From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Sun Jun 19 2005 - 17:01:57 BST
Hi Matt ...Mike?
On 16 June Matt Kundert wrote:
> No, Bo, I just don't think you are reading me right. "Mind" may be
> part of the "mind/matter dualism," but I don't think "'mind'"
> necessarily is. Philosophers use scare quotes when (among other
> things) they want to warn people that the term contained is one they
> don't want to use, are about to deconstruct, and/or about to
> redescribe. When philosophers find problematic terms that contain
> deep-seated intuitions and that they want to make less problematic,
> they redescribe the term to get rid of the problems, which does one of
> two things to the intuitions: recommends we get rid of them because we
> can live without them or recommends we can keep them without the
> accompanied problems. As I said to Scott a day ago, I do think there
> is something about the "mind" that needs keeping, roughly the sense of
> what makes us individual, continuous persons.
About a need for the "mind". Yes, and the MOQ keeps it as its
highest static value; the mind/matter duality. If this don't suffice
see later.
> For instance, I wrote
> out my entire response to you two days ago, but do to a computer
> glitch, lost the whole thing. What I'm writing now is a pale
> reflection of my original response, but the continuity between the two
> is there. What I wrote existed somewhere and its continuity between
> there and here is in what we vulgarly call the "mind" and is what
> Pirsigians call a static intellectual pattern.
I agree, but one point though. "What Pirsigeans call a static
pattern". Maybe the Pirsigeans, but a MOQist would stress that
the mind/matter dualism is intellect. Mind alone is something
else. In a recent post to Platt I tried to outline how the notion of a
such an entity came to be. See later.
> Unless you want to toss out that notion completely, which I currently
> can't imagine is possible, you need to use "mind" (as a placeholder
> for those intuitions you're keeping) in your process of redescription
> or else you won't be able to make the translation work because there
> will be no reference to the old intuitions. When you keep on like
> this, Bo, calling everybody who even mentions the word "mind" a
> subjectivist, it just makes me think more and more that DMB is right,
> that you're just mistakenly reading everybody as a subjectivist
> already.
I'm reading those who talk like subjectivists as subjectivists. I will
eventually try to address Paul (again) about the "common sense"
issue. DMB has gone fishing.
> The issue at hand is what _you_ translate "mind" into in the SOL-MoQ,
> because presumably that would provide the clue as to where the SOL-MoQ
> is "contained."
> Bo said:
> If anything uttered by language are ideas, we certainly are idealists
> and idealism rules, but even the most rabid idealists shies this
> linguistic "black hole" and postulate something that language reflects
> ...which makes idealism part of the SOM - or of the intellectual
> level!
> Matt:
> I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but it is certainly not
> the case that (all) idealists postulate that language reflects
> something. Its the exact point of idealism that there's very little
> use in saying that language or ideas reflect anything because we'd
> never know what it is because all we have are the reflections
> (language/ideas).
>
> Bo said:
> ... I don't postulate "a sharp divide" between a metaphysics and
> reality. I say that the MOQ is the Quality Reality. Look. SOM was
> the S/O reality and the first move by Pirsig was to point to it, split
> it from reality, and the first reactions (from the few who noticed)
> were to deny a SOM ...which proves my point: it WAS reality itself.
> The S/O reality.
Matt:
If I understand your reasoning about the SOL-MoQ, it looks something
like this: SOM used to be the truth of us. We used to exist in the
SOM-Reality. But the creation of the MoQ has made it possible to move from one
reality, the SOM-Reality, to another, the Quality-Reality. When making that
switch, from SOM-Reality to Quality-Reality, we are literally entering a
new reality. That new reality is the SOL-MoQ. The SOL-MoQ is simply
short-hand for all the machinations we make in our reality, the
Quality-Reality, and the SOL-MoQ is the correct
interpretation of our new reality.
