ELEPHANT TO MARCO (AND ANDREA, AND ALL OTHER PATIENT READERS):
Couple of things to add, breifly.....(relatively breifly)....
MARCO WROTE TO ANDREA:
>>> But there's another important point to consider: "language", logic,
>>> science, metaphysics are part of the same reality they want
>>> to grasp.... so when they try to get closer to reality, they evolve,
>>> and the result is a reality modification. My point about
>>> the language/reality mismatch is that it's a false problem,
>>> as language is primarily a real entity itself. According to the
>>> MOQ, the *best* metaphysical division is static/dynamic. To
>>> say that reality is static, or that it is dynamic, it's the same
>>> mistake of considering one only aspect.
>>
ELEPHANT:
>> Do excuse me for butting in and adding my
>> two-penny-worth here. Firstly it
>> seems to me that one disagreement you've identified
>> concerns words only. No one is saying that the static entities
>> are unreal, just that, real as they
>> are, they are not real in quite the way that the dynamic
>> reality is real.
MARCO WROTE:
> I think I'm stating that the static entities are unreal... as well as
> dynamic entities are unreal... all entities are simultaneously
> dynamic and static.
ELEPHANT:
I don't think that this is possible - but whether it is or not really
depends on what you understand 'dynamic' as meaning, and what it means to
say that static/dynamic is a primary cut in reality. But the point about
evolution seems to cut nearer this bone so I'll hold fire till then.
ELEPHANT WROTE:
>> Secondly I agree that language can sometimes
>> form part of the reality we want to grasp, not just that
>> with which we grasp it. But I'm not yet sure where you
>> are going with this fact. Do please expand.
MARCO:
> I'm not an expert of physics, but, for what I know of it, I think it's
> not very different from the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. It's
> impossible to know both the dynamic and the static nature of reality.
> The more you investigate the static nature of reality, the more you lose
> its dynamic nature. And vice versa. Intellect, like the observer of the
> quantum physics, is involved in reality, and contributes to its nature.
> Talking about reality modifies reality.
ELEPHANT:
Still not sure I'm understanding. As a natural phenomenon, language is
changed by our discussion of it: sure. But were not just talking about
language as a natural phenomenon, atleast I'm not. I'm talking about the
*essence* of language, supposing there to be one (something Wittgenstein
denies). I think there are esential facts about what language does, if it
is to count as a language, that no description of it as a natural phenomenon
could ever overwrite. Such as that language is our way of accessing
(inventing) static entitites in a dynamic world.
MARCO WROTE:
>>> Language has a double nature: it is statically, and interacts
>>> dynamically. Just like every *real* entity, it interacts
>>> with reality (dynamically, in the Q event) and then translates
>>> the experience according to static patterns. The result are
>>> new real entities (ideas, concepts and so on....). Language is not
>>> purely static: actually, it modifies reality and it evolves at the
>>> same time. In this, I don't see huge differences between
>>> language and biologic living beings. At every
>>> level of experience, the process is always to evolve towards
>>> excellence.
ELEPHANT WROTE:
>> The fact that something evolves does nothing to make
>> it dynamic as opposed to static (this seems to be a general
>> confusion, alteast, *I* think it is a confusion).
MARCO:
> I'm just stating that everything evolves thanks to its dynamic nature.
ELEPHANT WROTE:
>> Evolving entities are ones that change over time. But change
>> is antithetical to the dynamic, because the dynamic is just that
>> which does not have a static identity for long enough for there to
>> be any 'that' which changes.
>> Therefore if evolving entities change, this must be because they
>> count as static at any given time, and a static series of
>> static identities looked at over time. Just as there is a static
>> concept that is meant by 'seagull' right now, even though we
>> know that seagulls are evolving.
MARCO:
> Here I don't understand. It seems we are using the term "dynamic" for
> diverse concepts. IMO evolution is a dynamic process. My static nature
> is in opposition to evolution....
> Static does not mean fixed. Static means stable. The concept of seagull
> has a stable nature and a dynamic nature simultaneously. I think the
> concept of seagull changes, not diversely from the biologic seagull. The
> evolution of scientific beliefs is a fact. If you say that evolution is
> a series of static *snapshots* I could agree (at least I'd say it's a
> good intellectual trick), but every snapshot (every single seagull, or
> every single concept of seagull) interacts dynamically with Quality, so
> it is static and dynamic simultaneously.
ELEPHANT:
OK, I think we've come to the heart of it. My point is that there really
isn't anything to evolution beyond this 'good intellectal trick' you speak
of. Your idea is that there are intellectual tricks, and then there are
real particular realities out there. Well no, there aren't. There is
intellectual trickery, and then there is Dynamic Quality - that's my
understanding of the static/dynamic split.
