From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Wed Jun 15 2005 - 14:44:07 BST
Matt et al,
Matt said (to Bo):
A summary of the position that I believe all four of us [Matt, Paul, Ant,
and DMB] 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.
Scott:
I've said this sort of thing myself at one time, but it doesn't work. It is,
in fact, the Theravadin view of the self, which Nagarjuna challenged. It
doesn't work because it ignores the continuity over the set of static
intellectual patterns (also, it leaves unsettled where to locate the source
of new patterns). So while it doesn't make sense to call the self a
container of the set of static patterns, it also doesn't make sense to say
the self *is* the set of static patterns. When I wake up in the morning, I
need to "place" myself, that is, remember where I am, what I have to today,
possibly even my name. All of these are beliefs, but they make no sense
without the setting called "me". Now this is what Rorty would call an
intuition that, in his opinion, we should get rid of, but while I agree that
the intuition that this 'setting called "me"' should not be assumed to be an
independent thing (a container, for example), it is also not the beliefs
that are gathered. In short, it is one of the poles of a contradictory
identity (the other being the beliefs). Each is not the other, but each
constitutes the other. What you four (and Pirsig) are doing is taking one
pole of a polarity as true, making the other pole "just an appearance", and
that fails.
This error arises in the MOQ because of Pirsig's conflation of the
mind/matter meaning of S/O (S/)[1]) with the intentionality meaning (what I
call S/O[2]). The first can be dissolved because all the S[1] can be treated
as O[2]. But S[2] is still left dangling, which is why the MOQ, and
materialist pragmatism, are inadequate and incoherent.
- Scott
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