Squonk and Group.
I started to write this on Tuesday (11th September) and it's a little
pointless to send it, but ...
You wrote:
> I should like to say a few words about, 'Computers taking control.' I
> sincerely feel you are missing my point Bo? May i attempt to clarify?
> I do not feel computers, of themselves will take control of anything.
> I am suggesting that, enhanced modes of experience will provide a new
> avenue for Quality to utilise. In this sense, the computer is
> analogous to a high quality hammer; the engineer may beat panel with a
> hammer, and in doing so create good art. As with the enhanced human
> experience, it is the computer software evolving in an evolutionary
> relationship with human experience that generates fifth level - fifth
> level will, in this sense not be divorced from humans. Fifth level
> will be static fifth level patterns composed of a relationship between
> human experience and it's own enhancement with software. I am not an
> advocate of AI suddenly jumping at our throats with a vengeance! The
> relationship between AI and us will be a mediation of DQ, and it will
> be valued by humans while shielding fifth level evolution.
The above is a very hefty piece and I believe I understand what you
mean and you may be right in the sense that computers will be
instrumental ...an avenue for Quality to utilize ....to another level,
yet it's more of Intellect's technology. Storing, retrieving and
processing data has been on the agenda from who knows when?
The cuneiform clay tablets, the various calculating techniques,
mathematics, printing, mechanical calculating, electronic
computers, and ..on and on.
I feel that many are hung up in the idea that 4th level is
thinking/computing and a movement beyond is supercomputing,
connecting minds etc. but my opinion is that what Pirsig describes
in the ZAMM (as the emergence of subject/object metaphysics)
may as well be seen as as the "coming of age" of Q-intellect (the
4th level), and consequently a 5th level must be something that
supersedes subject/objectivism, and ...gasp ... if the MoQ is to
replace SOM the Quality idea is the 5th level!
This interpretations based on a ZAMM/LILA comparison is obvious.
> As for the MOQ being a fifth level step?
> Well, Quality has been pointed to throughout human history, and
> Pirsig's pointer - the MOQ - is not new in this context.
You are right - to a degree. In LILA Pirsig says that the quality idea
is not new (the RT chapter), but by this he means that the age that
preceded the Greek experience was an intuitive quality existence
... no "metaphysics". All aboriginal people surely lived in a Quality
universe. Furthermore Pirsig's thesis is that the Hindu/Buddhist
tradition is a "modus vivendi" between dynamism and stability
through rituals and that they understand both worlds. However,
after the SOM revolution, the Westerners cannot understand
anything ELSE, and even now when an alternative is presented
want it to fit the S/O mold.
> What is new,
> is the development of science, and the MOQ does address this, making
> the MOQ original and of extreme importance?
Right.
> You know this and yet
> suggest the MOQ itself is fifth level? I find this a little odd! I
> feel sure the fault must be due to my own misunderstanding.
The above (RT) development seen in my interpretation is that the
old intuitive Quality perception was the Social level, and isn't that
also pretty obvious from the ZAMM perspective: The Sophists that
Socrates (as a "new SOM-age-ist") hated so much claimed that
everything was a question of persuasion (i.e: everything is
subjective/of social agreement). Their spokesman - Protagoras -
said that "man is the measure of all things" (there is no objective
truth).
> I don't know what more i can say right now in order to make myself
> more clear? One thing i am confident about and it is this: If you
> could experience your culture 50 years from now, you would almost
> certainly find it impossible to integrate yourself, or be integrated.
I understand, and agree with you about the failure to integrate
oneself with a world fifty years from now. A pet ideas of mine is
how a "resurrected" person returning from a hundred years before
would be increasingly alienated. That is: One from year 1200
wouldn't know the difference if resurrected in the year 1300, while
one from 1900 wouldn't understand the first thing of to-day. This
makes for an exponential curve (increasing change over time) and
with its present "steepness" ten years will be enough (I am already
outdated), but this is technology, the curve will have to collapse
before ....?
Enough!
Bo
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