hello Bruce, Jonathan and everyone
in his book 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind',
Julian Jaynes coins
the word 'struction' to signify a state of both construction and
destruction at the same time. perhaps if we view the Metaphysics of Quality
as a struction
instead of
something in actual movement towards itself, it may be easier to reconcile
some of the seeming contradictions.
Bruce writes:
The Dynamic-static code is Pirsig's wild card which gets him out of tricky
situations like when do you decide when the social level should override the
biological level and when do you decide that the social level is destroyig
the biological level and hence immoral (ie it is okay for the higher levels
to overcome the lower ones as long as they don't destroy them). Given that
there are infinite no of outcomes of any situation, how can you decide which
is best? Of course it's easy enough with hindsight but at the time, in the
event, your only recourse is to use Dynamic Quality to decide. Not that I'm
saying that's necessary a bad thing, but it's not a reasonable thing so
Pirsig's claim is not justtified.
Bruce, there are not an infinite number of outcomes in our reality
struction. this
mistaken notion has also been the downfall of Darwinian evolution's natural
selection process. reality seems to be in a continual state of both building
itself and destroying itself in the same moment, and this struction leads to
a finite number of outcomes to any particular moment we focus upon within
the struction. this quanton nature of reality tends to 'funnel' unpatterned
reality into static quality patterns we are able to perceive with our five
senses.
by the time an experience is experienced by the experiencer, a sequence of
events has already taken place. each of the four levels of static quality
reality
has resonated with the experience, and if the experiencer can agree with
that resonance on all four levels, then it becomes an experience, or a
Quality Event. by the time the Quality Event takes place, there is no longer
an
infinite number of possible outcomes to chose from, and since we cannot
experience reality without forming Quality Events, there is actually very
little choice involved at all and natural selection becomes selection of the
highest Quality pattern of value.
Jonathan writes:
The point is that in Chapter 13, Pirsig clearly distinguishes between
"patterns of value", which make up the MoQ levels, and the "moral codes"
which mediate between the levels. In the Chapter 30 passage about the
chair, he says explicitly that moral codes and patterns of value are
synonymous. I call that a contradiction.
Jonathan, patterns of value are those things we have formed agreements with
and named experiences. therefore all static quality reality is patterned
value.
as our moral codes are part of this pattern of values, they are indeed
synonymous and yet contain a discreteness of their own as well.
this goes back to Pirsig's first division of reality into Dynamic and static
quality. that division is not a razor cut thru reality like
subjective/objective thinking would have it...rather its an intricate
division between that which we experience and that which we do not.
everything we experience has been 'remembered' after it has resonated thru
the four levels and each static level experience is 'surrounded' by a
Dynamically unknown Quality, bound together inseparably with it.
the contradictions seem to disappear when we change our perceptions of
subjective/objective reality and recognize there is more at work than we can
account for by what it is we perceive of reality. it is this Conceptual
Unknown which has allowed us to form the struction of our reality even
though it is in a constant state of both construction and destruction.
best wishes,
glove
http://members.tripod.com/~Glove_r/Bohr.html
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