[Krimel] I was astounded to hear so much of what I have been trying to tell you for three years echoing in this response to John. Slowly but surely you seem to be getting there. School appears to be good for you. But as you might suspect I think you still have a ways to go so here are a few tips for you.
dmb says: So basically, the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum is the source of everything and the static reality we live in is the "everything". Put another way, the static patterns of quality are the defined, known world. It's everything you'd find in a perfectly exhaustive encyclopedia and Dynamic Quality is the source of all that. This helps to explain why we can't really say that DQ is exclusively "Good". Terms like good and bad, good and evil, right and wrong all belong to the world of differentiated concepts and judgments. Distinguishing good from bad is exactly what we mean by a "differentiation". [Krimel] I would like first to point out that when I first started saying that DQ could be and perhaps, more often than not, is bad, I was nearly hooted out of here. Now here you are, leader of the Aw Gi Cult, making the same point. But I have to add that you are not quite there yet. You say, "Distinguishing good from bad is exactly what we mean by a "differentiation"." But isn't the innate ability to sense good from bad exactly what Pirsig claims DQ is? Doesn't this kinda of leave you tying yourself up in knots? [dmb] But it's also true that DQ has a general tendency toward an undefined betterness. [Krimel] Oh yeah, tied in knots and clinging to this one. Come on Dave, "undefined betterness" is that a slip knot that you think will let you slide around making any sense? It looks more like a noose to me. If it's undefined, what makes you think it is "better"? [dmb] It remains undefined because better and worse mean different things at different levels and it'll mean different things within levels depending on the particular situation. On the biological level, it might mean faster or stronger and on the intellectual level it might mean greater clarity, precision or explanatory power. [Krimel] Exactly, better and worse are relative terms not metaphysical ones. [dmb] And then there is Pirsig's brand of radical empiricism. By adding Quality to what William James had said, the cutting edge of each moment in experience is undifferentiated and yet we are endowed with a sort of sixth sense that tells us about the quality, positive or negative, of the overall situation. [Krimel] See what I mean? So DQ is this kind of sixth sense that does the differentiating. I agree that we have this "sense of sense" a kind of synthesis of various parallel processes that basically passes an instant judgment of "good" or "bad" on immediate experience. But I don't think that is what DQ IS. [dmb] Following this sense would mean being so spontaneous that there is no room for deliberation or judgement, at least not in the usual sense. This is where freedom and creativity live, where one follows DQ rather than the written rules. It's Dharma, the unwritten law. [Krimel] Here you go way over the edge. Perception without concepts is not freedom or creative it is just clueless. It would be like living in a world totally devoid of meaning or sense or any connection to our past history. You call it spontaneous; I call that paralysis; like a deer in the headlights. Part of the problem is that you are so stubbornly unclear on what you mean. But here is what I think you mean. When you talk about 'pre-conceptual' you really mean non-verbal. Concepts, rational process and language are specialized processes which evolved late in humans. Much of what we do and think are not verbal at all. We often struggle to put them into words and concepts and then only if you are asked to do so. Mostly we don't even both. Most of what we learn is not verbal and most of what we learn, we do not conceptualize. This is most obviously seen in habits which are non-conceptual patterns of response to the environment. In fact the only way to be free of habits is to conceptualize them and actively seek to change them. But the truth is that most of what we do is habitual. I would suggest that "following that sense" is just a prescription of becoming a slave to habit. [dmb] This doesn't mean we can abandon static patterns. It's more like they recede into the background. To the extent that they are mastered, they become invisible, as in the case of every craftsman and mechanic and artist who ever lived. They're like your surf board and you use them to ride the wave of DQ. It's like developing an intuitive skill. I suppose that why sailing and motorcycle riding are the central metaphors. You learn the stuff you need to know and then forget it in favor of flying along by the seat of your pants. You might say it takes a lot of discipline to be free. [Krimel] Again, it's like you are almost parroting me here. From a metaphysical point of view static quality is seen as foreground against a dynamic background. Regularity, form, systems, emerge as self organizing strange attractors, set against a dynamic background of chaos and uncertainty. Once those static patterns begin to interact the levels emerge and we get to us. From our point of few the background is static and what attracts us is anything dynamic. Everything that is stabile, the oxygen content of the air, to the force of gravity, to heat of the sunlight are all so static that they support the dynamic quality of living systems. Those living systems devote relatively little time and energy in monitoring fluctuations in these. Our senses are tuned to the dynamic changing aspects of the environment any change or, the dynamic quality of immediate experience, captures our awareness. One of the reasons that we attend to DQ in the environment is to try to render it static ASAP. Static Quality is predictable, it contains an element of certainty and gives us an estimate of what the future will "probably" be like. Change, uncertainty, DQ upset these probability estimates. Anything that decrease the probabilities or our estimates of what the futute will be like demand our immediate attention we either need to assimilate into our estimates or change our estimate to accommodate the new data. 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/
