Ham
18 Feb. you wrote:
> Bo, I offer this as a follow-up to my last post of 2/17.
> I've not had the pleasure of talking with David Swift, whose too few
> messages seem to have slipped through the cracks in my efforts to
> limit the posts in my mailbox to under 1000. But his comments on
> "mental vs. physical" phenomena (quoted by you and Marsha) are so
> apropos to our recent discussion that they bear repeating.
David said:
> > I'm not sure I'm right but it seems that [RMP] believes in
> > some kind of alternate mental universe that exists in parallel
> > with our universe. ...
Ham:
> This is my feeling also, and I suspect that it's the basis for your
> unconventional definition of Intellect.
> > I think he believes in a mental universe because at the bottom
> > of page 151 he says:
> "Certainly the novel cannot exist in the computer without a
> parallel pattern of voltages to support it. But that does not
> mean that the novel is an expression or property of those
> voltages. It doesn't have to exist in any electronic circuits at
> all. It can also reside in magnetic domains on a disk of a drum
> or a tape, but again it is not composed of magnetic domains nor
> is it possessed by them. It can reside in a notebook but it is
> not composed of or posstaphor ssed by the ink and paper. It can reside
> in the brain of a programmer, but even here it is neither
> composed of this brain nor possessed by it."
Before David Swift (DS) says anything more let me comment.
Pirsig here wants to demonstrate the chasm between the static
levels. (just ahead of the passage he says)
What makes all this significant to the Metaphysics of
Quality is its striking parallelism to the interrelationship of
different levels of static patterns of quality.
DS:
> > The root of the fallacy is his failure to realize that the novel
> > only exists physically in the brains of the writer and readers. The
> > pattern of voltages, magnetic domains and ink and paper
> > representations of the novel are only symbols and have no meaning
> > until a living brain decodes them. It may seem a small point and is
> > certainly open to question and argument but I believe getting this
> > right has implications for the MoQ.
Exactly here I don't see any fallacy. Pirsig just says that the
author's meaning is re-established by the reader after having spent
and indeterminable time as print in a book. It's the intellectual level
that has created the abyss between the conveyor and what's
conveyed. NB! this abyss is valuable, but the MOQ's point is that it
did not exist at the social level and will not exist beyond intellect.
> Not only does David's point have "implications for the MoQ", it is the
> crucial point missing in Pirsig's epistemology. The point could have
> been made better had David omitted the phrase "exists physically in
> the brains". The novel exists in our MINDS (cognitive memory) which
> correlates to brain activity but is "physical" only in the same sense
> that magnetic and printed representations are physical.
Yes, yes, from intellect's mind/matter point of view this is obvious.
It's a subject - a mind - that interprets reality, that imposes
meaning on an otherwise meaningless world. The argument is
watertight and shockproof from intellect's S/O premises, but
MOQ's premises is not that.
> Bo, on 2/16 you questioned David's argument that "perceptions are
> feelings", hence biological in nature.
> [Bo to David]:
> > Feelings (can we use "emotion"?) Why biological? and why
> > symbols? I once made a list of "expressions" (I called) that
> > correspond to each the Quality levels
> > Interaction - Sensation - Emotion - Reason
> > (inorganic) (biology) (social) (intellect)
> > that places emotion=social, but I have noticed that so many want
> > emotions to be biological and wonder why? It's just obvious that
> > animals don't "emote", it's just us who extrapolate our experience
> > on to the animal world.
> That is an attempt to "objectify" the psycho-emotional faculty of
> intellection. Feeling, knowing, sentience, awareness, apprehension,
> understanding -- call it what you will -- is NOT an OBJECT.
A metaphysics that has rejected the subject/object dichotomy (and
relegated it the role of its 4th. level) can't well be accused of
"objectify" anything. Now, the said "expression" list is my making ,
but it just matches the MOQ so fantastically well. For instance, the
intellectual level (Reason) is rising above the social level where
emotions rule.
> Neither is it any combination of the (objective) levels you have
> charted. Intellect is SUBJECTIVE, which means that it exists only as
> Sensibility, which is the essential nature of individuated being-aware.
Ref, the dimension example. A being at the social level will not
"see" the (good of) the higher intellectual view. Regrettably this
goes for the intellect-dweller like yourself who can't see the higher
MOQ vista.
> Although Pirsig is credited for overcoming subject/object duality, he
> has done so at the expense of positing everything in existence as
> objective. I submit to you (and David) that the critical fallacy of
> Pirsig's thesis is his objectification of "subjective mentality".
"Everything as objective", would it sound better with "everything as
subjective"? For the nth. time, the S/O is only relevant at the
intellectual level, the highest and best static value, yet subordinate
to the overall Dynamic/Static system.
Bo
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