Hey Mark, Yeah, I pretty much didn't accept much of what you said. From what I've understood of your redescriptions of Dynamic Quality from your paper in the Forum, you'd like coherence to be a marker for increased Dynamicness, "coherence aims at DQ" as you said here. For the life of me, I can't make much sense of that because, as far as I've understood the whole metaphor of static/Dynamic, Dynamic Quality is an explicit _breaking_ of static patterns, the opposite of coherence.
I deny being a fatalist simply because a fatalist in your sense is a _theoretical_ fatalist, but fatalism only makes sense when talking about the practice of people, not about "theory" at all. That's why I want to describe DQ as something that _nobody_ can be closed to--you'll never know when you'll get slapped in the face and you can _never_ assuredly close yourself off from being slapped in the face. If you could, then moral evolution--and any evolution--most assuredly could never take place. Think about it: static patterns want to continue to be static. If they had their way, they'd always be just the way they are. But they _can't_ have their way, not because they secretly don't really want to have their own way or because some of them subtly leave themselves open to not having their own way, but because static patterns, as Pirsig has described it in SODV, sit in an ocean of Dynamic experience. Static patterns will try and get along as well as they can for as long as they can until _they can't_, at which point they break and evolve. You can't theoretically predict that kind of thing, you only find it through experience. That's a theoretical description that you want to call fatalistic, but I think that description is both more faithful to Pirsig and more productive. The problem with subsuming behavioral identifiers like "anticipation and problem solving" in a theoretical account is that you can't anticipate new experience. Anticipating new experience sounds just like Kant's effort to draw a transcendental circle around all possible experience. Anticipation is a practical effort, not something to be theorized about in this manner. Anticipation as a practical effort is more like _finding_ new experience, going out and creating new experience, rather than _predicting_ it as it sounds like in your effort to theorize about it. Another way of putting this is that coherence is a bad indication of DQ because you have to ask what you're being coherent with, what you are harmonizing with. But DQ is a placeholder for the new and unimagined--you can't be coherent or harmonize with that unless you pinned it down, which is exactly what Pirsig didn't want and made DQ undefined to protect against. Coherence, in direct contradiction to you, is the paradigm of staticness. Rupture is the paradigm of Dynamic. In my theoretical description of DQ, I look like a fatalist to you, but in my practice, I think I show all the traits you identify as Dynamic, or at least I try. Opposed to that, your theoretical description of DQ looks Platonic to me, an effort to enshrine. You don't want to enshrine anything, you don't want to encapsulate. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Turn searches into helpful donations. Make your search count. http://click4thecause.live.com/search/charity/default.aspx?source=hmemtagline_donation&FORM=WLMTAG 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
