Bo said to Ron: ...But seriously you may have a point, Pirsig's "obsession" was/is Reality=Quality issue and he obviously thinks that the Q-reality can be "assembled" many ways and still be a Quality Metaphysics. He even says somewhere that SOM is a "moq. This is so outrageous that I hardly believe my eyes.
dmb says:This "outrageous" claim is exactly what I've been trying to explain. It has everything to do with the other claim we're debating, namely that the MOQ is different from Quality it talks about. It has everything to do with the difference between DQ and sq. These are just different ways to express the same point, the same idea, the same distinction. Pirsig's paint gallery analogy is yet another way of saying this. The MOQ and SOM are different ways to "assemble" reality in the sense that they are rival intellectual descriptions of the same primary empirical reality. And there can be any number of such intellectual constructions. Ironically, SOM says there can be only one correct construction, the one that corresponds with objective reality, with the pre-existing external world that we know through the senses and by thinking about what the senses provide. In Kantian language, this would be the world of the things-in-themselves. In science, this is the material world, the physical universe. This is not to be equated with the primary empirical reality of the MOQ. The pre-intellectual experience is not raw sense data or the initial impression of a physical reality. All of that is just conceptual and comes later and then only if you live in a culture like ours, in a culture that constructs things that way. So Pirsig's "outrageous" claim is that SOM insists there can only be one construction of things because it thinks of itself as an intellectual descriptions of the objective universe but that's exactly where it goes wrong and actually it is derived from pure experience, just like the MOQ or any other intellectual description. Again, this is why the MOQ is different from the Quality it talks about. The primary empirical reality is Dynamic and the descriptions are static. And again, this reality is not physical and it is not mental. It is not objective or subjective. DQ is not a thing that gets experienced or the subject who experiences it. It is just experience itself without any the distinctions that follow. Bo continued:...the various static levels can be seen as "assemblies of DQ in different ways". Yet not arbitrary, biological life had to follow inorganic death and society after that and finally intellect. This sequence is fixed be it on earth or on a planet in Alfa Centauri. And Pirsig must for Goodness sake have seen the DQ/SQ assembly as the one that makes the MOQ work and not be a mere "installation". dmb says:This is exactly what goes wrong when DQ is equated with a pre-existing objective reality. You're right to say that we can't construct things arbitrarily but it is experience that constrains us, NOT the a world of pre-existing things, not even when they're described in terms of the MOQ's static levels. This is the mistake of essentialism, as I've tried to explain in the past. In effect you're saying these intellectually constructed categories are the only correct ones, just as SOM does. But our constructions are not fixed at all, that pretty much the whole point of the MOQ. Despite your denials this same idea appears in ZAMM too. The first thing that springs to mind is the quote saying that our reality is composed of analogies all the way down. The other, more to the point, is Phaedrus' central complaint about Plato, that he tried to convert Quality into a fixed and rigid idea when in fact it is not an idea at all. In the train analogy, where Quality is the cutting edge of experience, the pre-intellectual experience and the (static) world of understanding always follows behind that cutting edge. I mean, this is not different from the stuff we find in Lila, let alone a reversal. He added terms like static and dynamic, but these only clarify what he'd always said. This is what makes his similarity to William James all the more remarkable. He discovered the parallel only after the fact, after he'd discovered the same thing on his own, in his own experience. This might come across as mere insult, but I have to say that your ideas are not difficult to overcome because they're powerful but because they are tangled up with so very many misconceptions that grappling with them requires a careful untangling of just about every single term you use. It's just a huge amount of work and what's worse is that no amount of effort has any effect. Not on you, anyway. And so frankly, I have no longer have any expectations that you'll budge, not even an inch. But hopefully other MOQers will get something out of it. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® is up to 70% faster. Now good news travels really fast. http://windowslive.com/online/hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_70faster_032009 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/
