Hey Dan, Dan quoted Pirsig: The low value that can be derived from sitting on a hot stove is obviously an experience even though it is not an object and even though it is not subjective. The low value comes first, then the subjective thoughts that include such things as stove and heat and pain come second. The value is the reality that brings the thoughts to mind.
Dan said: And I agree there is a subtlety here easily overlooked... the negative value of realizing we're sitting on the hot stove comes later... we are not yet certain what is creating the negative value... we only know that we are indeed in a low quality situation. That much is empirically verifiable. The low quality value we experience sitting on a hot stove is more real than our sweet ass or the stove. It is that empirical reality out of which we intellectually construct the negative notion of sitting on a hot stove. What I sense Steve is doing (and you by backing him up) is assigning a negative value to that which gets us off the stove... Dynamic Quality. We are indeed in a low quality situation but the subjective thought of negative value (of pain) comes later. Pain as a negative value is subjective. But what gets us off the stove is between the stove and the subjective self, according to Robert Pirsig. Perhaps there is a confusion between low value and negative value which is being overlooked. Matt: I did not realize you were making a distinction between "low value" and "negative value." This I find interesting, and here indeed would lie the subtlety. Nowhere do I recall Pirsig making a firm distinction between "low" and "negative." And it does not appear to me in those passages themselves, only in a construal of them. This would be an enlightening and subtle distinction to bear in mind, one I'd need refreshing on. In doing so, however, I wonder too about what the distinction is supposed to separate. I'm guessing that the DQ-low-value/DQ-high-value continuum exactly parallels the SQ-negative-value/SQ-positive-value continuum. And if that's the case, all it does is tell you which epithets to use depending on whether you are talking about DQ or static patterns. It doesn't, itself, tell one whether they are talking about DQ or static patterns. And this last ability is one of the central issues Steve, Ron, and I were tussling with. And if all the above is the case, I would continue to be unclear about what is being illuminated in that issue by this subtle distinction. In construing Steve and I, you say we "assign a negative value to that which gets us off the stove...Dynamic Quality." The only basis for rejecting this formulation is the subtle terminological distinction that, I think, you are introducing (and, my present impression is, not Pirsig). I'm not against subtle distinctions; I'm not against having carefully constructed conceptual boxes that everything needs to be placed in correctly; nor am I against innovating on Pirsig's formulations in order to dissolve problems. However, I'm not sure "confusion" is the right word for someone who doesn't make a distinction between "low" and "negative." Everything seems to hang on on us not using the right word, but I'm not sure Steve or I ever made the conceptual slips that landed us into making that mistake of talking about "subjective thoughts." It seems, at the moment, a willy-nilly rendering of what we were talking about to assume we were making that mistake. Perhaps we did: the first step would be to make _that_ mistake clear, not recapitulating the Pirsigian notions we think we are already not flouting. So I guess the main point is that I do not find an obvious distinction between "low" and "negative" in Pirsig's philosophy. This is a textual question that can be cleared up. If we were wrong on that, then I think Pirsig's "affirmative" annotation does take on a slightly different color, though it still does look like he's apologizing for a subtlety that was perhaps too subtle for his readers. But even if this is all the case, I'm still not clear how this helps with the central issue. Matt 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
