[Bo]
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.
[Krimel]
No, it does not show that there are no monisms. It shows that polarities are
opposite sides of the same coin. It is a bit like a sine wave which is a
monism composed of a peak and a valley. Or a day which recognized as a cycle
of light and darkness. Or a magnetic field which is made of plus and minus.
Taoism reveals the monisms that underlie our binary perceptions.
[Bo]
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.
[Krimel]
Then I confess that I have no idea what S/O is. In my reading of Pirsig it
is a strawman he builds out of the mind/body problem. It is a fundamental
duality that has many nuances and Pirsig selects the version of it that most
irritates him and runs with it. But my understanding of the mind/body
problem is that it is most certainly the I/Thou problem. It is self/other.
It is the distinctly different character of my perception and sensation of
my self versus the wholly other character of external reality. One of the
great tasks of Buddhist for example is to recognize that "other" really is
an internal construction and representation. "Other" is in fact "self" thus
they say that Thou art That to dissolve the distinction.
[Bo]
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.
[Krimel]
I would be happy to accept the conflation of Quality and DQ if it where
phrased properly. If DQ and SQ are understood as chaos and order it actually
makes sense. Order is a manifestation of chaos and that duality is clearly
an illusion. But until that is understood, I think it makes more sense to
retain SQ and DQ as modifiers or separate aspects of Quality just as we
divide a day into daytime and nighttime.
As it stands now the MoQ is not commonly understood in this way. Most see DQ
as mystical or 'betterness'. This is what I regard as a major obstacle
toward progress.
[Bo]
Someone said that Pirsig look into this discussion, so why
doesn't he step forward and settles this?
[Krimel]
I thought he has talked to you before. He sure doesn't talk to me or if he
does he gets eaten by my spam filter. Why don't you ask him?
[Bo]
Agree. Change/stasis was interesting, I collect variants of the
dynamic/static root.
[Krimel]
Once again this is Taoism. The fundamental set of opposites are seen to be
active and passive, Yin and Yang, broadly understood.
[Bo]
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)
[Krimel]
Well as I have said I think there is much more to thinking than language. In
fact one might see language as conscious, dynamic, Yang, objective, while;
emotion and sensation are unconscious, static, yin, subjective. That just
occurred to me but seems worth exploring.
You are right that memory and our ability to approximate the future are time
randomly accessed. Language certainly facilitates this. I don't see how the
MoQ levels help resolve any problems with respect to human versus animal
intelligence though. As you would have it language predates the perception
of S/O by at minimum 50,000 years.
[Bo]
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.
[Krimel]
First of all it is not my focus but since I became acquaint with these ideas
about the same time that Lila was written what does that say? At least Chaos
has inspired the myth of the butterfly effect which spread and has taken
root in our culture. Furthermore, the tension between order and change,
stability and chaos strike straight to the heart of evolutionary theory.
Uniting the metaphysics of Taoism with the understanding of evolutionary
theory may seem stale but they are hardly irrelevant. Pirsig's contribution
to this has been mired by his focus on 'betterness' and teleology or cosmic
purpose. This too is a big obstacle in the way of progress.
[Bo]
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.
[Krimel]
Are they mutually dependant? Certainly from an ordered or static stand point
it appears that way. But why is that?
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