Met two MoQ’ers last week, Horse (custodian of MoQ-Discuss) and Sam (Elizaphanian Blog).
With Horse, discussed the state and politics of MoQ discuss, (post the MoQ Conference and the “Loggins” hoax), and mainly his plans to update the technology to allow individuals to manage their subscription profiles, and work with multiple forum areas for different discussion topic areas.
With Sam, covered much more philosophical ground, whilst at a great rustic sea-food shack in West Mersea, where we broke bread and drank wine. Apart from discovering my second-hand reading of Wittgenstein is pretty close to Sam’s first-hand reading, the main areas of interest were;
The nebulous “experience” aspect of Pirsig’s Quality, which I attribute to an incomplete model of consciousness;
The causal, intentional god-like analogies to Dynamic Quality, which I currently reject in favour of a more arbitrary view of dynamism (as per neo-Darwinian evolution); and
Better descriptions of the intellectual level of the MoQ, which we both see as being closer to Bo’s “SOLAQI” view as described, and therefore incomplete – SOM is simply the lowest layer of the intellectual level, the first (or second) kind of reasoning to have evolved (so far).
you forgot to mention that we talked about football a lot 🙂
re Wittgenstein and experience, the crucial bits of the philosophical investigations are §§243-315, also known as the ‘private language arguments’
which i think are an absolute knockdown argument against grounding a metaphysics on ‘experience’
essentially witt is saying that language must be public to be intelligible, and we simply cannot talk about ‘experience’ as something ineffable which acts as the groundstuff for everything else – which is what Pirsig has turned Quality into.
“When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of the thought” (§ 329)
This also, by the way, links in with how he misunderstands ‘mysticism’ as being grounded in experience, but that’s a whole other point.
Hi Sam,
Those “private language” arguments I’ve come across (and will read in the original, I promise), but I don’t entirely agree.
Yes to communicate, there is no such thing as a private language, but I do believe consciousness has it’s own conceptual symbology – which may well draw on the shared natural language 99% of the time (that’s pragmatism) – but being “lost for words” or having a name “on the tip of your tongue” does not stop you thinking of the related objects and communicating with yourself.
ie I believe there are qualia and meanings experienced independently of any shared language – but we just find it hard to talk about them (for obvious reasons), and we don’t have a good model of consciousness that supports them (yet). I must understand Witt’s argument better, I’ll check what Chalmers says about Witt too.