulda' thunk?
Anyways, back to the details of our group effort:
Bo said:
Mind and everything aside, I saw this your post and at first glance took it
to be just another non-understanding one, only today did I study it and my
jaw dropped: Finally one who UNDERSTOOD
Matt:
I'm not so sure that I do. You're certainly right, understanding and
communication are the first steps to disagreement and criticism, but your
position seems still too obscure to me to be confident in my disagreement
while doing justice to your position.
A summary of the position that I believe all four of us stand in/with/as:
What we call "mind" is better refered to as a collection of static
intellectual patterns. A person does not _have_ intellectual patterns, we
_are_ intellectual patterns. A "person" is a particular amalgamation of
static intellectual patterns, the vast majority of which we share with other
people. Paul's DNA analogy is perfect for this: humans have almost entirely
identical DNA, though the smallest of the small particular variations is
what makes people unique. Likewise, language-users share almost all their
beliefs with other people (most of which are of the innocuous, boring kinds
like "Rocks are hard" and "The ground is under my feet"), but its the small
variations that make people distinguishable from each other. A visual way
to picture it is of a number of overlapping circles. Each circle
individually is a person, but most of each circle shares a space with all
the other circles. That shared space is "common sense." If we picture the
white space the circles enclose as static patterns, the gigantic web of
beliefs that counts as a "culture," then I think that gives a good portrayal
of Pirsig's patterned vision.
As I started saying, what we call "mind" used to refer to each enclosed
circle and it owned whatever it was that was inside it. With Pirsig's
patterned vision, however, it becomes much harder to apply the image of
ownership--there is so much that is shared. Not only that, but as DMB has
just argued, patterns come and go. Reading history will impress you with
the degree to which we have changed--of course, it could also just as easily
impress you with the degree to which we've stayed the same. To do justice
to the past, though, we need to note the little, tiny variations in our
culture's beliefs that have changed. And likewise for other cultures and
the differences between our's and their's. One of the beliefs that is in
the process of changing is the idea of a "mind." Historians will tell you
that we created the idea of a "mind" (some will even tell you it was the
philosophers' fault) to refer to something. Some philosophers nowadays want
to change what it refers to, or rather, change the belief structure around
which "mind" gets to refer to something. Pirsig is one of these. No longer
is the mind an irreducible substance that reflects the world, or is
impressed upon by the world like a blank clay tablet. These were
philosophical dead-ends. Pirsig wants us to picture the mind as a woven
tapestry of beliefs. And even better, he wants us to stop talking about
people having "minds" because that engenders the idea of being
self-enclosed, when instead we all take part in a common world.
So far I've run through (what I take to be) the common denominator of
Anthony, DMB, Paul, and my's recent arguments in the recent conversations
with Bo and Ham. The principle place where this turns into an argument
against Bo is when Anthony and I wonder where the MoQ exists, what it is.
As Anthony says, "if you retain SOL, I think you have to explain where the
MOQ (which is an intellectual map of reality) metaphysically fits within
itself." A kind of reply is when Bo says that, "A theory does not reside
anywhere within itself. Newton's Physics postulates a physical reality
subject to its laws, but is nowhere inside this reality. Thus the MOQ - or
the SOL interpretation of it - is nowhere inside the MOQ; it is the Quality
Reality!"
This is Bo sounding like an idealist, while trying to foist that label on
us. Bo does go on directly after that to say, "The S/O Metaphysics however
has such an enormous (gravity) pull that people automatically see thinking
as taking place in the mind of the mind/matter reality." So Bo clearly
doesn't want to be regarded as an idealist. But that leaves us with the
question that becomes more and more pressing--what is the MoQ? Bo answers
with a sharp divide between theory and reality, that a theory doesn't reside
within what it purports to describe. But this immediately becomes queer
looking when what we are talking about are general theories of reality. How
could it not contain itself and then claim to have described reality?
Newton's physics never had a problem with this because it didn't itself
purport to describe all of reality (maybe not historically true, but the
practice of physicists (a class subsequently created after Newton to
differentiate themselves from the "natural philosophers" they once were) has
never bothered to worry about what their theories are themselves). However,
it did cause a problem for _philosophers_ who wanted to use Newton and the
New Science as the platform for a new general theory of reality. These
philosophers became, eventually, known as logical positivists.
Logical positivism eventually fell into complete failure as a program
because of the exact problem Bo is facing: what is the theory itself?
Pirsig skips lightly over what actually brought down logical positivism as a
philosophical program (which isn't that big a deal because the remenants of
positivism still reside in our philosophical culture and they still need a
wider ranging critque, or really, alternative that Pirsig offers), but he
does (I think) knowingly allude to it. (I don't have Lila with me, mind
you, so I can't directly quote or refer.) At the beginning of one of the
earlier chapters of Lila, Pirsig begins by talking about the tests of truth.
