Hi Mary! I get to you at last. So much wading through the boys, it's a relief to get some feminine company for a bit.
> > [Mary now] > We seem to be talking right past each other right here. What you say is > not > what I was at all, but I'm willing to go with it for a moment to see where > this is heading. It may be too early to say whether the difference > matters. > > John: > But I do believe it's important to assert that Quality is co-fundamental > with Free Will. You literally cannot have Quality when you literally have > no choice. Therefore, Quality is dependent upon Choice and unlike Ham > asserts, Choice is also dependant upon the existence of Quality. There > must > be a criterion for the better alternative, in order for choice to be real. > > [Mary now] > This is an interesting question. Quality vs free will. What I want to > know > is what does everyone here mean by 'free will'? At the end of the day, > there is no such thing as absolute free will. I don't have free will to > choose to win the lottery, for instance, even though I can imagine it and > desire to do so. So, what's the difference between limited free will and > determinism if all the possible choices are so limited by constraints? Do > you get my question here? It's not intended to be facetious. I'm just > kind > of wondering of the concept of free will isn't a strawman. > > John Now: Although I started to respond and then the power went off, so "now" always remains a nebulous concept from the past. I think one thing should be clear by my making free will co-fundamental with DQ, is that then Free Will is equally indefinable. So you can probably never pin it down exactly. But I think we can delineate a bit, anyway. Talk about some of the things it is not, for instance. It's not the complete control of all reality. When you're in prison, you're in prison, and all the freedom of your body that you might "will" is denied you by your circumstances. But you're still free to long for it. You're free to choose. That's the free will I mean - choice. Fundamental choice. And if it is a strawman, well it's the strawman upon which all reality is constructed! abstract free will from the world, and you end up with the exact same reality as Pirsig describes when he takes out all the Quality. A drab, meaningless emptiness with no laughter, joy or color. > John: > I dunno, Mary. Maybe it is is a platypus. But so what? Aren't all > platypi > in the end, cute and interesting creatures, worthy of an intellectual > cuddle? > > [Mary now] > Well, maybe you can adopt one at the animal shelter? > > They're pretty shy creature, actually. And I think they bite. > [Mary now] > Come on, John! Quality with a small q is what you get sold in a store, > it's > what the Victorians had defined down to the monogrammed napkins in their > drawing rooms, it has to do with manners, and Victorian morals, breeding, > proper upbringing, and all sorts of other pretentious crap. Pirsig rants > about this very thing for pages, and it's not just old historical stuff > either. People work very hard now to be able to afford a home by a quality > builder, in a quality neighborhood, with quality schools, while driving a > quality car and wearing designer quality clothes, etc. It's not trivial or > silly. It's essential to people's lives - certain kinds of people that is. > If you ask these people what quality is, they will tell you, and I am sure > it will not be the same thing you or me or Arlo would say. When Pirsig > says > we all know what Quality is, he is right, but first you have to pull the > advertising wool away from most Westerner's eyes before they can have a > chance of noticing it. > > John: Yes, the static aspect. What is agreed upon in society. Interesting. Perhaps sq is inherently social? Hmmm... that sort of ties together a few loose ends, I think maybe. I'll have to roll that around in my head a bit. Which is why it helps to conceptualize DQ. That's the key aspect of the split, a way to keep your Quality disambiguated. I like it. > John: > > Is anti-matter part of the universe? I think so and in the same way I > think anti-quality an aspect of this Quality/Value/Morals that you call > the > ground-stuff of the Universe. In the same way of the good "you know what > it > is" we can use the same criterion for evil. It's hard to define exactly, > but you sure as hell know it when you experience it. > > [Mary now] > Tricky John! I ain't no physicist, but my Star Trek understanding of > anti-matter is that it's just plain ole matter with a reverse polarity. > Positive electrons and negative protons, you know, but still recognizable > as > good ole Newtonian matter at the end of the day. Evil? I have no idea > what > that is. I think you have to believe in God before you believe in evil. > Maybe evil is just stuff you don't like taken to several orders of > magnitude? If enough people don't like something like Nazis or Republicans > :), they can call it evil. > > Only the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. > > Which brings me around to saying that evil seems to be stuff that's good at > a lower level than I am, from my perspective anyway. Sorry, I really can't > figure out Nazi's at all, but greed is good at the biological level and > even > the early social, so you gotta figure greedy Capitalists are just doin what > comes natural - to a gorilla on Wall Street. > > John: It's tricky, I agree. We don't discuss evil very much. But nevertheless I think there is plain evidence it exists. For instance, if we abstract evil from the world we know, just like when we abstract quality, we find a far different world than the one we experience. Therefore, we know that evil is real. I think evil is largely a 4th-level phenom, for some reason. I don't see tigers killing their prey or babies pooping their diapers as anything to do with evil. I think a man who cigarette burn the baby's butt, or the hunter who bags the last tiger to hang on his wall and ego-magnify himself, that approaches what I'd call "evil". But it's probably just as impossible to define exactly as "good", so we'll probably have to leave it somewhat nebulous. [Mary now] You cannot equate objects