Krimel, You make some valueable points. A nichomachian "mean" applied to the arguement is more along the lines I suspect. I don't believe MoQ "rejects" SOM just the assumptions of absolutes it tends to be predicated on. Likewise with religeon. therefore the power lies in knowing when to apply which theory with which context adhereing to none and utilizing all. The term wisdom comes to mind.
________________________________ From: Krimel <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, March 2, 2009 4:22:52 PM Subject: Re: [MD] The Quality/MOQ dichotomy. Ron: I think the notion of seduction of form captures the situation quite well. Krimel: But James is very clear that concepts are derived from perception. He is also clear on a point I have tried to make to dmb, many times: perception is the synthesis or summation of different sensory experiences. Perception is a process of smoothing over the rough spots and imperfections in our sensory systems. But the real point is that concepts (the objective) derived from precepts (the subjective). I include S/O not as an endorsement, but as markers for the outmoded concepts. There is no duality in James. His aim is to show the superiority of percepts, (empiricism) over concepts (rationalism). Ron: You make a fine point, but the one reservation I have is envisioning the flow of expereince in a direct current way, when an alternating current of overlapping precepts and concepts in an associative manner, the proton/nuetron relationship that defines the illusion of the whole might serve more accurately. Krimel: I think this way of framing the distinction is quite helpful. Whatever set of static concepts we chose to apply to our dynamic experience, something will be left out. There is always this lingering paradox in our understanding. All of our senses and perceptions seem to point to and are about something that is wholly other than us. And yet all of our experiences is uniquely idiosyncratic to us. Each of us views the ongoing stream of experience from a different vantage point. James does not suggest that it is at all a good idea to kill all of our conceptual patterns and kill them completely. I think he would find such a notion as nonsensical as I do. But he does advise us to regard them with a healthy degree of caution and suspicion. I whole heartedly agree. But his chief point is that real understanding must involve both, percepts and concepts. Ron: A great observation, interesting, a thought, entertain me if you would. All in all, the base concept Pirsig makes, in this light is that "some things are better than others" the buddists say that making this sort of distinction in regards to expereince leads to suffering. If we make that distinction intellectually "betterness" comes into the picture. But if we allow those distinctions to flow naturally "betterness" is simply harmony. The natural state of existence. "When all understand goodness to be good, evil appears." This is not to say that making distinctions is wrong, it simply means that this should be taken into consideration when forming our opinions. Krimel: The point of any conceptual system is to provide the greatest possible explanatory power from the smallest number of concepts. What makes the Theory of Evolution beautiful is that is lets us understand the increasing height of basketball players, the process of learning, social change and stellar evolution all with the same set of simple ideas. This really isn't on the topic of your comment now that I read over it but it isn't that off track either. DQ/SQ are concepts. They are the names we attach to our experience of Quality. Dave, as the heir apparent, is quite faithfully restating Pirsig's views on the matter. Pirsig not only originates the confusion by calling Quality, DQ in Lila, he reinforces the confusion in one of his letters. He says similar kinds of things in Ant's videos. As Dave points out, Pirsig wants DQ to be equated with some kinds of "special" mystical ideas. I think he is doing us all a disservice in this respect. As I noted some time ago Pirsig claims some special affinity to Taoism when he says that you can go through the Tao te Ching and replace "Tao" with "Quality" and it will not change the meaning. However, unfortunately, the reverse is not the case. You cannot go through Lila and replace "Quality" with "Tao" and preserve the meaning. This is not a problem for Lao Tsu but it seriously negatively impacts the MoQ. I would say that this critical confusion is one of the greatest stumbling blocks in understanding the power of the MoQ. Concepts, ideas, are static representations of perception. Perception is the dynamic flow of the present. We need them both and we need them to be in balance and to complement each other. They are yin and yang. If the goal of mysticism is to be free of static concepts that is a bit like saying that we would all be better off to remove half of our brains. Dave has pretty much endorsed this with his lauding of Jill Bolte-Taylor's nirvana-like stroke experience. Enlightenment through pathology, if you will. Ron: I think the main thrust of mysticism is the awareness that static patterns are just that, the goal of the sage being that the budda rests as comfortable within the gears of a motorcycle as in the lotus. rejecting one for the other is making the same mistake. Krimel: As I have said many times Quality is undefined because like James says it is ever changing, continuous, flowing and uncertain. But our descriptions of it as static or dynamic are not similarly required to be undefined or indefinable. All experience gets rendered into concepts. If it didn't we couldn't talk about it at all. The issue is always a matter of how closely we can formulate conceptual illusions that approximate our lived experience. Ron; If we all keep this in mind we really shoud'nt have any problems. 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/ [Ron] yeah, but how the heck do you convey it? statically. anytime you convey it it becomes not it. the psuedo paradox that constantly confuses the issue. [Krimel] I recently attended a conference were one of the panelists had written a book on William James so I asked him a few questions of the sort we toss about here. He and another panelist suggested that often James appears to be taking perception as his starting point and they recommended the chapters on Concepts and Precepts in James' final work "Some Problems of Philosophy". After reading those chapters I think I have a better handle on what James was going on about. He distinguishes concepts as discrete entities that we carve out of the ongoing dynamic stream of perception. Concepts are ideas. They are the "JUST" in many of Marsha's posts. They are also the Ideal Forms of Plato. James notes how the Greeks became enraptured by the beauty and perfection of these conceptual entities. He compares conceptual systems to maps and as you point out elsewhere, we judge concepts just as we judge maps; by how well they serve in getting us to where we are going. 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/