I had to indent this because this is just spot on. I could not have
formulated it better myself (in my own language)
> The question I will continue to press is, "What is the SOL-MoQ? Where
> is it?" Why would I press it if I just answered it with, "'Where'
> isn't the right word because the SOL-MoQ is everywhere because it is
> everything, all of reality"? Well, you first answered it by saying
> that a "theory does not reside anywhere within itself," which I said
> doesn't make any sense when the theory in question is a theory of
> reality. You then claim that you don't make any "sharp divide" betwen
> theory and reality, which looks like a repeal of your first response,
> but makes sense of your earlier remarks that "a theory changes the
> element of reality it treats" and that because the MoQ is a general
> theory of reality it "consequently changes EVERYTHING." But if you
> take back your first response, that SOL-MoQ doesn't have to be
> "contained" in your picture of reality because theories don't contain
> themselves, how does that make sense if your theory of reality is
> about all of reality? Wouldn't that include theories? If the SOL-MoQ
> is reality, is the Quality-Reality, the new reality we live in having
> transcended or replaced the SOM-Reality, why wouldn't it contain
> itself?
Why this harping on where things are? As earlier shown the S/O
metaphysics wasn't bothered with this question because on-one
knew of any SOM. Now that it is "demasked", if we turn to it and
ask where it is within itself. Well, what would you suggest?
> In effect, what are you doing right now, writing the words you do,
> thinking about the MoQ, arguing for your interpretation of the correct
> reality, the SOL-MoQ? What are you doing, what is being created? You
> can't be arguing for reality itself, as a whole, because reality
> doesn't need your help. Reality does just fine existing without your
> help. What you're trying to do is change our reality, our
> interpretation of reality. But how are you doing it? You seem to
> have disarmed yourself.
As said I earlier outlined to Platt how the notion of an realm
called mind developed (where symbols - in the silent language
called 'thoughts' - are manipulated) as different from a world out
there. The neural RAM "cache" where all creatures (above some
level) can store experience (and re-assess it as images) was -
with the coming of language - invaded by it. By the development
sketched this developed into "thoughts" and the idea of a mind
and by and by a metaphysics of two realms.
This capacity originating in biology is what is behind "intelligence"
(the ability to learn and adapt to new challenges) and what most
people of this discussion identifies with Q-intellect (sorry to say
Pirsig too) and have created this infernal mess of the great MOQ.
If you now ask " Is it here that all theories including the MOQ
are?" ...be my guest. It's the same as asking if they are "in"
language. We better drop that.
> I said that our (the current coalition of, as I would call us,
> pragmatist sympathizers) answer was that the MoQ is an intellectual
> pattern. You replied that "if Pirsig's container logic is valid it is
> grossly violated here." You're absolutely right, but part of our move
> is a repeal of this "container logic." That logic is dead wrong. It
> doesn't make sense and I've argued against it before. All we need is
> the claim that the MoQ is a better intellectual pattern than SOM. And
> so when it comes time to describe what we are doing when we are
> arguing for the MoQ over SOM, we can say that we are battling an
> outmoded intellectual pattern. But it doesn't look like you can say
> that. In fact, it doesn't look like you can say you can argue for the
> MoQ at all. It would appear that the switch from the SOM-Reality to
> the Quality-Reality is just something that mysteriously occurs,
> because to argue would be to use intellectual patterns, and
> intellectual patterns are the Subject-Object Logic.
Firstly, how could ANY level escape take place? As pointed to in
LILA, the inorganic conditions forbids life (even in SOM it's a
mystery) MOQ unites creation and evolution by postulating a
relentless dynamic urge to escape ALL static latches. Admittedly
the MOQ is not a level, but it is definitely "out of intellect"
(because intellect was S/OM.) and show all level struggle
characteristics with it. So if MOQ's postulates are accepted I very
well can argue for it's "mysteriously occurrence".
I can't see the how your "battling an outmoded intellectual
pattern" removes the container logical bend. It's what creates it!
The MOQ contains the static hierarchy of which intellect is a sub-
set and can't well be a sub-set of intellect.
> The one move I see that is left to you if you go on in this fashion is
> to argue that the Quality-Reality is the reality that was always
> sitting behind SOM, its just that we didn't know it until now. Pirsig
> showed us that Quality "contains" SOM, thus preserving the "container
> logic."
Newton's Physics moulded physics in its pattern, not least the
past as the formation of stars and the galaxies (not in Newton's
time however) was explained by its laws. Thus the MOQ moulds
absolutely everything and now we see the quality reality as
always been "sitting behind the S/O reality".
> But to go this route you'd have to not only repeal the
> theory/reality divide, you'd also have to repeal the idea that Pirsig
> _changed_ reality, because now he didn't--he discovered it. We were
> always living in a Quality-Reality, we just didn't know it.
