Hi Steve, Steve said: If experience is reality in the MOQ, then I don't see how we would ever need to worry about being in touch with reality. Likewise, if DQ is the leading edge of experience, then how is perceiving DQ something that "you" can be better or worse at? If this "you" is a set of static pattern left in the wake of DQ, then it is always in intimate contact with DQ.
Matt: Dave has been emphasizing for years whenever I would take this line that Pirsig still makes a direct/indirect distinction, and this then would appear to fill the role in providing a way of saying that DQ is something you can be better or worse at. I've always had difficulty seeing how the direct/indirect distinction doesn't reproduce the problems of the experience/reality distinction. Be that as it may, if we distinguish between the collapse of the latter from the erection of the former, perhaps the way of visualizing how it works is to see people as being able to face two different directions. The "you" of static patterns is always situated at the front of the train (because, technically, "you" _are_ the train, and how would a train not have a front?), but it can face the back, or face forward. One can then elaborate the analogy in terms similar to what Dave was saying: if you're facing backward, you're more likely to run into things; this is why we look where we're going. The trouble, yet, is that I still see no clear way of telling the difference, in your own first-personal experience, between facing your static patterns and facing forward toward your direct experience of life. How do you tell the difference between facing the direct experience of life and being lucky and never running into problems? Because what I do fear, and this will seem ironic to Dave, is the trivializing of Dynamic Quality by making it sound easy. For example, if being able to tell the difference between direct and indirect is as easy as telling the difference between linguistic and the nonlinguistic, then I think something has gone wrong in understanding the difference between the direct and indirect. It's more or less easy to tell the difference between what Pirsig describes as "Dynamic Quality" and what he describes as "static patterns." That's not what I'm concerned about, however. I'm concerned about the kinds of questions that arise when one tries to put Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality to use in one's own life. And when one tries to do this, that is what proves the importance of things in Pirsig's philosophy like the indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy thesis. 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
