Magnus, Jonathan, Marco, Bo, ..... (AND To 3WD re process metaphysics)
Jonathan! It's good to find that I'm saying what you've already said. I
don't have much to add here, but a tiny suggestion about oxymoronic
philosophy.
JONATHAN WROTE: Don't try Magnus's "iron on the toe" experiment. He had me
try that a couple of years ago and I regret listening to him;-).
ELEPHANT: Have no fear. No toe flagellent I: when I have things droped on
my toes it's because somebody else let go. Word of advice: never trust your
sister with a 6' by 4'.
MARCO WROTE: IMO, THE SPLIT OF EXPERIENCE IN FOUR LEVEL IS WHOLLY
INTELLECTUAL. A ghost, just like the gravity law. I mean, it's a good
intellectual trick used by Pirsig to explain universe.
JONATHAN WROTE: I think that Marco's statement accurately reflects my
position, and see that Elephant concurs.
ELEPHANT WROTE: <<<The way I suggest that we understand this is that All
static patterns are intellectual patterns: this is what Marco is saying.
Biological, Social, Inorganic: these are all divisions WITHIN the
intellectual level. This is not to say that a dormouse is an intellectual,
but just to say that a dormouse is an ntellctual pattern - one arrived at by
intellects, viz biologists.>>>
JONATHAN WROTE: To some extent, this is a restatement of my arguments that
Intellect should not be regarded as a level in the same sense as the other 3
(see http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/9812/0049.html and
following discussion). The point is that the other levels develop by
increasing COMPLEXITY. Intellect is an ABSTRACTION.
ELEPHANT: Right. I'm tempted by a discourse on the intelligence of dormice,
but I resist.
MAGNUS (to Elephant): <<<I see now where you got the idea that
intellect/non-intellect maps exactly to the static/dynamic split. But please
don't do that, I hate to say it but if I don't, Bo will. You're getting
awfully close to the mind/matter dichotomy here and we all know where that
leads.>>>
JONATHAN WROTE: Magnus is right that considering "intellect" as somehow
different brings us close to the mind/matter dichotomy. However, I don't see
that simple denial solves the problem.
ELEPHANT WROTE: Moreover, I would say that in it's struggle with it's own
static patterns intellect will *look* like a pattern amoughst others, and
like a competing level amougst others.
JONATHAN WROTE: This is entirely right. Since the MoQ is an intellectual
construct, intellect gets caught in a recursive loop when it tries to define
itself. This will be part of any philosophy where intellect is considered a
part of the reality it describes. I have no easy answers; me might consider
"non-intellectual" philosophy, but that sounds like an oxymoron to me.
ELEPHANT: The key might be in the idea that it's possible to offer a kind of
definition without actually poasitively attributing properties. We could
just say what it's not. That might take us far enough that, although we
can't express it in a neat sentence, we have somehow managed so show it, to
show where it is. Really I think that this is something like the process
gone through by Pirsig with respect to Dynamic Quality, so it's not beyond
the wit of man.
MAGNUS WROTE: <<<No! Now, you're back into experiencer=mind vs. experienced
world=matter.>>>
JONATHAN WROTE: Yes we are, but it doesn't mean much without proper
definitions of mind and matter.
ELEPHANT: I guess that's the other way of putting it. I stressed the
opposite approach by assuming that mind and matter have some hard and fast
definitions and then showing that my dichotomy doesn't match them. But I
think I like your question technique Jonathan. It's more to the point.
JONATHAN WROTE: Descartes certainly has no monopoly on this, but I don't
like Pirsig's version either ("Mind" = Intellect + Social levels, "Matter" =
Inorganic + Biological levels). However, we can be a bit clearer on what we
mean by "experiencer" and "experienced".
MAGNUS WROTE: <<<The really big jump to make when moving from a SOM view to
the MoQ is to realise that SOM "things" are made of many levels at once. Not
only that, they are often made of different many levels depending on the
observer.>>>
JONATHAN WROTE: Yes!!! That's something I said in my very early days in the
forum (post #2, 14 May 1998, http://www.moq.org/old_lilasquad/9805/0023.html
):
<<< Pirsig hasn't really done away with the SO at all, but has incorporated
it into his MOQ. If we consider subject as the observer and object as the
observed (things that happen), Pirsig has created multiple non-exclusive
subjects. The observer observes at the molecular level, or is an organism
observing at the biological level, or a society observing at the social
level etc. Thus subject and object become relative terms.
