Arlo, Krimel, Marsha and all:
Arlo said:
Yeah, I agree. [That it looks like Krimel been trying to provoke a fight for
the last couple of days.] This is just the latest reboot of the "Enlightened
Prophet Saves Pirsig From Himself" franchise. Its a tired story. And while I'm
sure Krimel thinks HIS enlightened prophet schtick is novel and different, it's
really neither. On a simple level, its confirmation bias, of course. Part
of the "enlightened prophet" schtick is to simply reject any and all evidence
that challenges your claim. I mean, its not rocket science that in order to
make his "enlightened salvation of Pirsig" work he has to openly and
aggressively reject Pirsig's text as authority on Pirsig's views. Add a splash
of "martyr assaulting the orthodoxy" and pinch of
deconstructionism-as-relativism and, as Kirk might say, you have the Kobayashi
Maru [a no-win situation or scenario].
dmb says:
Confirmation bias certainly plays a role in this. As Wikipedia will "confirm",
confirmation bias leads a person "to favor information that confirms their
beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember
information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. ..They also
tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position" and
this bias has "been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a
disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed
to the same evidence),.." This is basically what Pirsig described as "the
Cleveland Harbor Effect" and his "full cup" analogy. As I understand, everyone
does this to some degree. We do need to conserve our beliefs to some extent,
otherwise we'd be easily swayed by any belief that came along, nonsense or not.
But too much rigidity, too much bias, is unhealthy as retards one's capacity to
learn, grow and change. Sometimes the bias is so strong tha
t you'll see people pull all kinds of stunts when they're confronted with
dis-confirming evidence. I'm fairly certain that this explains the behavior we
see around here, especially from folks like Marsha and Krimel and all the
religious types who've waltzed through here. (This tendency is usually more
pronounced in political and religious conservatives.) When I complain about
their evasions, I'm talking about those biased stunts. Naturally a heavily
biased person is going to be the very worst judge of his own bias. That's why
we need feedback from others. That's why we need to take the primary textual
evidence seriously [Pirsig's books]. That's why we need illumination from other
credible sources, from other philosophers, from encyclopedia and, yes, when
things degenerate down to the realm of plain old contradictions, even
dictionaries. These are all tools to with which to knock the bias out. It's a
kind of reality check that serves as feedback from a neutral third party. Th
ese things are supposed to inhibit our ability to maintain delusions and
confusions and mistakes.
That's why Marsha and Krimel won't have any part of that evidence stuff. That's
why they have "to openly and aggressively reject Pirsig's text as authority on
Pirsig's views.". Apparently, they just don't mind taking this absurd stance
wherein the MOQ is just means whatever they want it mean - while at the same
time relying on the quotes that confirm what they want. That is quite a stunt.
Arlo said:
Sadly, this wouldn't need to escalate to the level of hostility, it would be a
simple statement for Krimel to say "Pirsig was wrong, and here's what I think
is better." Instead we end up with some
Pirsig-as-Authority-on-Pirsig-rejecting, salvation-reconstruction that is not
just an 'equally valid' interpretation of Pirsig, but the one that rescues the
poor author from his own stupidity and timidity (and us along the way). And if
that sounds familiar, well, like I said its this year's reboot of the all too
familiar franchise.
dmb says:
Yea, hostility is often a symptom of a strong confirmation bias. Challenging
these confirmed views are felt as deeply threatening or perceived as a personal
attack. The swooping savior syndrome is, I think, just another stunt and it has
the added advantage of implying that the self-appointed savior is so clever and
wise and profound that he or she is above all that the stupid static stuff,
stuff like evidence or the meaning of words and concepts. It's a very
ego-boosting response when one has accused of misunderstanding the most basic
terms and ideas. Emotionally speaking, this savior act says, "You only THINK
that I'm failing first grade because my view is post-Doctoral brilliance that
you can't understand."
There is nothing wrong with a person sincerely attempting to improve on Pirsig.
(Although if the attempt was being made by a person who didn't first take the
time and effort to learn some philosophy, I'd suspect them of being a bit
delusional.) Maybe it's not exactly a logical necessity but I don't see how it
could be possible to improve an idea or offer a better alternative to that
idea, unless you first understand what that idea means. That's why the swooping
savior act is always so implausible. I can see where they've wrong and it's
always the core concepts; SOM, MOQ, Quality, Dynamic Quality, static quality.
Krimel, Marsha and Bo all have serious problems with the misuse of these terms
and they absolutely refuse to be corrected by anyone, not even by Pirsig's
text. Marsha, for example, may or may not read the following quote but she will
certainly continue to describe static patterns as "ever-changing" regardless of
what it obviously means.
"The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be separated from the
Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like the rest of the printed philosophic
tradition it doesn't change from day to day, although the world it talks about
does."
Hmmm. If the MOQ itself is static and intellectual and morality is served by
killing intellectual patterns completely, I guess Pirsig wants us to pull the
plug on this discussion group, burn all his books, and never speak of it again.
But seriously, Marsha's notion of ever-changing patterns confuses the world,
which is ever-changing, with intellectual static patterns, which doesn't change
from day to day.
The opening line of the Tao Te Ching says, "The Tao that can be named is not
the true Tao" and in ZAMM he translates this into, "The quality that can be
defined is not the Absolute Quality". The Tao, like Quality in ZAMM or DQ in
Lila, cannot be named because names are static and Dynamic Quality is not.
Arlo said:
Krimel still hasn't answered with examples of "downside of DQ", but given that
expression alone it's a clear rejection (and misunderstanding) of Pirsig's
Dynamic Quality. My guess is that Krimel's DQ is "chaos", the
destroyer/transformer Shiva, the "darkness" opposite the "light"- since he's
adopted the Yin-Yang terminology, and the use of "downside" would indicate a
correlation to the Shiva/Vishnu relationship in the Trimurti rather than a
mutually positive relation like "masculine/feminine" or "active/passive" or
even "sun/moon" in contrast to "light/dark". But let's face it, there is no
dialogue here. There is the glorious martyr descending into the mud to rescue
the swine.
dmb says:
The first I want to say is, "oink". And yes, that's what it looks like to me
too. He's using Pirsig's terms but it has nothing to do with the MOQ. The "DQ"
in Krimel's question (what's the downside of DQ) can't mean what Pirisg means
by it. That what I tried to show him by substituting the letters "DQ" for a
more descriptive alternative like "pre-conceptual experience" or "primary
empirical reality". When you put that into Krimel's sentence, one would hope,
it is clearly exposed as nonsense. "What is the downside of the primary
empirical reality?" "What is the downside of pre-intellectual experience?" He
still hasn't explained what this question could possibly mean.
And speaking of evasions, Krimel has many outstanding criticisms and questions
still waiting for a real answer. Just going off the top of my head, there is
the issue of distinguishing the MOQ from SOM, of distinguishing static from
Dynamic, and the issue of translating ZAMM's Quality into Lila's Dynamic
Quality. I remember those errors quite easily because they are so basic and
central to the larger whole. Getting these issues wrong is going to be a total
disaster, presuming that one actually wants to understand the MOQ.
"The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be separated from the
Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like the rest of the printed philosophic
tradition it doesn't change from day to day, although the world it talks about
does."
"Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is
a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A
metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any
metaphysics."
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
