Platt,
You've just struck gold! Jakobson studied a brain
dysfunction called "aphasia" whereby a person could
not communicate adequately because he/she had no
ability for self-reference. Self-reference is what the
word "meta" gets at. We need self-reference for
consciousness. So metaphysics is physics about physics
or as you put it in Pirsigian terms:
> Quality that created pure experience is by pure
> experience created.
What I'm getting at has been seen throughout 20th
century: the split between self-reflexive thought and
thought for thought's sake. You can split it as
subject/object, late Wittgenstein/early Wittgenstein,
Dynamic/static, etc. Pirsig's MOQ only works for me
when you think of his MOQ AS the story AND the
metaphysics. The metaphysics ALONE has no
self-reflection BUT if you incorporate the STORY, he
has it covered. THUS, I get bored with the SOLAQI etc
(and I've explicitly explained this to Bo, Good love
him) because it does not cover self-reflexive
communication. Q-Intellect has DYNAMIC quality which
Bo solves by adding a new level. But Pirsig covers
this already if only you read Q-intellect in a Dynamic
way. I think Bo understands Dynamic quality thinking
but he just makes the mistake of bringing DQ thinking
back into the static thinking of metaphysics. He
understands the problem accurately, it's just his
solution makes the same mistake that his solution is
trying to solve. You can't define DQ, so criticizing
the Q-intellect level for not having DQ is violating
the MOQ. Bo even works his way out of this problem by
saying that Quality = sq+ DQ is wrong. What he
believes and I think is accurate is that Quality = sq
+ DQ = (sq+DQ*sq) + DQ. In other words, sq = sq+sq*DQ,
ad infinitum. sq is static, but anything static also
has a dynamic nature to it. It's reflexive, it's meta.
But at that point he is grasping for straws to force
DQ in a static metaphysics and he falls into solipsism
because DQ is only revealed on a personal basis. DQ
works because it works. You can't force it into
equations because it is indefinable.
It's a common mistake because DQ intellect is
difficult to pin down (just read late Wittgenstein to
"feel" this). I've offered a "grammar" based on HTML
but that does not seem to work either (and shows my
own naivity in trying to make one). That's the mystery
of mysticism: we have no grammar for half of our
experience, which is why I've been interested in
paraconsistent logic. We can experience 2
contradictory experiences in one moment.
James and Pirsig help us by "showing" that Dynamic can
be "described" but can't be "defined." That's an
important distinction, DQ can be described but not
defined. In other words, through performance we can
intelligibly communicate with other people, we just
can't define our terms. I think Wittgenstein (who
loved James btw) and James and Pirsig and Rand for
that matter bring us out of the Kant hermetic seal by
"showing" that the noumena can be communicated, can be
experienced and shared. Obviously emotions enter the
picture here and I think Pirsig gives shortshrift to
them. To me the realm of the "show" is dominated by
"love" and almost all emotions can be alchemized by
love which can then alter experience (i've talked to
John about this in terms of what I call
"transdimensional awareness"). The fact that no one
talks about "love" on this site is a problem because
it is ignoring the most experience altering experience
(I remember someone quit the site over this very
omission). BTW I mean "love" in almost all it's
emotional forms (maybe we need to re inject Plato's
symposium here).
In short, your quote
> Quality that created pure experience is by pure
> experience created.
is the closest I've seen on this list for definition
of a metaphysics of quality. Congrats.
Hope this helps.
angus
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