Didn't we - from the intellectual level - look back on the social
level with this attitude? They really lived in a subject/object
(scientifically explicable reality) but were too ignorant to know?
> Going
> this route, however, also commits you to the same problems of thinking
> of the MoQ as a fifth level that you'd repealed even earlier. The
> four levels are "surrounded" by the Quality-Reality, by the SOL-MoQ,
> but with the logic of discovery at work, with discovering that the
> Quality-Reality was the true reality sitting behind the SOM-Reality
> (which would have been true had it not claimed to be the True
> Reality), it commits you to an ascension paradigm, where we ascend
> beyond the SOM (which was right in its way) to the MoQ (which is more
> right).
Yes, I dropped the 5th. level because of the impossible static
quality pattern-patterns it invoked) but as said, the MOQ shows
the level-struggle characteristic versus intellect. Also the "joining
forces with your enemy's enemy) is present as its affinity for
social value (that angered the critics who reviewed LILA). It also
explains why social value (Aretê) was discovered as value itself
in ZMM.
> In the end, I'm not sure what is left. When I run through the
> possible directions of your argument, I either come up with the above
> dead-ends or end up pushing the SOL-MoQ into a position where any
> disagreement between what you are saying and what we are saying is
> pretty much verbal and uninteresting. So, what is the SOL-MoQ, what
> is it you are doing when you propound it, what are you arguing _for_?
> Not an intellectual pattern...so what?
We are at the end of our respective tethers now. These last
questions of yours are answered earlier. But again I must thank
you for your willingness to explore the SOL to its source, never
ever before have I seen it laid out so perfectly. What a relief!
And anyone who hasn't dropped his/her "common sense"
because Pirsig seemingly has rejected the SOL interpretation will
see that it is the MOQ.
Yours ever more impressed
Bo
PS
> Bo said unrelatedly:
> Can you Matt show me anyone referring to a subject/object metaphysics,
> I mean in the sense of it having an origin and maybe a exit?
> Matt:
> Yeah, quite a few. I think it incredibly and dangerously naive to
> think that Pirsig is the only one to do anything like this. Scott's
> examples are people like Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit), Coleridge
> (?), and Barfield (Saving the Appearances). My favorites currently
> are Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature), Jeffery Stout (The
> Flight from Authority), Stephen Toulmin (Cosmopolis), Richard
> Bernstein (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism), Bernard Yack (The
> Longing for Total Revolution), and Susan Neiman (Evil in Modern
> Thought), to name a few. One of Sam's favorites, in addition to
> Toulmin, is Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue). One of DMB's favorites
> is Ken Wilber. And there are more: Jurgen Habermas (The Philosophical
> Discourse of Modernity), Michel Foucault (The Order of Things),
> Jacques Derrida (Of Grammatology). And some older ones: Nietzsche
> (Beyond Good and Evil), Heidegger (Being and Time), Dewey (The Quest
> for Certainty).
I turned to my "Philosophy History" when Scott mentioned Hegel,
but nowhere did I find anything resembling Pirsig's pin-pointing a
SOM. I don't require the exact terms, but an emergence in time is
necessary - as well as an exit. But again you may provide some
material. Wilber?? I have never really liked the spiritual quality of
his "static" hierarchy and have a feeling that the MOQ would
become trivialized by a comparison. Barfield possibly, his
participation scheme fits but Scott is just making it difficult on
insisting that Pirsig must adjust to Barfield's premises.
> Not all of these people agree. But they are all, in my estimation,
> working the same vineyard. I went on to a lengthier discussion of the
> very idea of Pirsig's "radical originality," but I'm not sure it is
> needed. It roughly revolves around that idea that, if Pirsig really
> was as radical as some people say he is, nobody would understand him.
> We would simply think he were unintelligibly insane. I think Pirsig
> would agree, what with his idea of "to step out of the mythos is to go
> insane."
Insane or not, to step out of a level's "mythos" is necessary to see
it's outline and a greater reality. Now that Pirsig pioneered that we
can do the same without much fear
> For us to even understand him, and then to even agree, our
> entire philosophical culture is far enough along the track to throw
> out SOM
If I understand you, modern physics has by now undermined
SOM. Yes, but this quantum mysticism does not help without a
complete overhaul like the MOQ.
that we should see others ready to give it up, too. Others
> like Barfield, Rorty, MacIntyre, Wilber, etc., etc.
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