Bo, Arlo:
A great post, Arlo, one that explains a whole lot of conundrums, not only
those you mention, but the mystery of consciousness that continues to
baffle everyone. "Who is the I that knows me?" It also explains why logic
can't explain beginnings from a cause-effect perspective. You just keep
getting pushed back into infinite regress, as in "Who made God?"
It was these ultimate "recursions" and "paradoxes" so succinctly and
clearly described by you and the passages from Pirsig you cite that
propelled me towards aesthetics as the most fruitful path to better
understanding of life and living. You can then imagine my delight at
finding a metaphysics built on a foundation of Quality experience.
Thanks to Bo for all these years of patiently, patiently explaining why the
MOQ is not and cannot be itself a fourth level intellectual pattern. As
Arlo put it, the MOQ is not AND CANNOT POSSIBLE BE just another
cerebral philosophy. Rather it's a "way of being."
Other contributors to this forum may have come to this conclusion long ago.
But seeing it expressed like this in a single post is for me is a
breakthrough. I hope to have many more discussions about this because I
think it's most promising way to expand the essential meaning of MOQ.
Regards,
Platt
> [Bo]
> Before I have tried the same example in a lesser scale, about
> Newton's Physics place within Newton's Physics, but I don't think it
> got through.
>
> [Arlo]
> Maybe this is stating the obvious, but the problem here
> ("containment" as you refer to it) is one of self-reference, that is,
> trying to use something to define itself. This puts us right
> smack-dab into the paradoxes and recursions of Goedel and, to a
> lesser but important sense, Pirsig.
>
> For young Phaedrus, a critical point was the attempt to apply the
> "scientific method TO the scientific method", then it was "turning
> analytic reason back on itself", and later was his recognition that
> NO symbolic system was ever capable of containing Quality, "Since the
> One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it
> cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what
> thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something
> less than the One itself.", along with a final "nod" to
> self-reference when he laments the Chairman's approach "He might
> learn something. Once it's stated that "the dialectic comes before
> anything else," this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity,
> subject to dialectical question."
>
> When you try to "put the MOQ into the MOQ" you are at a stall point.
> You simply can not contain a system within itself without leading to
> the "strange loops", paradoxes and recursions that brings. As
> Hofstadter refers to it, this is the "essential incompleteness" of
> any system, it can never contain itself. And so, as Pirsig points
> out, the only way to reference a system from within its system is by
> allegory, analogy and indirect pointers.
>
> This is what you are doing (and I add, correctly), and why it is not
> only "not easy" to define the MOQ in terms of itself, but IMPOSSIBLE.
> And this is why saying "the MOQ is an intellectual pattern within a
> system called the MOQ" is immediately self-referential and hence
> paradoxical.
>
> Maybe the MOQ is not a thing (I am just speculating based on recent
> thoughts), but a "doing". Maybe it is better to think of the MOQ not
> as a pattern, but as a Verb. This would tie somewhat into Platt's
> "Weltanschauung" which translates almost as a "thing" (worldview) but
> in German means something more "active", more like a "way of
> being". And that certainly gets as well to your suggestion that it's
> "how we live".
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