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. Mark 28-01-07: Hi Matt, I have no descriptions or redescriptions of DQ. Coherence is itself a static description of the unity of static patterns.
Matt: 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. Mark 28-01-07: My sense of a fatalist is one who is satisfied to accept the unexpected. This is not theoretical, it is extrapolated from your own statements. >From your own statements it may be seen you are a fatalist. As such you are not a Dynamic pragmatist. Matt: 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. Mark 28-01-07: This may appear so until one appreciates coherence as static quality - which you fail to do. Coherence is, by definition, a unifying process which accommodates structure and openness to DQ: It may be were evolution takes place. What's more, this is predicted by experience. It is verifiable. Matt: 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. Mark 28-01-07: There can be no practical effort without structured experience or theory as you put it: The moq's description of static function and Dynamic function is your answer here. Satisfaction is an acceptance of the static. Coherence is a unifying relationship between static patterns. Matt: 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. Mark 28-01-07: Coherence is an alternative to stasis. It is has logical validity and empirical verification: Quality situations reduce differentiation when they, 'feel' right. Terms such as rupture may be appropriate as severe static structural disruption. Conversely. there logically exists the possibility of, 'Accepting' static structures which actually grow in response to, 'disruption.' As such, rupture is certainly not the paradigm of the Dynamic, or DQ. Your failure to imagine this may be a result of your own static nature. Matt: 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. Mark 28-01-07: There is no theoretical description of DQ. Therefore, i do not employ one. Coherence is not a theoretical description of DQ. Coherence is a static description of static unity. Matt: 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 Mark 28-01-07: You have made a fundamental assumption that DQ is being defined Matt. It is not and cannot be defined. Love, Mark 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/
