LS Re: Pirsig's present

From: Keith A. Gillette (kgillette@austin.rr.com)
Date: Fri May 21 1999 - 06:20:59 BST


Ken,

Thanks for your response! Let me try to clarify the view I tried to advance
in my last post by contrasting it to what I take to be your view. (Please
correct me if I'm misrepresenting your ideas.)

In your posts you use the word 'universe' a lot. This is obviously an
important part of your understanding of the Metaphysics of Quality. When
you use the word 'universe', I take you to mean the physical universe as
presented to us through the eyes of science. That is, the universe of
matter and energy governed by the strong and weak nuclear forces,
electromagnetism, and gravity. A universe that started 12 billion years ago
with a big bang and has seen the birth of stars forming countless galaxies,
planets orbiting those stars, and on at least one of those planets, the
evolution of life and of recent note, sentient beings.

I have no argument with this picture of the world. I happen to have great
faith in it myself. I think it's the best idea of how things are that
exists. However, and I think this is where you and I disagree, I believe
that it is an idea only, not a bare fact. It is a story we tell to explain
this thing we have called experience.

Before you jump in to argue with what probably looks like my 'idealism'
here, allow me to go on a bit further. You characterized our difference of
viewpoint differently:

At 2:23 PM -0500 05/20/1999, Clark wrote:
> Before we get into the details I believe I see where our major difference
>lies. You seem to be saying that the universe would not exist without
>sentience. That our existence was required before the universe could have
>any material qualities. Alternatively, it could be that you are saying that
>the universe existed but could have no reality for us without the
>intervention of Dynamic Quality. If the second is the case then we are both
>arguing for the existence of Quality from the beginning.

I wouldn't characterize my view of Quality either of those ways. The point
I was trying to make in my last post was an epistemological one--a
statement about what we can know. I take no position on the ontological
question of whether the universe existed before sentient humans could
perceive it other than what I said above: Our best explanation of our
experience indicates that this is so. It makes great sense that something
led up to my existence as a perceiving being. However, I can't KNOW that
with any certainty. In my previous post, I tried to argue for why I believe
we can't know that. I'll try to apply that reasoning here to try to explain
that view further.

In your last sentence above you use the phrase the "existence of Quality
from the beginning". I believe that in this statement you are implicitly
asserting the factual existence of an objective, physical, historical,
universe. My question is: How do you KNOW that the physical universe as we
currently conceive it (quarks and gluons, billions of years of evolution
and all) exists?

That's the central question for me. How do you *know* something exists?
Stop and let that hang in your mind for a while. If it works on you as it
does on me, it'll drive you more crazy than my last post did.

Before you have to undergo the electroshock therapy, though, let me try to
give what I believe to be Pirsig's answer. Pirsig is a good empiricist so
his answer is that we can only know things through experience. "The
Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims
that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking
about what the senses provide." (*Lila*, Ch.8). We know what is presented
to our senses.

But Pirsig is not an ordinary empiricist. He's a very thorough and
puritanical empiricist from what I gather and the Metaphysics of Quality is
not just any empiricism, it's a continuation of William James' *radical
empiricism*. I believe this is important to note because James' empiricism
is focused on the present moment. James' empircism takes as its starting
point "the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later
reflection with its conceptual categories." (*Lila*, Ch.29)

So what we can truly know is not just experience but immediate experience.
If we look at this 'immediate flux', this "cutting edge of reality" (*ZMM*,
Ch.20, *Lila*, Ch.9,11) closely enough we find some startling things.
First, we note that it is completely devoid of the subjects and objects we
normally talk about in everyday conversation. These 'objects', like chairs
and books and trees, Pirsig argues, are concepts that appear *after* the
primary perception. They are not *in* the perception we have, but rather
are *inferred* from the perception. This is the key point and deserves
attention. Pirsig explains his theory of perception in *ZMM* as follows:

"This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective
world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn't mean
it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time,
before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of
nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can't
be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and
between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time
lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant, But there's no
justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant-none
whatsoever." (*ZMM*, Ch.20)

So in the present instant I look out and see something. It's dark at the
base and juts upward in strong dark vertical vertical lines and then
explodes in a flurry of green. I call it a tree. But is that 'tree' really
out there? Sure seems like it. But there's not 'tree' in my perception.
There's only 'brown' and 'green' and some rustling noises. Where's the
connection? Where is the tree independent of my judgement of it as a tree?
Nowhere, I argue. Yes, there is *something* 'out there'. But it is
"something, I know not what." That's all we can say with certainty about
it. Otherwise, as to the actual reality of the thing itself, we must answer
"mu".

Now I know when I say stuff like that it sounds like I'm saying:
>Keith says that the universe only exists in the NOW, the present instant.

And in a sense, I am, but not in the sense intended by Ken here. What I am
saying is that our only source of certain knowledge is in the NOW when we
have direct experience. That's what Pirsig is arguing. All of our ideas
about the universe come from our experience at each moment.

Looking at this moment of perception is important because it was the
starting point for Pirsig's MOQ. His whole metaphysics is built around the
'Copernican Revolution' presented here. Subjects and objects don't create
experience, rather they are *deduced* from experience. I have this
perception right now of some patterns of 'brown' and 'green' and 'blue'.
What's going on? Well, I (subject) am seeing a tree (object) against a blue
sky (object). Sounds good. But how do I know that's a tree? How do I know
this is 'me'? Because I experience it. But what do I experience? I don't
experience 'a tree' in its entirety. I experience some brown and some green
and so on and deduce both the tree and myself from that.

And then when I ask what a tree is I find out that it's a herbaceous life
form. And what I ask what a life is I find out that it's a complex of
hierarchically arranged, self-replicating molecules, generated through
millions of years of random selection. And when I ask what molecules are I
find that they're bonded atoms which have been created in the hearts of
stars billions of years in the past. And when I ...

But do I know any of that with certainty? All I know with certainty is my
direct experience in the present moment. Have I experienced any of that
other stuff? Have I experienced the big bang and the great expansion and
the cooling of the universe and the forming of the stars and the
manufacturing of the atoms and the coalescing of planets and the evolution
of life? No. I've deduced all of these events from an instant of experience
and the simultaneous memory of what seem to be previous moments and
thoughts. I don't know any of that with certainty. I don't know *anything*
with certainty. But 'me' and that 'tree' and this 'universe' sure sound
good. That's why they form our *best explanation* of experience.

It's such a good explanation that we forget where it came from. It came
from an attempt to explain this thing called experience we're having every
instant. That's the starting point for knowledge. That's what this
'universe' we talk about as having existing for billions of years is meant
to explain: Why I'm seeing these particular patterns right now. We
*believe* the 'universe', as an 'external entity', came temporally prior to
us and our present experience but all we can *know* for certain is that
it's the best explanation we have right now for our experience and it was
deduced after that experience. Of the universe itself??? "Mu."

Well, like Ken, I now feel like I've argued this ad nauseum and without
much great success in getting the point across. To top it off, I haven't
made any advances since the last post on the implications of this radical
empiricist viewpoint for the static/Dynamic split. Perhaps the lesson there
is that our differences of opinion and understanding go back even further
than that basic split. Until next time ...

Cheers,
Keith

______________________________________________________________________
Keith A. Gillette <http://detling.dorm.org/gillette/>

MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jan 17 2002 - 13:08:44 GMT