Hi DMB
One question, are animals able to recognise patterns, shapes, forms? Does
the MOQ
see animals as intellectualising? Bad move I'd suggest, surely SQ is active
in all
processes prior to the intellectual ones that humans undertake? At least
that
is the view In take. How do you explain how non-intellectual processes work
without any SQ involved? That would be a chaos don;t you think? If not why
not?
Luckily animals can identify a mate without any intellectual concepts
required,
such is SQ I would suggest, regular patterns experienced as qualities with
positive
value I propose. This is an idea but one about the ontology and activity of
non-
intellectual processes, I think the MOQ says something about processes and
how they causally work not just about how we understand them. Otherwise
it is not really a metaphysics is it? it would just be an epistemology.
Of course I recognise that experienced phenomenon are prior to all theories
we
develop tom explain and understand our experiences, not very hard to get
your
head around unless you are a SOM materialist.
Thanks
David M
-----Original Message-----
From: david buchanan
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 8:43 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [MD] Where does DQ end and SQ begin and SQ end and DQ begin?
It's all bananas isn't it?
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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