You now say 'static does not mean fixed, it means stable', and my response
to this is to ask: what exactly is the difference between 'stable' and
'fixed' in this context? Sure, I never said that the nature of seaguls is
something fixed for all eternity, but, for all that it is fixed *now*: if
it wasn't something fixed that we can refer to now it wouldn't be a
'nature'. To know the natural state of something is to know it as static.
About this see Plato's remark in the Cratylus: "you cannot get any further
in knowing their state, because you cannot know that which has no state".
MARCO WROTE:
>>> Any reality/language division is a door opened to the subject/object
>>> division.
>>
ELEPHANT WROTE:
>> Why?
> [...]
>> I'd like to be told why the separation of language from
>> the dynamically real is a SOMist point of view, given that
>> neither language nor the dynamically
>> real is a subject or an object.
MARCO:
> Well, I could be wrong, but I see an analogy. I (subject) use a language
> to define reality (object). If I consider my language as a separated
> entity from its target, IMO I'm trying to be objective.
ELEPHANT:
O.K. That makes me think. Two points. (1) It cannot be a subject ('I')
for which language is a tool, since subject and object are grammatical (that
is to say linguistic) concepts, (2) This does not exclude talking of
language as a tool of consciousness (consciousness is not a subject), (3)
Your argument here identifies language with it's existence for us as a
natural phenomena, rather than with it's existence for us as the way we
arrive at the conception of a natural phenomenon. In short: language isn't
a separated entity for its target, if by entity we mean 'natural
phenomenon': the boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my
(natural) world. When I say that I consider my language as separate from
it's target, then this is just because there is an essence to language, and
essence which is not to be identified with any target or world of targets
anywhere. It is not subjectivity or objectivity that I am pursuing in
thinking of language as separable from it's targets in *this* way, but
truth, and the Good.
ELEPHANT WROTE:
>> I think when Pirsig is talking about the static he talking about
>> the discrete and conceptualised (the linguistic) and that talking
>> about the dynamic he is talking about the continuous and
>> preconceptual (the prelinguistic).
MARCO:
> Pirsig:
> << [In Lila] The quality that was referred to in Zen and the Art of
> Motorcycle Maintenance can be subdivided into Dynamic Quality and static
> quality. Dynamic Quality is a stream of quality events going on and on
> forever, always at the cutting edge of the present. But in the wake of
> this cutting edge are static patterns of value. These are memories,
> customs and patterns of nature.>>
> (SODaV paper).
ELEPHANT:
I cannot deny that the quote seems to back up the idea of the Dynamic as
simply this series of quality events, but I would point to the numerous
passages where the idea of Dynamic Quality is expressly contrasted with this
idea of a series of distinct *events*: in the reference to Northrop's
aesthetic *continuum* in ZAMM, in the discussion of the mystic objection to
metaphysics in LILA, and indeed at frequent intervals throughout both of
Pirsigs books and in the paper on Quantum Mechanics and so on. *IMO* it
would be a big mistake to take this passage as meaning that the dynamism in
Dynamic Quality simply consists in the rapid fire succession of changing
events. It cannot be denied that the idea of being composed of a series of
distinct events is contradictory to the idea of being a continuum.
I think that if we want to avoid saying that Pirsig is contradicting himself
(which I do) then we need to find some way of interpreting the above passage
which does not give it the meaning you give it.
What Pirsig is saying here, in my veiw of the matter, is that the Dynamic
*looks like* a series of quality events, as soon as we try to picture it.
But the reference to a 'stream' in preference to 'series' in the quoted
passage rather gives the game away, in the dual connotations it has, both
for James's 'stream of consciousness' and for the watery 'flux' of
Heraclitus and Plato. One way to look at the question is to ask whether
Pirsig thinks that quality essentially comes in quanta. I think the answer
to this has to be 'no': for otherwise it is hard to see what the
dynamic/static distinction adds. If Dynamic quality comes in quanta, then
dynamic quality is just static quality. Here endeth the whole Metaphysics
of Quality, consigned to the file marked 'gibberish'. But I don't think
Pirsig is talking gibberish. It makes perfect sense to distinguish the
dynamic from the static, and this distinction is not one of degree or a
question of how long a quality event hangs around, but a categorical
distinction: the primary cut from which all else follows. Your idea of what
'Dynamic' means, Marco, would seem to make objective time measurement prior
to the distinction between dynamic and static, and practice the whole SOM
apparatus of objectivising the world. For there is no doubt: Unlike Dynamic
Quality, the quality event is an object. An 'event' is just that we give
the name 'event' to. A quality event must be *specified*, it's limits and
relations *described*: it has thus a linguistic existence, unlike the truly
dynamic Quality, which preceeds and exceeds all language.
....as I see it.
Elephant
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