MARCO TO ELEPHANT
(and Andrea Sosio, Riskybiz Roger , Platt Holden, Andrew Bowen... and
all MD)
... about DQ, sq, truth, beauty, language (wow!)
> 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.
"Life can't exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power".
(Lila, ch 9)
"Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive"
(Lila, ch 9)
"Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in
which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order,
preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive
without the other".
(Lila, ch 9)
"What the dynamic force had to invent in order to move up the molecular
level and stay there was a carbon molecule that would preserve its
limited dynamic freedom from inorganic laws and at the same time resist
deterioration back to simple compounds of carbon again. A study of
nature shows the dynamic force was not able to do this but got around
the problem by inventing two molecules: a static molecule able to resist
abrasion, heat, chemical attack and the like; and a dynamic one, able to
preserve the subatomic indeterminacy at a molecular level and "try
everything" in the ways of chemical combination"
(Lila ch 11)
"The division of all biological evolutionary patterns into a dynamic
function and a static function continues on up through higher level of
evolutions"
(Lila ch 11)
"The increase in versatility is directed toward Dynamic Quality. The
increase in power to control hostile forces is directed toward static
quality. Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without
static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed."
(Lila ch 11)
"That's the whole thing: to obtain static and Dynamic Quality
simultaneously. If you don't have the static patterns of scientific
knowledge to build upon you're back with the cave man. But if you don't
have the freedom to change those patterns you're blocked from any
further growth."
Well, It seems that Pirsig clearly states that it is possible (more, it
is THE WHOLE THING!) to be static and dynamic simultaneously. That is,
in an harmonic way. In my opinion, dynamic means versatile; able to
evolve as containing possibilities and differences. Of course, the
amount of staticity and dynamism in entities is variable: but a pure
staticity is a limit, just like a pure dynamism.
> 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.
Let me try to explain. In a broader sense, IMO the *essence* of language
is that it's the tool we use to share concepts. I'm just saying that
it's hard to state that these concepts are completely static, in a world
completely dynamic. As said, IMO a pure staticity is a limit. Actually,
these concepts we create will be shared (that is, they will interact
dynamically in the public opinion) and probably everyone will understand
what I say in a different way. This will cause the necessity of further
investigations, new concepts, again and again.
But the problem is not strictly in language. IMO it's firstly in the
concepts. The more you want to formulate undeniable concepts [that is,
the more you formulate a *truth*], the more you are talking of the
static nature of your observations. At the contrary, the more you try to
talk of the (mystic?) dynamic aspects of your experience, the more you
will necessarily formulate a disputable concept. The first one is the
case of science, but, more than science, of fundamentalism. The latter
is the case of art, that is IMO (remember?) another language. As Platt
writes in his essay on the forum "Art is man's effort to present me [the
NOW] in a form that allows you to see and feel my true nature more
fully".
The purpose of art is not truth, rather it's beauty. Truth and Beauty
are both types of Good. Yes... Truth and Beauty are two kinds of
intellectual Good.... I'd say that an absolute Truth is an absolutely
static intellectual pattern of value.... while an absolute (ecstatic)
Beauty is the absolute dissolution of every static intellectual concept.
> 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.
More... I say that even intellectual tricks are out there!
> There is
> intellectual trickery, and then there is Dynamic Quality - that's my
> understanding of the static/dynamic split.
So you have a dualism. All static patterns are intellectual, all dynamic
Quality is there outside. Mind and Matter. Sorry, I don't buy this sort
of things.....
>
> 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?
Well, stability is a property... the tendency to defend a given
configuration of values from every possible modification.
> 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.
What is fixed *now* in the nature of seagulls is their staticity. But as
we well know that they will evolve, clearly there's a range of dynamic
possibilities. Unpredictable. Partly inherent their nature (a seagull
will not evolve into a starship), partly inherent their biologic
environment. Those possibilities depend on the variations the seagulls
will allow to their *fixed* nature.
>
> MARCO WROTE:
> > Any reality/language division is a door opened to the subject/object
> > division.
> > 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,
I did not say that the language/reality division IS the subject/object
division. It is a first step in that direction.... However I don't know
how many people consider their "self" merely a grammatical concept.
> (2) This does not exclude talking of language as a tool of
> consciousness (consciousness is not a subject),
Well, I agree that language is a tool of consciousness....
> (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.
I think I'm considering both. While we try to arrive at the conception,
we produce a natural phenomenon. However, I've never denied that the
value of language is that it can be used in order to investigate
reality.
> 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.
>
>
Actually this is you, not me:
"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".
You are talking of FIXED NOW... and I answered it could be an
intellectual trick (that is exactly like your "look like")! My mistake
is that I forgot you consider "static" as "intellectual".
However, I offered the quotation with a completely different purpose.
It was to answer to your (IMO mistaken) concept that static means
intellectual, while dynamic is what's outside. Here Pirsig says that
patterns of nature are static. Not because they are intellectual
constructs: they are static as every*thing* is static.... with dynamic
possibilities. But not DQ: DQ is not a series of static events. I hope
it is clear that when I say that entities are simultaneously static and
dynamic, I'm not meaning that DQ is inherent those entities. In these
your last lines you write:
> *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.
Dynamism of Dynamic Quality?????? DQ is DQ and stop. No property.
Dynamism is in static entities the property to allow the power of DQ to
come in! It makes me remember a sentence by Andrew Bowen on MF about one
year ago: "Full is the static space, empty is the dynamic space".
Dynamism is the empty space where DQ can come in. This is valid for
every entity, at every possible level of experience.
Be good.
Marco.
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