Letter to Bodvar Skutvik >From Robert M Pirsig, September 15, 2000
"The question of "How do you justify the statement that Quality equals reality?" was the best one. The correct answer from a MOQ perspective is, "by the harmony it produces", but this answer is only for people who already understand the MOQ. Those who don't can't see the harmony and for them this answer is meaningless. "We see that these people want rational justification, usually "objective" justification " "As you know there is something about quality that makes it impossible for many to understand what you are talking about. A lot of it is persistence of the materialistic, objective, historic tradition that hopefully will be overcome in time. But also we are seeing a kind of quality blindness that musicians call a "tin ear" of singers who keep sharping and flattening notes without knowing they are doing it. Many people just do not "see" quality at the same time they are obviously seeing it, in the same way that tin- eared people do not "hear" harmony at the same time they are obviously hearing it. I think this was what you were trying to tell Hellier at the end of the Great Shoot-Out when you told him to learn more about reality. It seems that all he could see was quality as a concept, something with about the same scientific reality as hippogriffs and Jesus in Heaven and other empirically unverifiable entities. He just did not directly see what you were talking about. Anthony McWatt attended a class on ZMM where the teacher actually had the same problem. She had no grasp of what value was, only what a value judgement was." Letter to Paul Turner "Another subtler confusion exists between the word, "intellect," that can mean thought about anything and the word, "intellectual," where abstract thought itself is of primary importance. Thus, though it may be assumed that the Egyptians who preceded the Greeks had intellect, it can be doubted that theirs was an intellectual culture. When getting into a definition of the intellectual level much clarity can be gained by recognizing a parallel with the lower levels. Just as every biological pattern is also inorganic, but not all inorganic patterns are biological; and just as every social level is also biological, although not all biological patterns are social; so every intellectual pattern is social although not all social patterns are intellectual." Ron: 10 years later, the same misinterpretations exist. Perpetuated by the same person. After all this time with no substantive answers and nothing new to introduce and no progress made in their assumptions one would think that it was time to revisit the problem with an eye toward what was initially missed. 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/
