Hi, John
>
>I liked your short essay.
Thanks, I liked yours too (the last one in the forum section).
[snip]
>"The Self is therefore the patterned, static, known aspect of an
>individual."
>
>Not a bad definition. However in my view it neglects agency. Too static.
Agreed. I thought about that when I wrote it but kept it in for the sake of
convenience. I hadn't yet tackled the concept of freedom, and therefore
inserting agency at this point would have muddled the waters. What is agency
without freedom ? Nothing but cause/consequence, something that can be
predicted with sufficient data, an extention of the known, IOW.
[snip racy part ;)]
>
>"Quality is still undefinable, and the Universe non-mechanical by nature.
It
>still escapes the intellectual nets we're trying to wrap around it.
Pirsig's
>definition still stands : "We are determined when we follow SQ, and Free
>when we follow DQ."
>
>Ummm. Sounds like the chatechism to me.
In a way, it is. It is more an aphorism than a rational, logical statement.
How can you make rational statements about the undefinable ? This is as
close as RMP can get without defining Freedom, and therefore DQ, his only
ace in the hole if he wants to avoid saying that Static PoV determine our
every move, thought and feeling.
>Pirsig's first cut fails, in my
>opinion, right in his prime example of the song on the radio. Presumedly on
>first hearing it is DQ. Next time x% DQ and y% sq, third time ?DQ ?sq. It
>really is a mess. And just by coincidence he chose a song on the radio. My
>experience is that it is generally not the first hearing which is the
>highest in quality for me, but perhaps the third to tenth hearings,
>depending on the song.
In past posts (almost two years ago, I believe) I proposed the notion of the
'horizon of expectation'. It's a concept one of my literature teachers
proposed to explain the changes in literary style. The horizon of
expectation is what the public will still recognize as literature, even
though the form has changed. It is the "pattern" of literature, as distorted
as it can get while remaining literature. Once a new literary style hits the
shelves, it can go two ways : it can be recognized, and perhaps become
included in the general psyche as valid litterature, or it is too far from
the norm and no one manages to recognize its value. It's generally called
"over-intellectual"...
The parallel with Pirsig DQ/SQ division is striking, but Pirsig picks up
where my teacher left. Why do people prefer some new genres and not others ?
Why isn't it sufficient to change the way you write ? What is talent ?
The same kind of phenomenon appears in widly different fields. Take
phonetics, for example. Did you knew that when you were a baby your babble
was an incredibly rich soup of vowels and consons, most of which you would
be totally incapable of reproducing today without training ?
Our culture trains us to select elements from an almost infinite field of
experience. Those elements are what the local culture values. In the case of
languages, most of them are composed of between 20 to 50 phonems, but
globally phonems exist in the thousands !
The interesting thing is : once they learn to speak, children are long
longer capable of recognizing those phonems. For us French people, the
english 'th' sounds like 's' or 'd'. The initial patterning blocks the view.
It is a truism to say that young people are generally more open to novelty
than older ones. Why is that ? Those people have been "trained" for only one
or two decades, but they recognize the value of jazz, rock'n'roll or techno
before anyone else even notice they exist ! You must admit that this puts a
serious dent in your argument that quality increases with familiarity.
>In other words the quality increases with
>familiarity, then diminishes over time with subsequent hearings. It is
>simply wrong in most cases to suggest that dynamic equals novel with music!
>(Which is why many of our most revered classical pieces were not well
>received on their first performance.)
>
Not by the public at large, but some people must have liked it. At that time
they didn't have commercial radios and TV ads to brainwash people into
believing shit was gold. The main flaw I see in your argument is the fact
that classical music endures, and finds new fans in every generation (Bach
being my personal hero), while "summer hits" vanish without a trace every
year. Who still listen to the 'Boys on the Block' ? Repetition and
recognition isn't sufficient.
DQ isn't only about novelty, it's also about Quality.
>I will go a step further. DQ is a myth. Quite commonly it is equated with
>novelty, which is a nonsense.
Yours, I believe. I do not want to offend you, but DQ is better than 'just
novelty'.
>Pirsig is right to suggest that quality which
>initially is dynamic can change over time to become static. This conforms
>with his illustration that what was once for me a "good" song, I may no
>longer want to hear, but would still recommend if you asked me if it is any
>good. Quality evolves. (At least as seen from my 'self' perspective, which
>at the moment is the only one I have.) But this is so far from the incisive
>first cut he sought that it is laughable. DQ is many things, of different
>kinds; not one thing as Pirsig would have us believe.
>
If your remember Lila correctly, he gives an explanation of why it isn't the
same for everyone.
My personal understanding of it is this : there is such a thing as Quality
(or Tao, or X or Whatever for the purists out there), and we do recognize it
when we see it.
Or rather, we should.
Problem is, mostly we've been trained NOT to recognize it. It was no evil
overlord who did that to us, but our own loving parents. And they didn't do
it out of spite or ignorance, but out of a very real desire for us to
*survive*.
You see, out of the myriad of things that Quality is, only a very rare few
are really useful to our survival, and these are the ones your parents are
teaching you to *concentrate* on. We learn to ignore the others, that's all.
After a while, we aren't even able to appreciate new stuff 'on the go', as
we did when we were young. We have to slowly assimilate the strange patterns
before they become recognisable enough for us to see if they have Quality or
not. But with practice, breaking your patterns to includes new ones becomes
easier and easier.
Once, one of my friends made me listen to a Lebanese Oud player (kind of
luth, ancestor of acoustic guitar), Rabbi Abou Khalid. At the first
hearing, I wasn't too impressed, and in fact I soon ignored the music and
spoke with my friend.
When the disc ended, my friend asked me how I found it, and I answered in a
polite 'its ok' tone. Not being stupid, he did not insist and life went on.
In the mean time, I listened a lot to Led Zeppelin, which have been inspired
a lot by Indian music, as the tune 'Kashmir' shows. Then, more than a year
after the previous episode, I was talking with the same friend when my
attention shifted rather dramatically to the music that was softly playing
in the background. "My god, I exclaimed, what IS that ?" - my friend,
looking embarrassed, said - "It's an Lebanese Oud player, Rabbi Abou
Khalid."
"It's great !!!" I exclaimed "When did you get that ?"
He looked at me, puzzled, and said "I made you listen to it a year ago,
don't you remember ? You didn't like it." And then it came back to me. At
first I couldn't see how I could have ignored something so great, but it
later came to me that in the meantime, I had widened my scope of music, and
that the patterns I was capable of recognizing were more diverse, less set
in a narrow channel.
It is the same for languages. For a child it is easy to learn new languages,
and then it becomes more difficult as he grows older. But, the more
languages he learns, the less difficult it becomes to learn new ones.
The first patterns are always the strongest, and the most difficult traps to
break from. But once you start to broaden your horizons, a bit of your old
facility at recognizing Quality comes back.
I'd like to go on, but I have to go now. I'll answer the rest in a separate
post.
Seeya
Denis
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