Arlo said to Mary:
So the "inorganic level" is "pattern of value" of a new level above intellect,
is that what you are saying? And what is inadequate about the way "intellect"
would describe the "inorganic level"? Do you think Pirsig's description of "the
inorganic level" is beyond intellectual description?
dmb says:
I think a big part of the confusion here is that the "inorganic level" is taken
as just another term for physical reality, which re-introduces the belief in a
pre-existing physical reality, which puts you right back into scientific
materialism.
"...Bohr's 'observation' and the MOQ's 'quality event' are the same, but the
contexts are different. The difference is rooted in the historic
chicken-and-egg controversy over whether matter came first and produces idea,
or ideas come first and produce what we know of matter. The MOQ says that
Quality comes first, which produces ideas, which produce what we know as
matter. The scientific community that has produced Complementarity, almost
invariably presumes that matter comes first and produces ideas. However, as if
to further the confusion, the idea that matter comes first is a high quality
idea! I think Bohr would say that philosophic idealism (i.e. ideas before
matter) is a viable philosophy since complementarity allows multiple
contradictory views to exist." (Robert Pirsig, LILA'S CHILD)
In other words, inorganic patterns of value are ideas derived from experience.
The idea of matter was invented to explain the felt resistances encountered in
experience. The qualities such as heaviness, hardness, sharpness, roughness and
such are added up, so to speak, and explained in terms of substance. So it is
the experience that comes first and "matter" is a inference from experience, a
thought habit that is used to guide these sorts of experiences. "Matter" is
just one of those marvelous analogies that we're handed by the culture as we
learn the language system.
The questions in this thread are merely a result of reification, of the
thingification of an idea, of a kind of literalism. In other words, Mary's
objections are not real objections but rather a reflection of a
misunderstanding.
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