Greetings David,
I am not sure why you are interested in what I think of your post. Perhaps, the
recent plunge you’ve taken into your personal psyche has establioshed access
into the collective consciousness and you now know that I have tickets to see
Jimmy Dale Gilmore in a small café in Saratoga Springs, NY on March 1st.
Anyhow, I will be glad to give some small comment on your post. I am not an
expert on Jung or Campbell and I don’t even know who Wilber is. In fact, I
don’t consider myself an expert on much of anything. When I was reading Joseph
Campbell and watching his specials on PBS with Bill M. I used to wonder what he
would have to say about ZAMM and Lila. I suppose he might agree that they were
culture-bearer books in the sense that each attempted to rewrite the myths we
live by. Pirsig would say he has added dynamic quality to the collective
conscience. Shattered some of the old myths (I don’t mean the ancient
archetypes, but western myths) and given us some new ones to work with. I think
he has succeeded in doing that. This doesn’t put Pirsig is on par with the
great philosophers or even Jung. It just means that he is a good storyteller
with a powerful story to tell. He does not even have to be right. He has
already had his impact. And, if he really succeeded in writing a culture-bearer
book, our entire society now carries around a piece of ZAMM and Lila with them.
As an aside to another thread, another culture-bearer book that does the same is
“Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, although in a completely different way.
Anyway, I think that that there is a conflict between individuals and the
collective, so I am not ready to flush the toilet just yet. I think that if an
intellectual level exists it would be between the biological and the social.
However, Mary’s post has given me some new perspective and I will have to do
some more thinking. Right now, I would say that social values might have
something to do with the collective conscious. However, I am not sure that
intellectual values exist at all, other than as a label that we put on social
values that we feel have high quality. I really like Mary’s idea that the
intellectual level might be only necessary for western society and am ready to
subscribe to this. But all this philosophizing is not my forte, so I better get
back on some solid ground where I belong.
I was merely trying to integrate some of the ideas of dynamic quality with
complexity theory. I was exploring if something is there and if what Pirsig
means by dynamic quality exists in the frontier known in complexity theory as
“the edge of chaos.” This edge of chaos is describable mathematically, but
lacks an adequate description in words. This is similar to Pirsig’s “Subjects,
Objects, Data and Value,” where he attempts to use the MOQ to explain Quantum
theory. This search out of curiosity has led to another distraction from what I
should be doing (completing my PhD), and now I am pretending to know something
else I know little about.
Oh well,
It beats watching meaningless sporting events, taking voyeuristic detours to
free porn sites, getting drunk, or taking home loose women.
Respectfully,
Andy
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:48 BST