From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Sat Sep 06 2003 - 22:32:02 BST
Hi Matt
Good man, I am completely happy with the position you are now taking to
physicalsim, it is in the corner where it belongs. Yes it does imply without
purpose. This is a useful approach because I think purpose implies a dynamic
situation and
maths and science has trouble with dynamic situations where dynamic means
open to different possibilities, what Prigogine
is getting at when he says 'the possible is richer than the real' and where
we have to turn to the sort of probability maths that Einstein did not like.
You can keep using physicalism when you want, I am not going to use it. For
the same reason I am happy with metaphysics whilst you are not. I am happy
to keep using it even though I reject the notion of substance. But I if
anyone pushes me towards the corner I will drop it before I get there. I
like the idea of hanging on to it because I am currently
an advocate of Ontological Phenomenology. So if you want ontology you've got
metaphysics. I think MOQ is a very similar
to position to OP. OP/MOQ is a realist position that accepts that
reality=being+becoming=Quality. Unlike SOM that thinks reality=beings. OP
reality is a sort of pouring fountain of experience. Somehow via language
(itself a repeating pattern) we get a handle on the repeating patterns of
experience. Only then can we start the SOM language of objects and what it
is that allows objects to appear (subjects). But prior to SOM is the pouring
flux. Unlike SOM I do not want to forget the flux-reality.
What Heidegger calls the forgetting of Being (where being is not a substance
but more like a pouring flux or fire).
You could call it like Cupitt Be(com)ing. It is the guarantee of openness
and that which makes closure impossible.
Without Be(com)ing there would be no contingency/history/creativity. Only
dull, tedious, static repetition. Nietzsche makes
this distinction. But without dull, limiting, finite static reality there
would only be flux. The flux is almost transcendent, as it accounts for the
possible, richer than the real, but it is never far away it is imminent
(sic). It pours. But somehow static patterns
occur in the pouring, somehow the possible allows for the finite being of
this world, and we may not want to say progress,
bad you have a hard heart not to be impressed with what Be(com)ing has
achieved. I think that a recognition of Be(com)ing is an important
anti-anthropomorphic step to take. I think the human-life-world is the
achievement of
Man/Be(com)ng/Language. I think this falls in quite well with static/dynamic
quality from Pirsig, and this was my position prior
to reading Pirsig for the first time 2 months ago. It is essentially
Heidiggerian, and I found Pirsig in Lila as expounding Heidegger's ideas in
some ways better than Heidegger. I do not know if there was any direct
influence. If anyone would like to take a look at my unpublishably difficult
but short novel "The Secret Of Matter' and give me their views, please send
me an email.
By the way, Matt, you may be right that an anti-substance position is better
off without the metaphysics tag, or is it just impossible to say anything
much without implying a metaphysics?
Regards
DM
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 9:26 PM
Subject: Re: MD A metaphysics
> David, my detractors and hecklers,
>
> I gotta' hand it to David. I really do. He has pushed me into a very,
very awkward position. Playing the game that pragmatists love to do, he has
drawn out some consequences of pragmatism and has dared me to back down.
Nice, very nice. Unlike I think pretty much everyone else on the subject of
physicalism, David's shifted from talk about inconsistency, which begs the
question and won't get you anywhere in persuasion, to talk about utility and
language. Its still, in a way, about inconsistency, but its from my very
own idiom. He's speaking my language.
>
> David's challenge amounts to this: "physicalism" carries too much
metaphysical baggage for a pragmatist to use. Its a practical question. Do
I try to rehabilitate it, or do I try to invent something new to take its
place? The irony that I hope people are catching is that this is the same
angle I took with the term "metaphysics". I came out on the side of
replacing "metaphysics". Will I decide to replace "physicalism"?
>
> Thankfully, these are practical questions and have nothing to do with
logical consequences. But I do need to face up to this choice. As David
said, a good bet would be to try and make a distinction between materialism
and physicalism. Not a bad idea. However, I don't think I need to. The
reason is because the pragmatist already redescibes terms into
non-metaphysical terms. That's what non-reductive physicalism is supposed
to denote. "Non-reductive" means pragmatist. It means we are redescribing
the term as a way of talking, a habit of speech. Physicalism as a way of
speaking has no metaphysical baggage because it was already weeded out with
the "non-reductive". Non-reductive physicalism already distinguishes itself
from its metaphysical counterparts to not need a new term. In fact,
"non-reductive physicalism" is a new term. And because we haven't actually
changed the vocabulary "physicalism" refers to (though it may someday be
replaced) we should keep it as the t
> erm of the vocabulary.
>
> David does run together two challenges to me in the last post. One was
that physicalism carries too much baggage, which I decided to grasp, and the
other was that physicalism is already out-dated. This last claim I don't
see. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about particles or energy,
both are physical, nothing really fundamental has changed about the
vocabulary. Why? Because the physicalist vocabulary isn't about describing
things as particles or waves, but about describing things microstructurally,
whatever way we end up describing that microstructure in the end. And I
don't think this stretches mircostructural too far that it includes
everything. It just means that it doesn't matter whether we are talking
about atoms or indeterminate quanta. I will concede one point: that one of
the key points of physicalism is that it must use non-purposeful,
mechanistic explanations. This can be seperated from the claim that some
objects in the universe are physical. H
> owever, the way physicalism runs the two claims together, I think, is
still useful for certain intentions, certain investigations, certain fields
of inquiry.
>
> So, since I'm keeping "physicalism" because I can redescribe it
non-metaphysically, does that mean I'm going to recind on my rejection of
the term "metaphysics"? No, certainly not. It just doesn't make a lot of
sense, to me, to have something called "non-metaphyisical metaphysics". Why
ask the question "What is real?" if you weren't going to take it seriously?
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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