Magnus said to dmb:
Yes, yes. But you completely missed my point. As I said in my reply to Dan just
now, a computer that supports intellectual patterns must support all lower
levels as well. Not indirectly via users or anything but directly and at all
times. The novel that is stored in a computer must be supported by social,
biological and inorganic patterns *inside* the computer at all times.
dmb replies:
Biological patterns INSIDE the computer? Seriously? It seems you have a fairly
bizarre position. I mean, as far as I know there is no such thing as a computer
that operates with social or biological patterns inside it. Pirsig's static
levels are a way to re-categorized all the stuff in the encyclopedia of
everything. It can be used to describe actual computers but the artifact you've
described is pure fiction, no? A computer with biological and social patterns
is most likely to appear in a science-fiction horror movie, no? But in our
world, computers are a system of logical relations made manifest in inorganic
materials, the way a motorcycle is a system of rationality made of steel,
chrome, rubber and maybe an old beer can.
Magnus said:
Every quality event is the source of a subject and an object, right? And every
quality event is of one level, right? So at each inorganic quality event, we
get a subject and an object, at every biological QE, we get... and so on.
dmb says:
Three times no. I'm fairly certain that you have the wrong ideas going here.
You seem to be using a literal and materialistic interpretation of "the quality
event". To say it's the "source of subjects and objects" does NOT means that
subjects and objects just pop into existence after each "event". The claim is
epistemological, not ontological. It's about experience, perception and
conceptualization, not things. It's just that those "things" called subjects
and objects are the way we conceptualize experience. It's the common sense way
to see the world in our culture and most people never really doubt it. You
could also call it naive realism. But what Pirsig is saying is that common
sense is one big pile of analogies, of ghosts and so our static reality is an
evolved conceptual reality. And so Dynamic Quality is the cutting edge of
experience, the pre-intellectual moment of awareness prior to our
conceptualizations. Likewise, William James says that "pure experience" is not
yet
sorted into subjects and objects, mind and matter, or any other categories.
Pirsig quotes him in agreement and says that subjects and objects are secondary
and conceptual while the immediate flux of life is primary and
pre-intellectual.
So I think that if you say we get subjects and objects from an inorganic
quality event, you've got Quality producing a metaphysics of substance. But the
whole idea is to say that subjects and objects are abstractions, they have been
inferred from experience. They are ideas that have been reified. (To mistake
something abstract as real or concrete.) And since the claim has to do with how
we know rather than what there is, I think the idea can't be applied on the
inorganic and biological levels. Subject and objects are human ideas derived
from human experience. Inorganic patterns "respond" only in an inorganic way,
according to the laws of physics. But they aren't handed SOM glasses through
which to view the world. They don't even poop, you know?
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