Paul said to Dan:
In context (1), it is stated that the mythos has, in fact, always been created
and sustained by value. Context (2) is working out what the mythos would
consist of if it was based on the assumption that everything in it was actually
patterns of value.
...As above, it is correct to say that in context (2) objects and organisms (as
a name for inorganic patterns and biological patterns) exist independently and
prior to human experience. It is not correct to say they exist independently
and prior to experience.
...As above, in context (2) experience and human experience are not one and the
same.
....The high quality of the assumption that inorganic and biological patterns
exist (i.e. emerge from Dynamic Quality) before humans and continue to exist
independently of us is verified on a daily basis.
dmb says:
This is very helpful stuff. If I'm following you, then roughly speaking these
two contexts are ZAMM (1) and LILA (2). In ZAMM the trick is to establish that
[Dynamic] "Quality is the generator of everything we know". And "everything we
know" is talked about in terms of analogies, ghosts, and the mythos. [Dynamic]
"Quality is the source and substance of everything," Pirsig also says, but,
crucially, he says that we invented these analogies. Man "is a participant in
the creation of all things". This little profundity does not disappear from
LILA, exactly, but the focus shifts to these ghosts and analogies of the
mythos. In LILA these humanly constructed realities are referred to as static
patterns and the former mythos is reconstructed as an evolutionary morality. DQ
is still the generator here but it's outside of the four levels, which are
Pirsig's way of organizing everything in the encyclopedia or "everything we
know".
The four levels are not supposed to be the ultimate Truth or anything. The MOQ
is just an analogy because everything static is just an analogy. In effect,
Pirsig is just saying "it's better to look at things this way". You'd think it
would be easy and familiar because we all have access to the mythos and the
encyclopedia but it's really pretty radical because in Pirsig's static
hierarchy "experience" goes all the way down. The capacity to respond to DQ
goes all the way down, so that even the laws of physics (inorganic value) are
re-conceived as patterns of preference, as a kind of behavior. This is what you
might call panpsychism or panexperientialism. Pirsig says the empirical data is
the same either way. You can think subatomic particles are mechanically
following eternal laws or you can think they are expressing a very persistent
pattern of preference. But this idea that evolution is driven by preferences
gets increasingly easy to accept by common sense as we move up the scale into
the other three levels. And of course by the time we get to the intellectual
level, this reconstructed mythos is very useful, especially in philosophy and
science.
Paul said to Dan:
I think you can't see the difference between the useful subject-object
distinction and subject-object metaphysics. In the former no *ontological*
claim is being made any more than in the useful distinction between say, liquid
and gas. In the latter, one, the other, or a combination of the two are
claimed to be the ontological basis of existence itself. This is a huge
difference, not semantics. For example, I did not say that inorganic patterns
are the basis of existence itself.
dmb says:
Yes, this is what Pirsig says when he's explaining the radical empiricism of
William James. Subject and Objects are demoted from primary realities to
secondary concepts.
"By this (radical empiricism) he (James) meant that subjects and objects are
not the starting points of reality. Subjects and objects are secondary. They
are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the
immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection
with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the
distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and
content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms
wich we make them. Pure Experience cannot be called either physical or
psychical; it logically precedes this distinction."
Paul said to Dan:
... I said "assimilating a mystic experience" by which I mean something like,
having temporarily "left the mythos" one should not see the shattering of
intellectual patterns as some kind of permanent destruction of "reality." [Paul
previously]: I’m suggesting that the MOQ provides the basis of a reconstructed
mythos, not a means of escape from it. And to reiterate - this reconstructed
mythos does contain subjects and objects but they become taxonomical instead of
ontological or epistemological terms, simply referring to types (i.e. levels)
of value, as you know.
dmb says:
Right. Pirsig says anyone who live outside the mythos is insane. If think you
can live outside the mythos, then don't understand what the mythos is, he says.
That's another reason why the 180 degree enlightenment does not work. That's
why LILA still has to have a theory of truth, despite the rejection of
Objective Truth and the rejection of fixed and eternal Truth. It's not very
hard to see how 360 degree enlightenment comes back around to everyday life and
truth becomes a species of value, a particular kind of evolving static good
where DQ is still the generator. "Truth is a static intellectual pattern within
a larger entity called Quality." This 180 degree enlightenment, wherein these
static patterns are more or less dismissed (as "hypothetical", as illusions, as
ghostly in the unreal and imaginary sense) leads to a relativism, a nihilism
and an anti-intellectualism.
Thanks,
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