Krimel, Case and whoever it may interest:
You tell about your problems with Pirsig's ideas. Not to make this
overly long I begin with this paragraph:
> What gives Taoism its metaphysical significance is that it is a tool
> for resolving dualities. It helps us see that we understand dualistic
> pairs in virtue of their reference to one another. Each element of the
> pair does not exist for us without its opposite.
About nothing existing without a contrast is a deep insight, but
doesn't this show that there can be no monisms, that existence is
dualist to the core and the only task is to find the best dualism? If
Taoism or Buddhism sees this (dualism) context, but just makes
it even more elusive (the moon that various theories points to)
they don't resolve anything.
> What Pirsig is searching for is the most elemental of opposite pairs.
> The mind/matter or I/Thou distinction is commonly held as primary in
> the west and in Lila, Pirsig attempts to show the DQ and SQ are even
> more fundamental. Again this is pure Taoism but he gets it all muddled
> by insisting that Quality and DQ are the same thing and that they are
> always good or have something to do with betterness.
The I/You is not a S/O derivative, but you are right the DQ/SQ is
more fundamental than the S/O and as it began in ZAMM (by
making the earlier S/O dualism's into the "intellectual" part of the
new metaphysics) it resolves all paradoxes. And had the 4th.
level (of the final MOQ) been kept that way, it would have been
revolution, but as it is the Buddhist in Pirsig *) made him make
Quality the "moon" and the MOQ just another finger.
So what you see as muddling I see as a lost opportunity. Now the
million [EMAIL PROTECTED]&"#$ question is: has really Pirsig said ".... that
Quality and DQ are the same thing"? You referred to a passage
in a letter to Paul Turner, but in the Summary of 2005 he still
maintains
The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be
separated from the Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like
the rest of the printed philosophic tradition it doesn't
change from day to day, although the world it talks about
does. To use an Oriental metaphor, it is just another
finger pointing toward the moon.
Someone said that Pirsig look into this discussion, so why
doesn't he step forward and settles this?
> His whole system of levels is an instructive exercise in how we might
> apply an understanding of the world around us as SQ and DQ. He uses it
> in his critique of science, social science and social patterns over
> the last century. I find each of these analyses individually flawed
> but taken as a whole they provide a pretty good guide to an approach
> to seeing the world not so much as I/Thou but as change and stasis.
Agree. Change/stasis was interesting, I collect variants of the
dynamic/static root.
> In Lila for example his finger points directly at several really
> critical points that he obviously appreciates but doesn't fully grasp.
> His discourse on random access is a particularly important missed
> point. He fully appreciates the importance of random access and his
> description of it is about as good as it gets. But he stops well short
> of what that finger points to. Random access thinking is an entirely
> new phenomenon. It didn't exist at all two or three centuries ago and
> even well into the 20th century it was a very primitive business. The
> use of slips and card catalogs should be familiar to even the oldest
> of old timers here but computerized use of random access is a
> qualitative leap in human consciousness. Google is to a library card
> catalog as... I'm sorry this beggars my capacity to construct
> analogies.
What we call "thinking", namely language-conveyed manipulation
of experience, has always been based on biological random
access to earlier experience (memory). And the MOQ opens up
for an convincing explanation of how the illusion of a MIND
occurred (in addition to solving the intelligence in animal enigma)
> In Pirsig's description of random access he says that a metaphysics of
> quality would be a metaphysics of randomness. He opens the window
> stares into the light, points at it and turns away. He is not the only
> one to do this I have seen James, Russell, Hume and many others do it
> as well. They see the importance of randomness and chance but regard
> the task of dealing with it as hopeless and so point and move on. The
> task is not hopeless and I think Pirsig points The Way. But instead of
> hopping on board and sailing away he builds a 'head boat' with levels
> of frou frou and has left you and many others squabbling about where
> this or that bit of superficial ornamentation out to hang.
I understand that randomness and the Mandelbrot Fractals is
your focus - twenty years after its heyday - but it is stale, your
opening about noting existing except as dualisms will hit
randomness too. It needs a stable element to be compared with
to be perceived as random. It's the stable levels that gives MOQ
its phenomenal explanatory power.
> The video that you obviously either did not watch or did not
> understand shows the way around this. It shows a better way to see the
> world and the MoQ in terms of randomness, SQ, DQ and the Tao. But
> that's enough for now. There's more but I suspect you aren't ready for
> this much less that.
Watching would not bring me anything, I know about these
things. Random vs Order, change vs stasis, dynamic vs static.
These opposites are mutually dependent and its a folly to believe
that there can be a Randomness outside the random/order pair,
as it is to postulate a Dynamics outside the dynamic/static one, or
a Quality outside DQ/SQ.
Bo
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