[Kevin] I see the MoQ as proceeding from a kind of mystical awareness of reality but ending up as the mere intellectualization of reality.
[Arlo] I think its quite right to posit a link between the "essential incompleteness" of symbolic systems (intellection) and the "mystic awareness" described by traditions such as Buddhism. Intellectual systems, including a formualted "MOQ", serve as "pointers" towards this core. From Pirsig's MOQ Summary, "To use an Oriental metaphor, [the MOQ] is just another finger pointing toward the moon. The static language of the Metaphysics of Quality will never capture the Dynamic reality of the world but some fingers point better than others and as the world changes, old pointers and road maps tend to lose their value. ... It is this looking for new pointers, not the pointer itself, that is the essence of Dynamic philosophy." Art, metaphor, myth, analogy... these are also other "pointers". In the described final dialogue between Phaedrus and The Chairman, this was the central point-of-conflict. Phaedrus knew that what was being "pointed at" could never be "captured", it would always lay outside any symbolic system. Consider the analogy of a "black hole". We can't "see" it, we can only infer from what's going on around it that it's there. And there appears to be an "event horizon", where once you cross your descriptions become warped and Escherian. This "event horizon" is what Hofstadter referred to as a certain level of complexity allowing self-referentiality. But it's also a point of individual departure. We don't HAVE to "think about thinking", although it appears to be often unavoidable. We can sit back beyond the event horizon and make sound, pragmatic intellections about "the world". But if we choose to move in towards the black hole, to cross the event horizon, we are unavoidably in the Escherian landscape of paradox, recursion and "strange loops". 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/
