Hi Craig, All,
> [Steve] >> The MOQ says that Quality comes first which produces ideas which >> produce what we know as causality. It is common sense to presume that >> causality comes first and produces ideas. However, as if to further >> the confusion, the MOQ says that the idea that causality comes first >> is a high quality idea! Craig: > But between the "Quality that comes first" and the "ideas which > produce what we know as causality" there must be an awful lot of production. > That production is what "I know as causality". Steve: It may help to distinguish between the epistemology and the cosmology of the MOQ to understand Pirsig's claim (which I paraphrased above to put it in the context of causality rather than matter). If the production you are talking about is inorganic, biological, and social patterns rather than causality then the MOQ's _cosmology_ would agree. It says that it is a good idea to think of such patterns as having evolved in history before intellectual patterns (which include the idea of causality). But again, that same cosmology that puts inorganic patterns historically before intellectual ones itself is an idea which shows that ideas come before inorganic, biological, and social patterns in the MOQ's _epistemology_ which is also its ontology. (As I understand the terms, metaphysics usually gets divided into ontology and cosmology. In the MOQ, experience is reality, so its ontology is pretty much its epistemology (at least as far as DQ/sq) and cosmology gets demoted to being mere "ideas about reality" as distinct from direct experience (except perhaps for asserting the four types of patterns as a moral order since it seems to have ontological status in the MOQ).) Once we make that distinction, we see that ontologically, causality exists in the MOQ only as an intellectual pattern rather than as an extra term in addition to subjects and objects (i.e., rules about how they interact with one another written into the fabric of reality). What is fundamental is Value. The SOM ontological status of "A causes B" is replaced with "B values precondition A." Ontologically there is nothing but Value, which means we can dispense with ontology. We don't need an extra ontological category for causal laws since Value does just fine in explaining a basis for causality. Causality is then only an epistemological concern for making predictions rather than a clue to what is REALLY going on in the universe (i.e., reading the mind of God and learning the rules with which he runs things.) Ok, that was clear as mud. Maybe others will be interested in taking on trying to unpack that Pirsig quote from LC by distinguishing the terms for epistemology, ontology, and cosmology. I hope so. A shorter answer in terms of pragmatism is that language evolved as part of human tool-making and "causality" is a particular use of language that we do only because human beings have the needs and desires we have rather than being something handed to us by the universe. It is pointless then to try to distinguish the human from the non-human in the concept of causality or anything else since finding descriptions that are distinct from merely human concerns (trying to imagine what the view from nowhere is like to see how things look from a perspective-less perspective) is itself just one more human concern. There's no way to step out of our own skins. Best, Steve 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