Looking at this again, I now see Bo's SOLAQI idea come back in a new light.
The MoQ is an intellect construct that sets up SO patterns to be "valued" by
different observers at each level. The ways molecules appear to "value" each
other are "inorganic" patterns. The ways organisms appear to value each
other are "biological" patterns. Ditto for the social level, and we can
probably come up with something suitable if we absolutely insist on an
intellectual level;-)
But, WHO is making all the decisions in carving up all these
observer/observed systems in the various levels. It is Intellect in the
guise of Bodvar's SOLAQI. The only argument I ever had with Bo's proposal
was his claim that this represented the whole of intellect - I would prefer
a wider view of intellect that has additional attributes.
ELEPHANT: The 'WHO?' question is the right one. Absolutely. But what we
could probably do with here is a tiny bit of technical terminology. We are
going to need to distinguish the intellect that has all these additional
attributes from the intellect that is so hard to positively define because
of recursivity. I have no break through suggestions to offer at the mo, but
I think this may be just a terminology problem. Magnus or someone may be
able to see it as a deeper flaw, I don't know. I suppose I would probably
think it out along ego v. consciousness lines. There's this fat ego that
figures in a lot of the practical reason intellectualising, and then there's
this distanced calm intellect where the ego too can be observed from
outside, and we make a more direct connection with dynamic quality because
the 'me' 'me' 'me' isn't drowning out the scenery. Both of them count as
Quality intellects in my veiw - I mean this isn't like 18th Cent "reason".
Turning to process......
3WD WROTE: First I suggest that, we have to understand that Pirsig is
proposing a shift away from the dominant Western "thing" based metaphysics
towards a more "process" based metaphysics. Blackwell Companion to
Metaphysics entry on "process philosophy" in part say this:
"From the time of Aristotle, western metaphysics has had a marked bias in
favour of things or substances. However, another variant line of thought was
also current from the earliest time onward. After all concentrating on
perduring physical things as existents in nature slights the equally good
claims of another ontological category, namely processes, events,
occurances- items better named by verbs than nouns. And, clearly, storms and
heat waves are every bit as real as dogs and oranges."
ELEPHANT: Sure. Presumably though, by 'Process' you mean something very
different from Mechanism? Or perhaps you don't. I certainly got a shock
from seeing Heraclitus stuck next to Pierce, although Bergson is right-on.
What I'm worried about is the possibility of interpreting process in terms
of something like 'industrial process', or a string of discrete operations
with discrete materials. That's certainly not what Heraclitus had in mind.
But I think it might be what the blackwell companion has in mind: because
the move that's popular nowadays is to move from 'object' to 'process' in a
similar way that Quine moved from 'singular fact' to 'body of beleifs': in
fact it's just the same move really, for a lot of people. What's being put
forward in that context is no kind of concession to Heraclitus. What's
being put forward is the recognition that our beleifs about singular objects
(water molecules) and our general theories about the processes surrounding
them (thunderstorms) are all part of a general body of beleif: that rain
drops don't have any epistemological priority over thunderstoms. Sure,
that's a concession to process, in a way, but it's no departure from SOM,
because thunderstorms just get treated as large temporally extended objects:
as the sum of so many movie frames per second. The kind of 'process' that
Heraclitus is thinking of, if 'process' is a name for it, is pointed at with
the metaphor of the river. Something continuous and not objectifiable. You
can't step into the same river twice or even once because there's no
specifying 'same river': there's no object there, only flow. Flux, and a
river categorised at so many frames of identifiable pattern per second, are
two quite different enterprises. I guess it's more natural to talk about
'process' in the context of the second, conceptualised river. That's the
worry. But most of the points we end up making in this area fall back on
metaphor, so maybe 'process' is as good a pointer as any.
All the best,
Puzzled Elephant
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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