[Krimel] Arlo, I want to say that several of your recent posts in this thread have been so good that I decide any comment from me would just muddy the waters you had clarified. But, as you recently mentioned agreement tends to be the real conversation killer so I am just adding a few twists here and there.
You have talked before about Michael Tomasello and Douglas Hofstadter. You may have mentioned that Tomasello's views on the evolutionary significance of taking a point of view, results in Douglas Hofstadter's recursive loops. I suspect that conceptualization is the end product. I think this means, that in fact, we are not stuck in the immediate NOW. Conceptualization allows us the build a three dimensional representation of four dimensions. It allows us to travel backwards and forwards in time. To recall the past and plan the future. Immediate experience is the anchor. Perception is the undefined stream of the ongoing. It is prior to and dictates to, whatever conceptual frameworks we erect. But building conceptual frameworks is what we are programmed to do. Concepts must assimilate the immediate or accommodate to it. Building a solid but flexible conceptual framework is the task of a lifetime. It is the lens through which we take in other points of view and "reflect" on the points of view of others. [Arlo] I'll try to keep this focused on one of your final thoughts. "Some profound/ religious/ mystical experiences do not occur every day." You say this in support or agreement with Platt's notion that "DQ is not everyday experience". [Krimel] In Ant's video Pirsig make a point that people go do all this meditation in search of enlightenment business and once they have achieved it, they get up in the morning and go about their daily tasks. Isn't that what "enlightenment" is: understanding that DQ is there at every second with every breath? It isn't in the special mystical it is in the understand that every moment is a special mystical moment. [Arlo] What I am getting at, and what I believe is the core point of value in the MOQ's philosophy, is that Quality IS experience. Experience is not a response to some external Quality, experience IS Quality, it IS the Quality moment of zero time. And this moment is always and forever DQ. Our analogues are outgrowths of this, patterns of response we have found valuable, and so they attain greater and greater probabilities. [Krimel] Right and not all experience is "good" or "betterness." Many times it sucks. As the Lord says in Isaiah, "I create good and I create evil." I would go so far as to say that Pirsig has it exactly backwards. What is "Good" and "Betterness" is Static Quality. And as I have said before the chief problem of the modern age is the flood of Dynamic Quality that has changed the patterns and meaning of life faster than we can create static patterns to accommodate it. That is the real bitch against science. That is what the Victorians dreaded and what the hippies were reacting to. [Arlo] Dynamic Quality is the undefined, the uncertainty of the moment. It is dynamic quality that keeps the universe "alive", as without uncertainty everything would be a robotic, static, unchanging stasis. It is not some rareity that magically appears to some people some of the time under some situations. It permeates the cosmos as the zero-point, the "moment of immediate experience", and despite the patterning of responses to this experience is always there providing some uncertainty, some indefinable, some probability that something unexpected, new, outrageous, different, thing MAY happen. [Krimel] Right, Yin and Yang. But notice that until patterns at the inorganic level are held static for billions of years, dynamic biological patterns cannot occur. Until biological patterns are static for millions of years, social patterns cannot occur. Until social patterns are static for thousands of years intellectual patterns do not grow. Static patterns reduce uncertainty. The search for them is what drives science and religion and art and philosophy. Without them we are lost and impotent. The fact is nothing is fully static and nothing is fully dynamic. It is always a mixture and our point of view; our conceptual framework; determines how we regard the relative merits of either. "And yet in every drop of grey, we see that black and white still play." - Case [Arlo] It is no coincidence. The train analogy works for RQ/CQ, but it is a more apt analogy for DQ/SQ, and I think Pirsig sensed this early on. [Krimel] This is exactly the case William James makes in talking about the "stream of consciousness". It is a dynamic flowing continuum that we break down into static conceptual patterns. There are problems with this and only by seeing the real nature of conceptual patterns can we avoid being trapped and confined by them. [Arlo] You can see by the end of this passage one doesn't even need to substitute LILA terms for ZMM terms. It is evident that in this analogy Pirsig is pointing ahead to LILA, to a split that transcends RQ/CQ, and gives an analogy that maps BETTER to his latter terms than his immediate ones. We also see him adopting the term "static" in this analogy to refer to the boxcars. And, as I've shown, the key descriptors for RQ in this analogy map directly and verbatim to the key descriptors he gives for DQ in LILA. [Krimel] Right the MoQ is not about a particular map. It is about cartography. 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/
