PLATT ANSWERS ROGER’S COMMENTS ON THE PIRSIGIAN TEST
USING TEXT FROM LILA
ROGER
Morality exists outside of a social/cultural context?
If morality means quality or value ...yes. But if that is what morality
means, then why use the word "morality?
PIRSIG
Chap. 7: To answer him you have to go all the way back to fundamental
meanings of what is meant by morality and in this culture there aren't
any fundamental meanings of morality. There are only old traditional
social and religious meanings and these don't have any real
intellectual base. They're just traditions. Because Quality is morality.
Make no mistake about it. They're identical. And if Quality is the primary
reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality
of the world.
Chap. 13: What is today conventionally called "morality" covers only one
of these sets of moral codes, the social-biological code. In a subject-
object metaphysics this single social-biological code is considered to
be a minor, "subjective," physically nonexistent part of the universe. But
in the Metaphysics of Quality all these sets of morals, plus another
Dynamic morality, are not only real, they are the whole thing.
ROGER
We possess a sense of quality that is a genuine perception?
This one seems misleading or oversimplified. Our senses are of
quality. We are of quality.
PIRSIG
Chap. 9: If you had asked the brujo what ethical principles he was
following he probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. He wouldn't
have understood what you were talking about. He was just following
some vague sense of "better-ness" that he couldn't have defined if he
had wanted to.
Chap. 15: In all sexual selection, Lila chooses, Dynamically, the
individual she wants to project into the future. If he excites her sense of
Quality she joins him to perpetuate him into another generation, and
he lives on.
ROGER
Values are a separate category from subjects or objects?
No, subjects and objects are types of value patterns.
PIRSIG
Chap. 5: The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is
that empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You
can't do it. You get all mixed up because values don't belong to either
group. They are a separate category all their own.
ROGER
The world is primarily a moral order?
Again only if moral means quality or value or interrelationships. The
choice of word "moral" is not of high quality. It is confusing and it brings
in religious baggage that detracts from the statement. In its own
terms, substituting "morality" for "value" is immoral.
PIRSIG
Chap. 7: The world is primarily a moral order.
ROGER
Everything on earth emerged as the result of ethical activity?
Again, only if this means out of the advancement of quality.
PIRSIG
Chap. 12: So what Phaedrus was saying was that not just life, but
everything, is an ethical activity. It is nothing else.
ROGER
Everyone runs the same “me” program that doesn’t belong to anyone?
Not sure here.
PIRSIG
Chap. 15: This Cartesian "Me" is a software reality, not a hardware
reality. This body on the left and this body on the right are running
variations of the same program, the same "Me," which doesn't belong
to either of them. The "Me's" are simply a program format.
ROGER
Morality of the biological world is based on might makes right?
Gross oversimplification. Quality in the biological level involves the
continuation and propagation of a living pattern. Competition and
might are high quality strategies, but so is cooperation and synergy.
PIRSIG
Chap 24: What's coming out of the urban slums, where old Victorian
social moral codes are almost completely destroyed, isn't any new
paradise the revolutionaries hoped for, but a reversion to rule by terror,
violence and gang death—the old biological might-makes-right
morality of prehistoric brigandage that primitive societies were set up
to overcome.
ROGER:
Truth is built by the language of the group?
Truth is based on consistency within a proposition, between other
truths and with experience. Certainly the context of a truth is critical.
PIRSIG
Chap. 12: As the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are
suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is
always culturally derived.
Chap. 26: The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large
extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. . . .
ROGER
Since the 60’s there has been a drop in intellectual and social quality?
Of course not. In fact, some people still believed in socialism back
then, and complexity theory (let alone the MOQ) wasn't even created yet.
Certainly the evolutionary advance of both is not without some plateaus
and even temporary dips. However, overall, New York is a safer,
cleaner, wealthier, more law abiding place now than it was in Lila, and
I suspect it is just as dynamic, if not more so. If the evolutionary-
advance concepts of Lila are correct, New York will be even better in
another 100 or 200 years.
PIRSIG
Chap. 24: Today, it seemed to Phaedrus, the overall picture is one of
moral movements gone bankrupt. Just as the intellectual revolution
undermined social patterns, the Hippies undermined both static and
intellectual patterns. Nothing better has been introduced to replace
them. The result has been a drop in both social and intellectual quality.
ROGER
Cooperation without coercion is a devastating fiction?
No, at least not with the usual interpretation of the word coercion. It is
well documented that cooperation can and does emerge of its own
accord and can be an evolutionarily stable strategy. Read Axelrod and
discover the truth of uncoerced cooperation called "Tit-for-Tat." This
strategy is that the most productive strategy of interaction is to
cooperate with others until such a time as they cheat or attempt to
exploit you (ie not cooperate with you). At which point you withdraw
cooperation until they again choose to play nicely. I guess if we extend
the definition of "coersion" to include the threat of no longer extending
the benefits of cooperation then I agree with this statement. Certainly
Tit-for-Tat recognizes that people will cheat and exploit and take
advantage of others if allowed to.
PIRSIG
Chap. 24: What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the
twentieth-century intellectual faith in man's basic goodness as
spontaneous and natural is disastrously naive. The ideal of a
harmonious society in which everyone without coercion cooperates
happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating
fiction.
PLATT
A couple of comments. First, you seem to want to avoid using morality
as a synonym for Quality. I thought we agreed that in the MOQ
Quality=Morality=Good=Direct Experience. So my response to your first
question, “. . . then why use the word morality?” is why not? Belief in the
MOQ depends on accepting the extension of the word “morality”
beyond the just the social/cultural context.
Second, while New York city may have improved in quality since the
sixties due to an increased enforcement of law, the general decline in
intellectual and social quality in the U.S. has been documented in
numerous books, an example being “Closing of the American Mind-
How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the
Souls of Today’s Students” by Alan Bloom. But, one needn’t read
books to know there’s been a decline. Just look at the degradation of
the American Presidency by Clinton, passively accepted by the public,
along with the general decline in popular culture as exemplified in the
Super Bowl half-time show. In viewing the American scene today I’m
reminded constantly of Pirsig’s neon sign that keeps flashing
PARADISE-PARADISE, pointing to “the same low-quality thing that he
saw everywhere but which couldn't be put into words.” Economically,
technologically things are good. But moral degeneracy and dwindling
quality is evident everywhere.
As always, your comments are highly valued by yours truly.
Platt
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