From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [MD] The percolating SOL
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 11:31:00 -0600
Bodvar said:
As long as the MOQ is seen as an intellectual pattern (instead of intellect a
MOQ level) SOM is alive. Intellect remains a mental, mindish realm where ideas
reside, SOM one idea, the MOQ another idea, allegedly a good idea, but
nevertheless a subjective CONCEPT different from the objective world "out
there" ... and SOM prevails.
By contrast, in chapter 19 of ZAMM, Pirsig said:
He noted that although normally you associate Quality with objects, feelings of
Quality sometimes occur without any object at all. This is what led him at
first to think that maybe Quality is all subjective. But subjective pleasure
wasn't what he meant by Quality either. Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality
takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is
opposed to subjectivity.
I don't know how much thought passed before he arrived at this, but eventually
he saw that Quality couldn't be independently related with either the subject
or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each
other. It is the point at which subject and object meet.
That sounded warm.
Quality is not a thing. It is an event.
Warmer.
It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.
And because without objects there can be no subject...because the objects
create the subject's awareness of himself...Quality is the event at which
awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.
Hot.
Now he knew it was coming.
This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and
object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the
Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects,
which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!
Now he had that whole damned evil dilemma by the throat. The dilemma all the
time had this unseen vile presumption in it, for which there was no logical
justification. that Quality was the effect of subjects and objects. It was not!
He brought out his knife.
"The sun of quality," he wrote, "does not revolve around the subjects and
objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not
subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it!
And at that point, when he wrote that, he knew he had reached some kind of
culmination of thought he had been unconsciously striving for over a long
period of time.
Likewise, in chapter 20, Pirsig said:
He'd been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and matter and
had identified Quality as the parent of mind and matter, that event which gives
birth to mind and matter. This Copernican inversion of the relationship of
Quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully
explained, but he didn't mean it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the
cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a
kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You
can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and
between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time
lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant, But there's no
justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant...none whatsoever.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present
is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of
that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any
intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal.
Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes
place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus
felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually
identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is
the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.
AND
In answer to his colleagues at school he wrote:
"Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true
precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic
explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into
subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word
quality cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because
Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
"The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our
environment can understand is that `Quality is the response of an organism to
its environment' (he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to
see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory). An amoeba, placed on
a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull
away from the acid (I think). If it could speak the amoeba, without knowing
anything about sulfuric acid, could say, `This environment has poor quality.'
If it had a nervous system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome
the poor quality of the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images
and symbols from its previous experience, to define the unpleasant nature of
its new environment and thus `understand' it.
"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and
heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy,
engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And
they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing
that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into
an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality.
Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create
the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.
"Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it
within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality
cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than
Quality itself."
AND
In chapter 22, he wrote:
Poincaré then hypothesized that this selection is made by what he called the
"subliminal self," an entity that corresponds exactly with what Phædrus called
preintellectual awareness. The subliminal self, Poincaré said, looks at a large
number of solutions to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the
domain of consciousness. Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal
self on the basis of "mathematical beauty," of the harmony of numbers and
forms, of geometric elegance. "This is a true esthetic feeling which all
mathematicians know," Poincaré said, "but of which the profane are so ignorant
as often to be tempted to smile." But it is this harmony, this beauty, that is
at the center of it all.
...
Poincaré's contemporaries refused to acknowledge that facts are preselected
because they thought that to do so would destroy the validity of scientific
method. They presumed that "preselected facts" meant that truth is "whatever
you like" and called his ideas conventionalism. They vigorously ignored the
truth that their own "principle of objectivity" is not itself an observable
fact...and therefore by their own criteria should be put in a state of
suspended animation.
They felt they had to do this because if they didn't, the entire philosophic
underpinning of science would collapse. Poincaré didn't offer any resolutions
of this quandary. He didn't go far enough into the metaphysical implications of
what he was saying to arrive at the solution. What he neglected to say was that
the selection of facts before you "observe" them is "whatever you like" only in
a dualistic, subject-object metaphysical system! When Quality enters the
picture as a third metaphysical entity, the preselection of facts is no longer
arbitrary. The preselection of facts is not based on subjective, capricious
"whatever you like" but on Quality, which is reality itself. Thus the quandary
vanishes.
It was as though Phædrus had been working on a puzzle of his own and because of
lack of time had left one whole side unfinished.
Poincaré had been working on a puzzle of his own. His judgment that the
scientist selects facts, hypotheses and axioms on the basis of harmony, also
left the rough serrated edge of a puzzle incomplete. To leave the impression in
the scientific world that the source of all scientific reality is merely a
subjective, capricious harmony is to solve problems of epistemology while
leaving an unfinished edge at the border of metaphysics that makes the
epistemology unacceptable.
But we know from Phædrus' metaphysics that the harmony Poincaré talked about is
not subjective. It is the source of subjects and objects and exists in an
anterior relationship to them. It is not capricious, it is the force that
opposes capriciousness; the ordering principle of all scientific and
mathematical thought which destroys capriciousness, and without which no
scientific thought can proceed. What brought tears of recognition to my eyes
was the discovery that these unfinished edges match perfectly in a kind of
harmony that both Phædrus and Poincaré talked about, to produce a complete
structure of thought capable of uniting the separate languages of Science and
Art into one.
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