>===== Original Message From moq_discuss@moq.org =====
Hello,
I realized that I had the ZAMM and LILA set up wrong the last time. Let me try
again.
PIRSIG:Because he didn't pre-judge the fittingness of new ideas or try to put
them in order but just let them flow in, these ideas sometimes came in so fat
he couldn't write them down quickly enough. The subject matter, a whole
metaphysics, was so enormous the flow had turned into an avalanche. The
hundreds of topcs had organized themselves into larger sections, the sections
into chapters, and chapters into parts; so that what the slips had organized
themselves into finally was the contents of a book; but it was a book whose
organization was from the bottom up rather than from the top down. He hadn't
started with a master idea and then selected in Joe-fashion only those slips
that would fit. In this case, "Joe," the organizing principle, had been
democratically elected by the slips themselves.
ERIN: Okay. What I think is this idea of writing top down vs bottom up. Please
understand I am not saying one approach is better than another. I have heard
how some writers start with a clear outline skeleton of a story and fill in
details (top down) and the approach described here is more "associative" and
the outline emerges.
>RICK
>>Moreover, I can't imagine anyone would sit down to create a compass that
>points in whatever direction the explorer wants (what good would it be?).
ERIN: No, what I am saying is that there are different methods for the same
moral problem. Both methods are pointing the same way but are "getting there"
differently.
>
ERIN: I just think authors that I mentioned choose things like that
deliberately.
But anyways I had realized that I wrote the ZAMM and LILA distinction wrong
because they are complementary I pitted against them each other. My bad. Let
me try again.
What if ZAMM was written in a top-down way?
What if LILA was written in a bottom-up way?
(Both of them are pointing to MOQ but in a different way-)
O.k this is what I had meant about the right brain(holistic) and left brain
(linear thinking)
PIRSIG
I had always assumed that this blockage of direct quality perception was
social, but in Mexico a few years ago I talked to a neurologist who argued
that it was physiological. She said that recent experiments are showing that
the right side of the brain, the "artistic" side, filters all experience
before it reaches the left "rational" side of the brain. this would concur
with the MOQ assertion that value precedes concepts in human understanding. I
have read elsewhere that the left rational side of the brain can never
perceive the right brain as an object, but only receive messages from it. This
would explain why everyone knows that something is better than other things
but no one can define what this betterness is. All they get are the quality
messages but they don't know where the quality messages are coming from. This
is not to say that the right brain creates the quality, only that it filters
it before passing it along to the left brain for conceptualizing.
The neurologist's explanation also explains the finding that left- handed
people, in whom the value side of the brain dominates the rational side, are
more commonly found in the arts than are the general population and have a
higher rate of insanity. It could even explain the excessive hostility we are
seeing toward the MOQ from the academic philosophers like Strawson and Hellier
who are above all "rational" in the static sense of the term. I once read a
book called "Death and the Right Hand" which showed that one of the few
anthropological constants found in cultures throughout the world has been fear
and hatred of left-handedness. The word "sinister" originally meant
left-handed. Only our modern scientific rational culture abandons this social
hatred. But at deeper subliminal levels it may still be there, creating the
illusion in some people that Dynamic Quality is somehow "gauche" and sinister.
> RICK: I'm not sure all that stuff with the cards is really 'acausal' or
'nonlinear' thinking. There's a quote in ZMM where Phaedrus notices how his
>composition students are making the error of trying to think of 'what to
>say' and 'how to say it' at the same time.
ERIN: interesting I'm not sure i get that yet i will have to think about that.
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