Denis P and John B.
(I combine these two messages in the same thread)
Denis, you said:
> As for your post, I'll just go to the essential : Bo, please read my
> words carefully before attacking me with the idealist label.
Agreement about the essential. Re.idealist accusations I'll do my
best. Don't know how we managed to move from agreement to
disagreement in such a short time, must be the Paris heatwave ;-)
> Where on earth have you found that I proposed an "all-inclusive
> consciousness" ?
In a previous post..
> > The gap between human societies and animal ones is so ENORMOUS that
> > there MUST have been a jump in level between the two ...etc.
..you postulate a fundamental jump. I don't know if you mean a
jump inside the Q-social level or if it is the social-intellectual jump,
but you stress that it takes place in CONSCIOUSNESS and when
you describe this interior world it sounds much like MIND, and
once such a realm is evoked it's not easy to show what is not in it.
> This is not what I've said, I'm not saying it and I
> won't. Please, please, at least don't put any words in my mouth
> without asking me if I agree with them. I don't.
OK point taken.
> As for your argument that once the DQ/SQ split is done, you cannot go
> back to S/O logic to differentiate Quality from the MOQ, I completely
> disagree with you. The S/O position, generally known as positivism,
> basically states that there is an objective world, and our
> representation of it, which is more or less subjective, and the less
> the better.
I think you somehow see what I mean. That the S/O position is
known as positivism is quite a shortcut, they (the positivists)
merely say that it is no use to speculate let's only relate to facts.
> OTOH, Pirsig says that there is Quality, and good or bad intellectual
> representations of it. It might sound the same for you, but it isn't.
> S/O has nothing to do with this because the notion of an objective
> world has already been destroyed.
The destruction of a notion of an objective world is merely the
idealist claim (sorry:). The Quality Metaphysics DESTROYS THE
NOTION OF A SUBJECT/OBJECT WORLD! I know that Pirsig
sounds the "philospohologist" here (you know my explanation), but
clearly Quality is part and parcel of the QM.
> The difference between a SOM
> criticism and a MOQ criticism is that the SOMist has already defined
> good and bad (as objectivity / subjectivity) while the MOQist will try
> to keep an open mind toward the goodness of any intellectual pattern.
I don't follow you here, what the SOM does is to deem value
SUBJECTIVE, and naturally balks when someone wants it to be
primary to both S and O!
> He does not define goodness and then tries to find it in everything,
> but lets the goodness reveal itself, by meeting any experience with a
> mind as unencumbered as possible.
Amen to that, yet goodness is very much defined in the static value
scale.
> You've just gone too far within the intellectual maze of the MOQ to
> remember your starting point : Quality creates both Subjects and
> Objects. You are not different from Quality, you *are* Quality. Your
> "separateness" is just an illusion, so nothing can be said to be
> objective, not even Quality since it is BEFORE objectivity. It creates
> it as a sense of Intellectual quality.
> Differentiating Quality from the MOQ is ESSENTIAL, not because of an
> S/O split, but because it leaves the door open to further growth.
Do I convince you if I say that there is no maze in (my) Q-intellect?
The "separateness" you speak about is a problem only for those
who postulate an intellect where the MoQ - along with its
intellect!!! - is a model. And why you want me to be an "objectivist"
is beyond me.
About growth. My interpretation of the MoQ at least allows for a 5th
level, but what can possibly grow beyond the intellect in your view?
> We
> do not separate Quality from the MOQ because of a map/terrain analogy,
> but because we do not presume we know everything about Quality,
Hmmm. I admit that this sentence sent me reeling and it took a
few days until I came to grips with it. OK, in the MoQ all static
level/patterns are "maps of Quality (Quality=Reality) and not it.
Intellect is the last map and MoQ (as-an-intellectual-pattern) is
separate from Quality. But this is the logic bend again of Quality
being a lesser part of itself. If your "intellect" however is some
God's eye view outside of everything you have found Archimedes'
leverage point :-)
> and
> because we keep a mesure of modesty before the mysteries of the
> Universe. Finally, we differentiate Quality from the MOQ because
> Quality *cannot* be defined.
Point taken, but it is difficult to say something important being
modest. A metaphysics is an Universe and there is no bridge to
the SOM* universe; a "transformation" is needed which I hope I
have provided with the SOLAQI (see my Relativity-Newton
analogy).
*) In the SOL interpretation it loses its metaphysical flavour.
> Once you lose sight of the mystical insight that is the ontological
> starting point of the MOQ, you start uttering gibberish (sorry, but
> that's how it sounds to me) about the MOQ being an über-level equal to
> Quality itself, and other statements so vague or bizarre that I cannot
> even begin to make sense of them.
Appealing to mysticism after Pirsig having declared the mystics his
toughest opponents doesn't sound very convincing. You could, for
instance, address the "MoQ-a-pattern-of-a-level-of-itself" logic knot.
Admittedly, the claim that it is itself creates a logic loop, but that's
allowed IMO.
