[Bo] If you don't have trouble with the SOM I envy you, but it's like watching children knowing that their confidence is unfounded. Nothing personal, just metaphor ;-)
[Case] Whether it good metaphor or sound metaphysics, I can not say. But I experience what I experience. I do not experience what others experience. My body functions in such a way that down to the cellular level it distinguishes what is me from what is not. [Bo] IMO it's not mystical experiences that leads to doubt about SOM - or the mind/matter world as I knew it before Pirsig) but the fact that it is no stable foundation for reality - if one is of the unlucky kind that craves such. I did and my obsession ended in an experience, far from ecstatic, rather one that can be compared to what earthquake victims must feel when the ground gives way and I had some bad time afterwards lasting for many years. It's now difficult to recall the reasoning, but what's for sure is that when I found my first copy of ZMM I felt that I had met an even more reason-craving person. [Case] So you had like a bad mystical trip? Why did this lead you to question the mind/matter world? [Bo] In ZMM he eliminates it as metaphysically valid and that is what counts, all in all it was that book's use of the metaphysics term that became the second gooseflesh-rise experience. That the mind/matter chasm was something that had entered existence at some particular time in history, replacing another metaphysics had never occurred to me, being dead sure that this was the way reality was assembled. And the rest was plain going: His showing that "intellect" is the mind/matter "prism" (in the proto-moq), everything excited me greatly and I also sensed that this was not the last of this mysterious Pirsig. [Case] See, when I read ZMM many years ago I though he did a marvelous job of subtly introducing westerners to Taoism. In doing so he was showing how opposites can be united and dualisms resolved. [Bo] When LILA arrived many years later I at first grabbed without reservations, but the intellectual level began to trouble me because it differed from Phaedrus radical and Gordian Knot solution. I saw more flaws emerging from that particular point. For instance Pirsig's way of "encasing SOM" - you know the two lower levels being "objects/objective" and the upper two "subjects/subjective". OK as a non-moqist it's not your big interest. [Case] When I read Lila I thought he was continuing the Taoist thing by describing how the active and passive aspects of the Tao are manifest in the world. I never took his levels all that seriously beyond the fact that this is how colleges divide their curricula. I saw Pirsig as taking the MoQ out for a test drive thinking, "Yeah that kind of works," but if we drove it around a different block we might want to divide things up differently. [Bo] Is that (nature versus nurture) your favorite topic? At least it's another S/O offshoot that - like them all - at first glance looks patent, but upon examination collapses. As said many times have I read about "philosophologists" declaring that human beings are a mixture of both, our genes disposition us for success/failure at some favorable/unfavorable social condition - very much like Darwin's evolution, but no sooner is this declared before the debate starts of what part dominates .. exactly as the evolution debate. [Case] That is pretty much how I see it. Another dualism, sometimes more this and sometimes more that. [Bo] Seems like you have (had) some insight of your own that butts against S/O-rationality. Arbitrary setting of rules? Do you mean (for example) that the ethics for a cannibal tribe (if there are any left) differs from those of our "civilization"? The MOQ explains these enigmas and a lot more. [Case] The sad fact is there have to be social rules. The more those rules mimic the "laws of nature" the better they are. For example traffic laws are good laws because they set rules for reducing the probability of accidents. The penalties set for violating them merely mimic what their actual consequences could be. I could get charged a fine for running a traffic light but really I do not run traffic lights because I could get killed doing it. It is obviously hard to make all laws function this way but it would be a nice goal anyway. But I do not judge cannibal tribes based on my own cultural preconceptions. If the tribe survives under the conditions that most cannibals must live under, I am not sure how my meddling would benefit them. Social customs evolve based on the environment and history of the people that have to live with them. 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/