with static patterns of value. Wish I could just say something to make that leap clear, but I can't. It took me a long time to absorb the difference. Marsha said something one time, and now I can't even remember what, that caused a tremendous landslide of new understanding to happen. I didn't ask for it. Just happened, but once it did there was no going back. It's like those pen and ink drawings that can be two different things. The first time you look you only see the old woman, but all at once you can see the young girl in the feather hat. After that you can switch back and forth at will, but you can never again look at the picture and not see both. John: Well seeing static patterns as inherently dynamic, but still enjoying their static nature as a function of usefulness... I could see how you could hold both those conceptualizations side by side and keep from getting trapped in the perceptions of objectification. But still, in that one sense, we do use them as objects of thought, correct? John: According to a set of almost self-generative criterion. It is Quality which begets quality. It doesn't really arise from the self, it doesn't arise from the other. It arises from the entanglement between. [Mary now] Ummm. Not really. I don't get this entanglement between stuff, though I hear it here a lot. That's very SOMish, you know? A vs B. POVs are not objects. POVs don't need a relationship to justify their existence, though there are plenty of relationships happening. John: The entanglement between, is when A and B realize their identity through a relationship - a Quality relationship, and it's that relationship which is fundamental to their identity, not any intrinsic existence of their own. Does that make more sense? Because that's all I mean by both "codependent arising" and "entanglement between" (from a video Marsha posted by BA Wallace, btw, is the origination. I oughta look it up) > John: Thinking that it's all about me, sorta misses the point when "me" is an artificial construct anyway. But I figure hey, as long as I'm here, then I can argue with a certain logic that I am meant to be, and other than that I don't think about it much. I take as a presumption, the universe as a whole being good, or the source of all value, as the most pragmatically useful presumption possible. Everything else smacks of ultimate nihilism to me. But usually, the universe as I experience it is not hostile. Maybe if I lived in space or the north pole or palestine (or japan) I'd feel different. But I live in northern california, and even with all the rain, the universe doesn't feel hostile to me. So maybe that's why I like to look at it as fundamentally good? That's my experience, so... [Mary now] Nihilism seems to be the bugaboo of the month around here. Every other post has somebody accusing somebody else of being a nihilist. This is so funny! A few months ago, it was SOM. God forbid someone was 'steeped in SOM'. Nothing personal or directed at you, John, but it's just something I've noticed. Is it trendy and fashionable to accuse people of this? Guess I'm a life-long atheist nihilist, then. Nobody ever told me there was a Purpose to Life, and most specifically a BIG Purpose to MY Life. I must have been standing behind the door? Anyway, all these years I've gotten along perfectly fine without a Purpose that was handed to me. I figure life is what you make of it and that's entirely up to me. John: Well Mary, that's quite a bit different than saying there is no purpose at all. And what I term nihilism is the belief that's based on nothingness. I mean, it's just the definition of the term right? So the next step after basing one's purpose on the self, is to show that the self is an empty construct, and viola - you have nihilism. Mary: Again, nothing personal if you should take it that way, but I think people who worry about being a nihilist are egotists. John: Touche! Almost. Everybody is an egoist, to a certain extent. You have to have a strong ego, just to understand what "caring" even means. But basing one's values upon ego- or being in a "worried" condition, would qualify as overly concerned with one's ego so I basically agree. Mary: I guess my ego would want to insist I had a Purpose to MY Life, but I make every effort to ignore my ego as often as possible. :) ...and sometimes I might even be a little bit successful. John: Well you are constructing a conundrum for yourself then, for if your purpose comes from yourself, and you are ignoring yourself, then you're ignoring your purpose and apt to flail a bit. Unconscious metaphysics (or purposes) tend to be bad metaphysics (or purposes). John: I dunno, Mary. I don't know if I can agree at all. The way I view it, he was trying to hammer home exactly the point that what we commonly perceive as quality, is far more significant than we realize. It's not the conceptualization that he was trying to challenge, it's a realization of what that common conceptualization means. And pragmatically speaking, a world where people change their relationship with low and high quality items, is the best of all worlds I can extrapolate. It's a very simple thing really - Peace of mind - another example of something that "you know what it is" and it doesn't take a lot of fancy philosophizin' really. In fact, what takes a lot of energy, is getting people to believe in the world of objects! Think how much time, energy and money is invested in this process... That's the really incredible paradigm shift. [Mary now] You are right, John. We do not agree at all right now. Maybe what I said earlier about seeing things differently in the pen and ink drawings explains where I'm coming from? As I said before, I don't think people necessarily know what it is right at first. They have to stop listening to the culture and start listening to their hearts before they know what Quality is. John: But I'd agree with that. Specifically, they have to listen to what their heart says about culture's opinions of Quality. [Mary now] HE HE. This made me laugh out loud the first time I read it. :) Can you define irony? Nope! But I know it when I see it! Take care, John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