Bo
************************************************************
John B. wrote:
> I spent yesterday climbing Mt. Bartle Frere, Queensland's highest
> mountain, (not very high), with friends, amongst them one named Bo! So
> somewhat stiff and sore, I'm seeking to respond to your most recent
> comments, which certainly lead right into the heart of the high
> country of the mind. You said:
Interesting, I found it in my Atlas near Cairns. 1600plus meters. It's
higher than most of the peaks around here which are in the 1000-
1200 m. range.
Back to business. You ended your message thus:
> This has been difficult to write, and I hope you will take time to
> ponder what I am saying and not just see the SOM bogey everywhere.
> In particular, I would like you to respond to the difference between
> the deep structure of language and Cartesian thinking, which I agree
> far predates Descartes.
This touched me, I know how difficult it is to bring one's point
across, after writing for hours realizing that one has failed. I'll do my
best, but we are antipodes it seems :-) If you don't mind I go
directly to the said parts. I have read all of your message, but
believe (like you) that our difference lurks there so "if we can make
it there we can make it everywhere".
> You say that in using any polarity in my language I am simply falling
> into the subject object division. "Ideas in the "thinking compartment"
> (aka "mind") while everything else is outside, which is good old
> subject-object metaphysics?" If I talk about conceptual systems, you
> assume there will be a polar term (perhaps experience) which is just
> the same old subject object split. Nonsense.
The S/O family has many members not all as prominent as
mind/matter, there are others: psychic/physical, soul/body,
mental/corporeal...etc. Yet these are easily seen while the whole
range of relatives may pass by unnoticed.
Look to the debate over what constitutes us - if it is genes or
upbringing. Here is a s/o "cousin" that nobody spots. When I read
about efforts to find the decisive factor I smile wryly because no
such CAN be found, yet the search can't end either. For a time
they may compromise on a co-operation, but soon the
"fundamentalists" are at it again.
> You are confusing the deep structures of language with a particular
> philosophical trend. Any noun is predicated on being able to
> discriminate what is this 'thing' from what is not this 'thing'.
Go back ten thousand years. The stone -agers did not discriminate
between language and reality, but lived in (what we deem) a magic
world where the proper rituals and/or cave paintings would bring
animals to them (maybe your Aborigines still live in this world,
which is not to say that they aren't intelligent or don't think) You
will probably say that they did not know better, but in a Q context
this was a an existence when the social level reigned, before the
next value level (Intellect) had started on its S/O discrimination.
Intellect's division is valuable, it gave us the modern world, but in
the Q context it is just another static level not reality "as it is".
> Even 'good', if 'good' is a noun,
> about which I remain unconvinced.) Human development seems inevitably
> to pass through a stage of discriminating self from other, one thing
> from another.
Human development? Do you mean from baby to adult or
evolution? To discriminate self from other has an unmistakably
intellectual ring to it, surely all organisms preserve their integrity
and resists its dissolution. To discriminate one thing from another
is sensing - the biological "expression" par excellence.
> If the mystics are right I can learn through meditation
> that this separation is illusory, and come to see that all is one. But
> for me to state here and now that "All is one" would be to take
> someone's concept, which may or may not be based on their value
> experience, and to parrot it. It is not my experience. It is faith. Or
> if I insist upon it, it is dogma.
I agree, the mystical approach is not the way. Contemplation
however is needed.
> So when I argue with aspects of the MOQ I take seriously Pirsig's
> insight that value, as experienced as here and now quality, is the
> fundamental reality. Mental maps are helpful in their limited way, but
> are always inadequate, and language too is always inadequate. The MOQ
> is a mental map expressed in language.
Take seriously? What does that imply? It's either nonsense or
obvious, and if accepted the "mental maps contrasted to ??" falls
away. In the MoQ "dynamic" does not correspond an objective
reality that we make word-maps of.
Of course I can't deny the fact that the MoQ is "expressed in
language", but let me wield my interpretation again. In its time
language was the social pattern that Q-evolution rode to Intellect
which cast existence (language included) in its S/O mold
(words/reality), yet ever since language has been part of evolution.
Consequently, Intellect's "words/reality" will necessarily be where a
groping 5th level must come from, so at first it will see itself as
another "mental map", but slowly it will rid itself of its intellectual
roots. This is long into the future ...but acting the prophet ;-)!
> It is helpful as far as it
> goes. In places it goes too far and assumes too much. Any critique of
> the MOQ that is grounded in personal experience of value is valid, for
> the person making the critique, at that point in time. Which is why we
> rarely agree in this forum, and why the quest for a moral code based
> on the MOQ is pure fantasy. Wilber is much more credible in his
> outlook in this regard.
The MoQ as an ethics guide is futile, to that I agree, but it's
explanatory power is unprecedented and that is what counts for
me. Seeing existence from its point of view doesn't stop to thrill
me. It's like a magic wand.
Bo
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