Platt -- > Hey Ham,
Given that the MOQ is quite clear that the top two tiers in the hierarchy are man made in response to Dynamic Quality I can't say the scenario is inhuman. Am I missing your point?
Apparently you are. "Man made in response to Dynamic Quality" is unintelligible to me. Is it supposed to mean that DQ "creates" man? If so, whose "response" accounts for the creation?
The point you are missing is one that you yourself called to my attention years ago: "The individual is the cognizant locus of the physical universe." This conscious locus is not society or its collective "intellect", as Pirsig would have it. It's not "a collection of inorganic and biological patterns," either. Rather, it's the subjective awareness of the individual "knower". And it "exists" in relation to its experience of value as finite beingness (objects).
A hierarchy made up of physical and behavioral atttributes has no sentient locus, thus cannot "be aware" or "have experience". Only an individual agent can do that. That's what being-aware is. All sentient organisms represent a fusion of two primary existential essents: Sensibility and Beingness. Human being is unique in its sensibility to value (self-awareness) and its capacity to reason (intellect). These attributes are not distributed throughout the universe as an extracorporeal realm or level but exist only as individuated psycho-organic entities. It is this individuation that makes possible the realization (and objectivization) of value (i.e., Quality) by a free agent.
As I've said before, the evolutionary hierarchy is flawed on two counts. It assumes that value (quality) exists independently of sensibility, and it denies subjectivity. This is epistemologically unsound. The hierarchy is "inhuman" in the sense that it denies value-sensibility as the essence of man. Because it also fails to posit a primary (metaphysical) source for existence, Pirsig's thesis is limited to causal explanations of process in time.
I know this won't satisfy you, Platt. But it should at least help you understand what I consider to be the MoQ's shortcomings.
Best regards, Ham 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/
