> Bo and Steve -- First, let me apologize for attributing Steve's comment to Ron.
I guess my basic problem with the "levels of patterns" ontology is that it is unnecessarily specious without philosophical justification. It doesn't help us understand Quality as the primary source, and it doesn't acknowledge man as anything but a multi-level pattern. I find it unreasonable, for example, to put so much emphasis on the differences between inorganic, organic, and social phenomena without regard to time, space, contrariety, evolution, consciousness, esthetics, freedom, and desire, all of which seem far more significant to the history of civilization. And I can't even conceive of an Intellectual Level apart from man's thought process. Perhaps the following quotes will illustrate my point. These from Bo... > Culture/Nature is one of intellect's S/O dichotomies. > There is neither nature nor organisms in the MOQ, > only inorganic and biological patterns, and it's DQ > that created the biological level from the inorganic level. Why? To what end? Why should Quality be the creator of levels, while man is the creator of patterns? > Intellect has nothing to do with mind, thinking or > consciousness. All levels have "independent static" > existence. .. > > The MOQ just says that there are patterns of value > and that's all it is concerned with, the various scientific > disciplines' classification is intellect's business and exists > at that level as such. NB! Social existence surely had > names for everything but yours above was about > elements of chemistry and physics. What's the difference between "social names" and "intellectual names"? Are "culture" and "mankind" social names, while "mathematics" and 'physiology" are intellectual names? Do you see the need for specificity in this categorization? I don't. > In a metaphysics that rejects the subject/object divide, > objects and subjects do not exist outside the former SOM, > i.e. at the intellectual level. I don't follow you here, Bo. Is the "former SOM" presumed to be SOM without the intellectual level? Or is the intellectual level theorized as always present, even before there was a thinking creature? And these from Steve ... > Unreasonable is a term we use for low quality when we > are talking about intellectual patterns. "Low quality" by whose standards -- that of the collective intellect? > When Pirsig says that the universe is a moral order, > it is the same as saying that there is no such thing as > morality in the way it is usually thought of as a set of > social constructs. Whatever we mean by "value" when > we talk about morality is the same thing as when we > talk about the value of true over false. Since there is no > difference, we can either drop the word morality > or apply it to all levels. It appears that you are now equating morality with truth, in which case "2 + 2 = 4" or "when a man's heart stops he dies" become moral statements. Surely there's a difference between what you call "social constructs" and "logical constructs". Since you all are so anxious to parse differences, I'm astonished that you would want to ignore this one. > The MOQ says that this cognizant creature is an unknown > without Quality, so Quality comes first. You suppose that the > individual comes first. No, I do not. I suppose that "first" and "last" apply only to a system in transition, such as physical existence. I equate Quality with Value. And value, as I define it, is made aware only to a cognizant entity that stands apart from its source or essence. Thus, a world without awareness is a world without value. For me Quality is meaningless in the absence of a perceiver. Regards, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
