On 7/17/09 1:27 AM, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote
Hi Bo,
I am a somewhat asleep hero-worshiper. When you stated that the Taliban
abused the social level for their own machinations and that it was a very
very wrong to do, I was impressed at the quality and depth or your
conception. Thank You!
Now evolution is on my mind. If you are finished with posting, I want to
thank you very very much for expressing your conclusions.
Joe
> Platt and All.
>
> 15 July:
>
> I think I'll tell a story, you may have heard it many times, but it conveys
> my point better than all this tedious philosophy.
>
> In it's time I was oppressed by SOM. Not that the I knew any SOM, it
> was the mind/matter abyss, ourselves as isolated minds fundamentally
> alienated from other minds and - most of all - from reality, only
> approaching "it" by way of theories, that however close only were
> subjective descriptions of an enigmatic something. I knew the
> impossibility of this dualism, but it did not alleviate my oppression, it
> merely looked like an added sadistic game that existence played with
> us. Like a child playing with an ant not capable of understanding that
> the huge shape above it was its tormentor. I wandered through
> libraries and browsed through books in a search for some answer, but
> no one seemed to care.I mean a lot of thinkers addressed the M/M
> paradoxes and problems - the empiricists for instance - but only like
> myself in a more abstract way, pointing to the strange "thing in itself"
> world that we subjectively added qualities to. The more modern
> philosophers that DMB promotes I hadn't heard of, but they would not
> have helped, as said there's no lack of "criticisms" of the mind/matter
> schism, but no one has identified it as a metaphysics - as a SOM -
> entering history at a particular time. Not until Robert Pirsig. I came
> across "Zen and the Art .." in 1978 and it turned my tables. Phaedrus
> seemed even more oppressed than myself, but more capable of
> challenging it, as said I believed it was the way existence was
> "prefabricated". I need not repeat my first reading but even writing
> about it some thirty years later it moves me. Well, as we know, he had
> his Quality epiphany and by and by he made the in-out turn of the
> reality "sock": The subject/object divide was no abyss but a Quality fall-
> out. Most revealing for me was the section on how SOM emerged with
> the old Greeks, it had not existed as SOM itself wants us to believe
> "always, just for the Greeks to discover". Then, even more exciting,
> the sketch of a new metaphysics, and now NOT in the classic sense of
> just another theory about an enigmatic reality, but in the sense of
> CLASSIC being degraded to a part of the new world order. It was this
> that meant revolution for me. In ZAMM (translated to moqish) DQ only
> had SOM as its static component, but it was also called INTELLECT!!
> When LILA arrived the SQ range had increased to four levels and that
> was fine with me, but SOM no longer was the intellectual level, and
> that destroyed its value. Intellect had again become the dreaded
> "mind" where ideas - theories - are produced about the enigmatic
> Quality Reality. The MOQ itself just another mind-intellectual idea-
> theory Phaedrus giant step for humankind had been reversed.
>
> Hope this conveys my frustration.
>
> Bodvar
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>> You protest
>>> the "MOQ being reality itself" assertion on the grounds that
>>> theories are conveyed by language and language is subjective
>>> concepts in our minds, different from reality it describes . But
>>> this is SOM - the MOQ seen from the intellectual level - not
>>> intellect seen from the MOQ.
>
>> OK, but right away I'm in trouble. When you say "intellect seen from
>> the MOQ" you are in a SOM description that assumes a seer and a seen.
>> Is there any way to express the MOQ has you "see it" without falling
>> back into SOM?
>>
>>> SOM (intellect) forms everything in its S/O mold. If there isn't an
>>> objective reality - described by a "describer" - then all is
>>> description, all is language. It leaves no other alternatives WE
>>> must break out of this S/O pattern to understand the MOQ. The said
>>> pattern is the highest static value, but not reality itself.
>>
>> OK. But how do we break the S/O pattern and still describe the MOQ?
>>
>>> I had said:
>>>>> Scientific theories can be presented as independent of the
>>>>> theory and the latter-day Pirsig tries the same with the MOQ, as
>>>>> if he accidentally discovered Quality's unique position, but as
>>>>> he demonstrated in ZAMM (the Newton Gravity example) he Quality
>>>>> Reality is the MOQ. Not as an idea in Pirsig's mind, but as the
>>>>> metaphysics, wherever it had its origin.
>>
>> But didn't he say in that ZAMM passage that nothing exists except in
>> the mind, making the Quality Reality ghost like all the other ghosts
>> that comprise "the whole blessed world we live in." ??
>>
>>> Platt:
>>>> I need further explanation of this. Is the MOQ separate from the
>>>> idea of the MOQ?
>>>
>>> I would drop ideas in the "concept ... in our mind" sense.when
>>> talking about the MOQ because it invokes SOM's mind/matter split
>>> that the MOQ rejects.
>>
>> OK, the MOQ is not a concept in our mind, although in the ZAMM
>> passage Pirsig says, "The world has no existence whatsoever outside
>> the human imagination." (I presume "imagination" here means "concept
>> in our mind.) So if the MOQ is not a concept, it doesn't exist. Yet
>> you say it does.
>>
>> You see why it gets confusing?
>>
>>>> If so, where does the idea of the MOQ fit into the MOQ?
>>>
>>> The MOQ as an idea belongs to intellect. The MOQ began as an
>>> intellectual pattern but turned too unruly (dynamic) for comfort and
>>> tore loose. .
>>
>> Can you expand on that concept?
>>
>>>> Or is paradox our lot in life when it comes to thinking about
>>>> reality?
>>
>>> I don't see it as paradoxical unless we regard intellect in its SOM
>>> role as shuffling around of ideas in our mind. It's MOQ role is the
>>> value of the subject/object (mind/matter) DISTINCTION or AGGREGATE.
>>
>> OK. Let me try to summarize. The "Quality Reality" as you call it is a
>> synonym for the MOQ. So concentrate not on what the MOQ says as a
>> metaphysics. Instead, concentrate on what it points to -- a world of
>> values, best understood not by words, but by pre-verbal direct
>> experience.
>>
>> Some time ago I listed what I thought might be indications that
>> someone was in "MOQ-Land." Please let me know iff any the following
>> gets close to what you are driving at by restricting the intellectual
>> level to SOL:
>>
>> You know you're in MOQ-Land:
>>
>> When you visit an art gallery.
>> When you say, "That's class."
>> When a poem touches your heart.
>> When you hold a baby in your arms.
>> When you go with your gut instinct.
>> When you find meaning in mythology.
>> When a chill goes down your spine.
>> When you have a feeling of coming home.
>> When you lose your sense of self while working.
>> When you hear a jazz performer improvise.
>> When you deliberately seek a break from routine.
>> When you think, "There must be a better way."
>> When you consider doing nothing a viable option.
>> When a solution to a problem suddenly pops into your head.
>> When you ponder the difference between a jelly glass and fine crystal.
>> When you identify one who says "outrageous" as an armchair moralist.
>> When on seeing a butterfly your think, "A nice biological value
>> pattern." When you imagine that a gun pointed at you is an inorganic
>> value pattern than can destroy all the values of your direct
>> experience.
>>
>> Thanks, Bo.
>>
>> Platt
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>
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