What's Good all?
I continue to wrestle with the issue of the purpose of life and the universe.
I am still not sure how well the MOQ solves this riddle. Below are snippets
of salient comments that I have collected this month to spur my thoughts. It
is a collage, and I am taking definite risk of losing or distorting the
intended meaning by destroying the true context of each of these quotes.
Therefore with apologies at the forefront, here goes...........
Mr. Pirsig says on page 117 that ".......the apparent purposelessness of the
universe and the life within it are all monster platypi created by the SOM."
Then on p166 he defines the explanation of life as a "migration of static
patterns toward Dynamic Quality."
In the book "The Collapse Of Chaos" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart the authors
attempt to deal with this and most of the other topics in Lila. Despite the
lack of a metaphysical foundation and language, they come to remarkably
similar conclusions....In fact, though it is obvious they haven't read it,
many passages could have been in Lila. ( In some areas I would even argue
they got further than Pirsig.) They never completely throw off SOM, but they
do toss out reductionism and you can tell they don't buy into conventional SOM
"wisdom."
On page 431 they address the topic as follows: "A dynamic does not
necessarily imply a purpose. Darwinian evolution has a dynamic, but organisms
do not seek to evolve. The existence of attractors does not imply that
dynamical systems are goal-seekers: on the contrary, they are goal-finders,
which only recognize what the 'goal' is when they have found it." They then go
on to state that it is a tempting fallacy to " derive a sense of purpose from
a dynamic and see it as a spiritual frame that we must use. "
On 9/8 Ken Clark wrote " As I see it DQ is not a goal, but simply a force that
is directed by our individual, previously-established patterns of value."
On 9/9 Horse stated "This doesn't mean purpose ceases to exist though, just
the opposite, it goes at a completely different
character..........Purpose/Meaning is value. To exist is to have purpose and
meaning."
Jonathan Marder on 9/15 wrote "I think that 'purpose', that SOM platypus, is
the
bridge between the August and September discussion programmes."
My final clip is again from Horse on 9/8 in response to my question from a few
days earlier where I wondered if the journey and the goal were one and the
same thing........."Why not? Who says there must be a goal!"
Sorry again for stealing and perhaps abusing your thoughts, but I have had
trouble finding a consistent flow to this portion of the topic-o-the-month.
Be Good!
Roger Parker
homepage - http://www.moq.org
queries - mailto:moq@moq.org
unsubscribe - mailto:majordomo@moq.org with UNSUBSCRIBE MOQ_DISCUSS in
body of email
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:34 BST