Arlo said:
You can argue that a better metaphysics must include pre-experiential
'things/patterns/objects/existence', but we really need to be clear that this
IS "SOM", and that simply not using 'subjects' and 'objects' doesn't change
that.
Ron replied:
And I think that is what Pirsig does when he employs the 4 levels explanation
and evolution. Both concern the usefulness of pre-expeirential concepts. His
terms change but he's talkin' SOM in the inorganic and biological levels which
is what often causes quite a bit of confusion around here, the use of Pirsig
quotes becomes contradictory and a whole lot of key strokes are spilled over a
basic clarification of meaning.
dmb says:
Yea, I think you guys are getting at the source of much confusion.
Arlo is quite rightly identified the essential problem with SOM, a pre-existing
reality (to which our true concepts must correspond). And yet, as Ron points
out, the MOQ's four levels are supposed to represent evolutionary stages of
development wherein inorganic matter pre-exists the human capacity for
conceptualization by billions of years. This is the basic problem, right? It
seems to be a contradiction.
Time and change are just basic concepts that emerge from Dynamic Quality, not
primary realities of their own and yet evolution is nothing but change over
time. So people wonder how to reconcile this or, much worse, they don't see any
need for reconciliation. In the latter case, there is no conflict because
Pirsig's levels of static patterns are just a new names for the same old
pre-existing "things" that SOM says they are. Being a MOQer, in this case, is
just a superficial change in lingo and not a real change of mind or
perspective. In this latter case, where the rejection of SOM is little more
than a banishment of the terms "subject" and "object", the Copernican
revolution fizzled out, got short-circuited, or otherwise failed to
materialize.
As I understand it, the MOQ's levels don't divide reality into evolutionary
stages so much as they divide what's in the encyclopedia. Pirsig says these
levels include absolutely everything except DQ, which means it includes
absolutely everything except reality itself. That is quite a lot to leave OUT
of the encyclopedia, eh?
It seems pretty clear to me that the MOQ's evolutionary levels are only
intended to organize our concepts and they should not be taken as a description
of reality as it is in itself. In the MOQ, that's is DQ and it is not
definable. You're not going to find the primary empirical reality in the
encyclopedia and the immediate flux of life is not to be found in the
dictionary, you know? The evolutionary hierarchy of the MOQ does not divide the
undivided reality. It re-organized and re-cuts and re-imagines the ghosts, the
analogies, the knowable, definable, static patterns. The levels are just a
better way to handle our ordinary concepts, including "time" and "change", both
the common sense and scientific versions. Pirsig does not offer this hierarchy
as anything more than a better analogy. It is not supposed to correspond to
objective reality and we MOQers are supposed to realize that reality itself is
experience as such. Anything we say about that primary empirical reality, th
e thoughts and the words that come after, will always be secondary. And so it
is with the MOQ and its four levels. The MOQ itself is static, Pirsig says, and
should not be confused with DQ, the ever-changing reality that it talks about.
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