Hi Roger:
ROG:
If morality means quality or value ...yes. But if that is what morality
means, then why use the word "morality?
PLATT: (previously)
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.
ROGER:
In the context of this exercise (to explain the metapysics to an outsider),
I don't see how these quotes do anything but support my position that
the words 'value' or 'quality' work much better. Certainly after 468 pages
of Lila, Pirsig does a convincing job of showing that morality is a form
of quality, and that there is quality in associating all quality as a form of
morality (because in the end the MOQ is a personal ethics). However,
if you want to start off a conversation with someone at work by saying
'Everything on earth emerged as the result of ethical activity,' or 'The
world is primarily a moral order,' you have started out the conversation
in an absurd direction that is almost guaranteed to set off every static
filter in your acquaintance's mental arsenal.
If we go to the dictionary and look up moral we get 'Moral implies
conformity to established sanctioned codes or accepted notions of
right and wrong.' This is not what Pirsig means by his extended
definition of moral, but it is similar to what your co-worker is thinking. In
other words, starting a conversation this way is more likely to distract
from the quality of the discussion than support anything. In fact, you
are likely to just repeat the Rigel conversation. You have to first redefine
morality, and only then can you get to the point of the MOQ. I find the
redefinition to be of questionable value, though I sometimes use it in
this forum, and I agree that with OUR DEFINITIONS that
Quality=Morality=Good=Direct Experience.
Right on, Roger. I notice in his SODV speech where Pirsig addresses
those who never heard of the MOQ that he avoids the words ‘moral’
and ‘morality’ like the plague. Lots of ‘values’ and ‘qualities’ in that
speech but only one easy-to-miss reference to ‘morals.’ I would hazard
to guess that Pirsig recognized ‘morality’ to be a red flag because he
would no doubt be accused of anthropomorphism for laying morality
on electrons.
FROM THE PIRSIGIAN TEST:
Q4) We possess a sense of quality that is a genuine perception?
ROG:
This one seems misleading or oversimplified. Our senses are of
quality. We are of quality.
PLATT (Quotes)
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:
Pirsig throws off all kinds of literary phrases. I would warn you against
forming them as fundamental tenets of the MOQ, though. If you are
stating that a fundamental tenet of the MOQ is that we have some type
of "quality" sense, then I strongly disagree. I think it is much more
appropriate to say that our senses and our thoughts are based on/of
quality. They are qualities that we have developed the ability to
dynamically respond to/with.
Will you be persuaded by the following quote from Pirsig’s SODV
paper? No literary phrases here, just a clear, direct no-doubt-about-it
statement that we have a built-in sense of value:
“In the third box are the biological patterns: senses of touch, sight
hearing, smell and taste. The Metaphysics of Quality follows the
empirical tradition here in saying that the senses are the starting point
of reality, but -- all importantly -- it includes a sense of value. Values are
phenomena. To ignore them is to misread the world. It says this sense
of value, of liking or disliking, is a primary sense that is a kind of
gatekeeper for everything else an infant learns. At birth this sense of
value is extremely Dynamic but as the infant grows up this sense of
value becomes more and more influenced by accumulated static
patterns. In the past this biological sense of value has been called the
"subjective" because there values cannot be located in an external
physical object. But quantum theory has destroyed the idea that only
properties located in external physical objects have reality.”
Q5) Values are a separate category from subjects or objects?
ROG:
No, subjects and objects are types of value patterns.
PLATT (Quotes)
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:
I think a more defining and central concept of the MOQ is that "Matter is
just a name for certain inorganic value patterns." And that substance is
"not some independent primary reality." Both of these are from Ch12.
Here are two more quotes to bolster my position that this ‘separate
category’ is central to the MOQ:
“What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate
category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects
and objects.” (LILA, Chap. 5)
“Eventually my unusual teaching methods came to the attention of the
other professors in the department and in a friendly way they asked the
question that connects all this with the struggles of Niels Bohr: ‘is
quality in the subject or in the object?’ The answer that was finally given
was, ‘neither, Quality is a separate category of experience that is
neither subject or object.’ This was the beginning of the system of
thought called the Metaphysics of Quality. It has lasted for more than 35
years now.” (SODV Paper)
Q6) Morality of the biological world is based on might makes right?
ROG:
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.
PLATT(Quotes):
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:
I don't disagree with the quote here, but I find your 'tenet' to be a gross
oversimplification that goes beyond anything supported by the quote.
Just because might-makes-right is a value of biology (it is) does not
mean that it is the only value of that level. I believe it is not the only
value, and if this differs from either you or Pirsig, then I am comfortable
with this. I think I can make a very strong case.
Below is another quote where Pirsig refers to the ‘tooth and claw’
nature of the bio-level. Cooperation implies choice. I see cooperation
limited to the human social level where people can volunteer to unite
for a common purpose or not, depending on individual interests.
“What the evolutionary structure of the Metaphysics of Quality shows is
that there is not just one moral system. There are many. In the
Metaphysics of Quality there's the morality called the "laws of nature,"
by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality
called the ”law of the jungle" where biology triumphs over the inorganic
forces of starvation and death; there's a morality where social patterns
triumph over biology, "the law"; and there is an intellectual morality,
which is still struggling in its attempts to control society. Each of these
sets of moral codes is no more related to the other than novels are to
flip-flops. (LILA, Chap. 13)
Q7)Since the 60’s there has been a drop in intellectual and social
quality?
ROG:
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.
PLATT (Quotes):
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.
PLATT adds:
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.
ROGER:
This is one of those questions that we could argue forever on without
reaching a consensus. It is more a test of a person's disposition than
of society. I will just say that again this is not a central tenet of the MOQ,
and if anything, it contradicts the MOQ's evolutionary advancement
theory (which IS a central tenet.) I find the world to be constantly
improving -- with frequent backslides -- and that is what the MOQ
predicts.
I don’t think Pirsig would have gone on to the lengths he did in Chap.
24 and other places if he didn’t think it was important. Civilizations rise
and fall, and from what historians tell us, it’s morality (in the social
sense) or lack thereof that is a primary cause. When families, the basic
social unit, begin to disintegrate as they are in the U.S. today, its hard
not to be concerned. But, you’re right—we could argue all day. We’ll
just have to disagree on the central tenet bit.
Thanks for your always cogent and interesting response, Roger. I look
forward to any further comments you wish to make, especially if you
change your mind as the result of my arguments based on quotes
from Pirsig himself. (-:
Platt
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