Hi Roger,
You said "I strongly encourage you or Platt to respond on this counter, or
on the unresolved challenge that destructiveness (as opposed to
reconstructiveness) is NOT the path to quality, or even the mystic angle
that you hinted at that everything is good (yuck!). I see no reason to
close the thread...after all, isn't this type of dialogue the very reason
for summarizing it?"
I'll have a go at responding as I'm going away for another week soon and if
I don't do something now it will get lost, I'm sure. I certainly appreciate
your patience in keeping the thread open. (I'll leave the mystics until
after I get back from my mystic retreat.)
First, "JOHN ... argued that death, destruction and decay CAN be of high
quality ... [and] gave numerous examples. However, ROGER countered each of
these and suggested that in every case people were either confusing
destruction with flexibility and adaptiveness, or they were citing examples
of circular processes where destruction was leading to reconstruction, and
that it was the reconstruction which they saw as good"
Your fundamental point was " the question does imply that we live in an
entropic
world where disorder is the norm, or the background out of which higher
Quality arises. Disorder is of lower quality than order, with a broad
spectrum of degrees of order based upon the scope of the pattern and its
versatility. Each step up the levels in the MOQ adds depth, span and
versatility to the patterns (aka dynamicness aka creativity aka freedom aka
edge of chaos). Agreed?"
Whew! This is harder than I thought. My points on destruction were more at
the level that just because something is destructive, does not make it
'bad'. Therefore destruction is part of the ongoing processes of nature, and
is not inherently evil. Your response, as I read it, is that quality, or
good, is anti-entropic, and that the value in destructive events is their
preparation for a higher level of structure to emerge. You do concede that
perhaps this is a matter of perspective when you said: "I don't know, at a
broad enough perspective perhaps you guys are right. Even disorder itself
is somehow harnessed into quality. Perhaps only in a world
of death, destruction and disorder can so much quality be created." So I
take it we can agree that something can be destructive without necessarily
being 'bad'.
But your main point is, I think, wrong.
ROG: "The world is indeed fundamentally entropic -- it has a tendency toward
disorder. Despite this, quality patterns not only merge, they also last and
they not only resist decay, they actually leverage it into a continuous
cycle of reorganization."
IMHO this is scientism. It would be taken as relatively non controversial by
most people in our culture, because it mirrors what we have been taught is
the scientific understanding of the world. It is an idea, and it has not
been very successful in helping us understand how quality patterns can
emerge from disorder. In fact this paradox is evident in your words; entropy
is fundamental, despite this, quality patterns emerge and become continuous.
Well, which is fundamental? I have picked up on Wilber's rewrite of
Whitehead, which suggests, for example, that a world where 'consciousness'
resides is not describable in terms of atomic theory.
Rather, we must rewrite our account of reality by starting with the higher
order processes and events, and seeing how far down the levels these extend.
Prehension was Whitehead's way of saying that even at the level of sub
atomic particles, there is more than just billiard balls doing their thing,
ruled by entropy.
Pirsig tries to have his cake and eat it too by using science, especially
evolution, as a prop for his metaphysics, while fundamentally pointing to
something other than science as the 'ground' of everything. Indeed, he is
critiquing the whole value free concept of science that dominates our world
by saying Quality (good) is more real than the concepts of science. He tries
to find space for his insights in quantum physics, but this is a risky
enterprise, as he himself pointed out so clearly in ZMM where he showed that
there is no end to the making of theories in science. I think there is a
necessary choice here, however well disguised, between the currently
fashionable understanding of science as to fundamental physical reality, and
a value centred view such as Pirsig's. As David Bohm says in an introduction
to one of his books, he gained the insight after meeting Krishnamurti, that
"a wrong functioning of thought is behind most of the troubles of the human
race". Pirsig is challenging our way of thought, and that is more profound
than any insight of science. While science excludes value, that is. Trying
to build value into the scientific world view through such devices as the
uncertainty principle is in my view to start at the wrong end totally.
Your understanding that "Disorder is of lower quality than order" is also
fundamentally flawed, I think, and this is where I feel the strength of
Platt's Nazi challenge. Nazis were pretty strong on order. Order can be of
high or low quality, in my view. I have several times pointed to the end of
Ch 22 in Lila, where Pirsig promotes what I see as a fascist social order
that is the antipathy of the Indian values that shaped modern America. This
is the result of promoting order above other values. Order is fundamentally
static. While we agree that neither dynamic nor static quality is an
adequate basis for a metaphysics, Pirsig lost the plot here by allowing the
collective a higher value than the individual. He suggests that it is more
important to keep a modern city functioning than to cultivate the freedoms
that will allow individuals to create even more dynamic social structures. I
say he is wrong, by his own logic throughout the rest of the book, and as a
moral judgement of quality that I make for myself.
WIM said "A further evolved pattern has better intentions ... is
compassionate (aware of others), tunes in to something bigger than itself."
You were correct in your suggestion that this is close to my feel for the
topic. You picked up on harmany and creativity "By harmony, I mean
establishing as large of a pattern as possible of mutual support -- where
you add value to your environment as it adds value to you. It therefore
becomes self flourishing. By creativity, I mean establishing a process of
continuously searching for novel ways to be more harmonious with an even
larger network. Harmony and creativity -- aka compassion and passion -- is
the path to quality."
If we go to the fundamental issue of what is important (has value) in the
world, then I argue that compassion and harmony and creativity come from a
higher level of value than entropy and order. They are thus more fundamental
to the ground of the universe than are the latter, despite the views of
scientism, which I equate with "a wrong functioning of thought".
But I could be wrong.
John B
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