Matt, DMB, Steve, Joe, et al ...
My thoughts inserted below ...
dmb says:
While it's also true that this sense of value plays a central role in
Pirsig's version of evolution, I think the quote is better understood
in terms of radical empiricism. In that context, this "primary sense"
would be an alternative phrase for "primary empirical reality" or
"pure experience".
Ian - I'd agree. See later.
Matt said:
I would also add, Steve, that your addition of "worseness" to
"betterness" in your description of what Pirsig means by DQ is a
conspicuous alteration of what Pirsig says with fair consistency in
Lila (despite the SODV passage just discussed, where he says "liking
and disliking").
dmb says:
Better and worse are just two sides of the same coin. It's DQ that
gets you off the hot stove. One could say it was worse on the stove or
one could say it was better off the stove. Either way, it means the
same thing. Likewise, survival of the best and extinction of the worst
both operate on exactly the same principle.
Matt continued ...
While it is certainly true that better and worse are two sides of the
same coin, I find it difficult to think one is using a single, unified
sense of the term denoted by "DQ" if one wants to say both 1) "DQ is
reality and therefore both betterness and worseness" and 2) "DQ is the
best." To say that all Pirsig was saying about evolution was that the
best survive and the worst die, it seems to me, is to fall into the
same meaninglessness Pirsig accused Dawinianian tautologists who say
survivors survive.
Ian - I think I agree with all your "logic" Matt, but I don't believe
DMB or Steve or anyone is making those those two assertions (1) and
(2) - at least not on the same level.
Matt continued
The only sense in which combining 1 and 2 would seem to make
interesting philosophical sense (such that we're not just making
tautologies, which is only interesting in the sense that Darwinians
are _specifically_ suggesting the tautology to _specifically_ kill off
the notion that there is anything cosmologically interesting about
evolution), I would think, is if they were construed in a Leibnizian
"best of all possible worlds" sense ("DQ is best, which is to say,
reality (DQ) is at the best possible state at any given moment, and
could not be better, until, of course, it is better"), which is not
how anybody I'm aware of has ever interpreted Pirsig.
Ian - Precisely - DMB's (simplified-in-context) statement of Darwinian
evolution is about as interesting as Pirsig's - ie not very. That
would be tautological. The problem that gives rise to the tautology
(as Joe suggests) is the (SOMist) logic itself - of treating the
"objects of discourse" (DQ in this case) as "objects" in SOMist logic.
The logic we require shifts between levels as we use it (in language)
- hence quining, punning, and other linguistic constructs, even irony
and (god-forbid) rhetoric if we are to break the tautological logic.
Anyway - DQ is not "the best possible state" because it is not a
"state" - but the possibility of states - the maintenance of radically
empirical opportunities before "collapsing" intellectually to any
conceived state.
Regards
Ian
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