David Morey said to dmb:
... Sure all concepts are SQ I agree. But is all SQ conceptual? Are not the
levels below the intellectual not forms of non conceptual SQ? I would have
thought that is what Pirsig is saying? DO you agree? [AND] Is not the
pre-conceptual also static and SQ patterned at times? Otherwise how were there
any patterns that formed the inorganic and the organic before human beings came
along to conceive the MOQ? Was not the reality of SQ and DQ forming the cosmos
before human beings came along?
dmb says:
These questions get at a very important point. This is where lots of MOQers
(especially Marsha) crash and burn. People have asked Pirsig himself about
this, as we see in Lila's Child.
"The MOQ does not deny the traditional scientific view of reality as composed
of material substance and independent of us. It says it is an extremely high
quality idea. We should follow it whenever it is practical to do so. But the
MOQ, like philosophic idealism, says this scientific view of reality is still
an idea. If it were not an idea, then that 'independent scientific material
reality' would not be able to change as new scientific discoveries come in."
[LILA'S CHILD, Annotation 4]
"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 MOQ says that the idea
that matter comes first is a high quality idea!" [LILA'S CHILD, Annotation 67]
"It is important for an understanding of the MOQ to see that although 'common
sense' dictates that inorganic nature came first, actually 'common sense' which
is a set of ideas, has to come first. This 'common sense' is arrived at
through a huge web of socially approved evaluations of various alternatives.
The key term here is "evaluation," i.e., quality decisions. The fundamental
reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws approved of by common
sense but the approval itself and the quality that leads to it." [LILA'S CHILD,
Annotation 97]
"I see today more clearly than when I wrote the SODV paper that the key to
integrating the MOQ with science is through philosophic idealism, which says
that objects grow out of ideas, not the other way around." [LILA'S CHILD,
Annotation 105]
It might be tough to wrap your mind around this point because of the way it
seems to defy scientific materialism and common sense but it isn't very
complicated. Quality or pure experience comes first and ideas always come
second - and then inorganic patterns like "matter" are among those ideas. It's
the same with big bang as it is with bananas. The whole history of the universe
is made up of static patterns, of ideas and concepts and words.
We can go all the way back and find this crucial point in ZAMM too. Pirsig is
quite consistent on this point. This is how he explained it to the faculty at
Bozeman more than 50 years ago - in terms that a behaviorist could
understand....
"This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective
world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn't mean it
to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an
object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness,
which he called awareness of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a
tree until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and
instant of awareness there must be a time lag. . .
The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag,
is always in the past. . .This preintellectual reality is what [the author]
felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually
identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is
the parent, the source of all subjects and objects. . .
Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to
intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The
names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality.
They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our
memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues toour
previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our
language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of
these analogues. . ."
"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and
heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy,
engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And
they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing
that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into
an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality.
Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create
the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."
These quotes have been selected and presented to clarify that one key point. Do
they clarify it for you? Do you see how radical this is? We really cannot
rightly understand the MOQ if we think of static patterns as actual objects, as
in SOM. The MOQ, in effect, says that scientific material and common sense
realist are one giant reification problem.
Hope that helps - but after so many attempts I hold that hope very lightly. And
if Marsha sees the point, it'll stop my heart and I'll die from shock. ;-)
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