dmb says: Well, you probably saw the Pirsig quote on evolution that adds this undefined betterness to Darwinism's notion of "fittest". I posted a quote earlier today in which the same notion is applied to the Brujo and in the hot stove example, which I've been throwing at you for years. I mean, this idea appears in Pirsig's work again and again with all kinds of examples. He also shows how artists, scientists, mechanics and motorcyclists follow this undefined sense of betterness. If it still makes no sense to you, then I hardly know what else to say. I guess you're just hopelessly static and hopelessly square. I mean, the notion refers to something you're suppose to already know from your own experience. It refers to a type of experience, not a metaphysical abstraction.
[Krimel] The sense of betterness is nothing more or less than "The Way." The Tao te Ching is the book of The Way of virtue. Our sense of The Way is part conscience and part aesthetic. We perceive it as sense of balance or harmony between the various binary poles that we see about us. I think confusing this sense of balance with what is being balanced (SQ and DQ) is a grievous error. Krimel said: ..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 says: The quote on radical empiricism says that pure experience logically precedes conceptual categories such as "physical and psychical" and yet here you are trying to explain it in terms of psycho-physical "processes". See, your response to this is always the same in that sense. You're insisting on the very premise that's already been rejected. [Krimel] As long as you persist in rejecting sensible terminology you will continue to flail about in confusion. Experience is not some abstract mystical term. It is a process of interaction between an organize and its environment. You keep confusing conception and perception in ways that James is very clear will produce nothing but confusion. Experience precedes conceptualization. Conceptualization is subordinate to perception. Perception is the direct interaction of the organism with the environment. Conception is the construction of meaning from experience. This is what Pierce was going on about with semiotics. Concepts are signs perception is what is signified. Krimel said: 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. dmb says: Now this is an especially sloppy piece of nonsense. You're criticizing me by making the same point I already made in the very next sentence. "This doesn't mean we can abandon static patterns" I said, "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." And if that isn't stupid enough, you then praise me for it as if I finally learned it from you, as if I didn't say it first. It's ridiculous.... [Krimel] Concepts can only "recede" into the background to the extent that they are working. Only when the lens of our conceptual system is transparent to us is it useful to us. We are constantly looking through this or that conceptual system, it is not as though we are limited to one. We only attend to "concepts" when they don't match our percepts or when we can't figure out how to assimilate our perception into our conceptual system. We can only surf to the extent that there is harmony between our concepts and percepts. Krimel said 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. ...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. ...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. ...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. dmb says: Like I said to John, trying to think of static and dynamic in terms of physical states will only lead to misunderstanding. DQ is not chaotic in that sense. It's not chaotic in any sense. Actually, following DQ can involve a great deal of certainty, although not in the sense of scientific or intellectual certainty. These are not ontological categories that describe what sorts of things exist. As I said to John, static and dynamic are categories of experience. Again, this is a case of trying to understand the rejection of materialism in terms of the thing being rejected. It's never gonna make sense to you until you drop those assumptions. Maybe it's not necessary to drop them sincerely or forever, but for the sake of your own comprehension you simply have to set that view aside. How many times have I said this to you, Krimel? Go ahead, try it. All the cool kids are doing it. [Krimel] Well, John just between you and me this is a pretty clear statement of how confused Dave really is. You can see at the heart of all this rubbish that he really just doesn't like materialism, or objectivity. He doesn't really know why. They just seem yucky to him. He doesn't understand the importance of chaos or the meaning of "meaning" or the consequences of the concept of "uncertainty." Granted our current understanding if these things has changed since Lila was written. But Dave is a bit like Ham. The only difference is that Ham wants us to return to a medieval style of thinking and Dave wants to turn the clock back 2,500 to the Greeks or the Buddhists. The truth is turning the clock backwards is futile. But even if you do, you will still find at the heart of human thinking, the struggle between order and chaos. It is fundamental to the thinking of every advanced civilization. Order is pattern stasis. Chaos is dynamic and uncertain. This is a central point of the MoQ and the differences between my position and Dave's could not be more critical. Dave's view confuses DQ or Yang, the active principle with "The Way" or our sense of harmony. That harmony arises from the interplay of static and dynamic quality. Focusing on a single aspect of Quality is not The Way. Dave doesn't want you to focus on physical states because he doesn't think there are physical states. If there were then his concepts would actually have to conform to the interactions of his nervous system with something else. His ideas don't work especially well if they are actually any constraints on them. Dave's form of romantic Luddism is little more than an excuse for ignoring the riches that have been accumulating in the intellectual level over the past half century. Dave never really engages any thinking that has transpired since about the 1930s. This lets him ignore such powerful ideas and conceptual lenses as systems theory, information theory, chaos and nonlinear dynamics. It lets him reject as trivial entire disciplines that aim to study and illuminate the very concepts Dave thinks are best viewed in the dark through ancient lens. All of the social sciences emerged and separated from philosophy during the past century. They are aimed at asking philosophical questions and constructing conceptual frameworks from testable evidence. Mostly what they find are things Dave doesn't like, so he is forced to resort to romantic ideals of the past that make him feel special for clinging to his personal view of mythology. But to conclude more closely to the actual point; Static and Dynamic work as metaphysical terms because they apply both to our experience of the world and to the patterns we perceive in the world. They do work in both cases. That is what makes them metaphysically significant. Dave on the other hand would reduce DQ to just a form of conception. For Dave DQ is just whatever seems like "betterness" to you. When you see that DQ is change and reflects uncertainty as opposed to SQ with is stability and certainty, then the MoQ like Taoism becomes a profound and coherent way of understanding instead an excuse for wishful thinking. 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/