Right after that, Pirsig announces that the MoQ not only passes the
logical positivists criteria truthfulness, it does better than logical
positivism. The key word Pirsig uses that alludes to the downfall of
positivism is "verifiability" (and its derivations). The logical
positivists, principally in A. J. Ayer's formulation of the Vienna Circle's
spin on something Wittgenstein said in passing in conversation (which, upon
seeing the Circle's spin, he denounced), said that the criteria of
meaningfulness is verifiability. If it can be verified, it is cognitively
meaningful. This is what they used to shunt religion, ethics, and art to
the side as "meaningless." However, the critique that was pressed on them
was: how is the principle of verifiability verified? Because it was quite
apparent that, from the positivists formulation of the principle, it
couldn't be. So the whole program of logical positivism as forwarding a
general theory of reality was shut down (for a number of other reasons,
also, mind you, but I think this was the first big push).
So, where/what is the SOL-MoQ? DMB, Paul, Anthony, and I do just fine by
first denying that a theory cannot contain itself. After all, what is a
theory but a string of words and anybody can look into a dictionary and find
that words contain themselves in an innocuous sense that we can handle. For
the four of us, the MoQ is an intellectual pattern. It is that particular
kind of intellectual pattern that principally refers to other intellectual
patterns, that kind of pattern we call "philosophy." But in your SOL-MoQ,
the SOL-MoQ itself seems to come to replace reality. But that doesn't seem
to make sense except as a kind of idealism. Not only that, but it should
remind us of Pirsig's snide comment about being handed a menu without any
food.
The problem that you are going to face, I think, is that it is perfectly and
logically sound and safe to make a distinction in levels between the MoQ and
the intellectual level/SOL. This would make the MoQ a fifth level.
Philosophers have always made this kind of move to guard themselves against
self-reference, but then they've always fallen towards infinite regress when
they do. None of this, however, is the problem. The problem is that each
distinction in level you make between what you are talking about and how you
are talking about it (which could go on forever) looks more and more like
the last one. And the more that happens, the more artificial the
distinction looks. The more artificial it looks, the more we are apt to
invoke economy of explanation to shut down the procedure. Philosophy prides
itself on explaining as much as it can in as short a space as possible. But
these twin imperatives breed the problems of self-reference (when you've not
explained enough) and infinite regress (when you're taking too much space to
explain). The idea of the pragmatist vision of philosophy, the vision that
Pirsig takes part in, is to balance the two directives to help the living of
life. One can push any philosophy hard enough to self-reference or to
infinite regress. The trick, though, is to get it to stop being useful.
I just have one other place that seems worth commenting on:
Matt said:
You say that the SOL is opposed to all this [idealism], but I have no idea
how. I could ask the same silly questions of you: what has SOL? Where does
it reside? But the whole point of Pirsig's formulations is to eliminate
these substances that "have" things. What I take Paul and I to be saying is
that when Pirsig dissolves the substances of yore (like mind and matter)
into static patterns, he's saying that "things" don't have these patterns,
all there is too _things_ are patterns. A "mind" doesn't have intellectual
patterns, all the mind is is a collection of static intellectual patterns.
Bo said:
Pirsig's rejecting "substance" was because it obviously doesn't meet the
requirements of "matter" (of yore). Only an inorganic level of VALUE can
explain its elusive quality.
...
"..substances of yore like mind and matter" ..?? Mind has no substance -
even of yore. The MOQ rejects the S/O (mind/matter) division as fundamental
and replaces it with its own Dynamic/Static one. And THEN the said static
patterns. It is this initial metaphysical about-turn that people passes too
lightly over.
Matt:
"Substance" is the word used by philosophers to denote something
irreducible. There have been many "substances" in history. One reason why
I sometimes suggest that Pirsig has unhelpfully conflated materialism with
SOM (which I take in a specifically epistemological way) is because of
Pirsig's passage about the dissolution of the substance platypus. I don't
think Pirsig hits that passage the way he should, but in particular it
misses the point that there have been many other bad substances that need a
different analysis than the one that he gave. He gave an analysis that is
specifically about materialism's substance, matter, (one that, I think, even
misses the heart of materialism) when he should have given a more general
dissolution of the notion of substance, i.e. of _anything_ being
irreducible--which is what he alludes to when he comments about "causation"
and "pre-conditional valuation."
So, in this analysis, the mind/matter dichotomy is just what it is _because_
both mind and matter are substances, both are irreducible to the other.
(And that was Descartes' fault.)
Matt
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