Roger Glove Mary Mangus - Walter Jeff and all the lurkers who know they
should chime in:
I'm really enjoying this thread. Everyone seems to be listening well,
which is the most difficult and rewarding aspect of any communication.
Certain things have become more clear to me, because of your questions,
answers, descriptions, etc.. I'm grateful. You're making me think
carefully about issues I love. What a kick!
Roger's method of presenting questions to the group has been a great
help in revealing a pattern I would not have seen otherwise. With so
many posts addressing exactly the same issues, I was able to see that
many of you share a view which I believe is mistaken. Please don't
imagine that being outnumbered is the same as being wrong. I may be the
only one who sees it as a mistake, so I'll be careful.
Roger says, "Static quality is patterned, conceptualized experience".
Glove says, "The universe has no order other than what the ... self
agrees it has."
Mary says, "Static quality isn't made of anything other than a mental
abstraction".
Mangus says, "The QE is the source of 2 static patterns, each one being
the subject from its point of view"
See what I'm getting at yet? The only thing I can think to call it is
Solipsism. And I don't mean that in the common sense of the word, as in
egotistically self absorbed. I mean it in the philosophical sense, as in
the theory that only the self exists. I think this is a HUGE mistake.
Walter has detected the problem too. He and I both point to the same
quote from Glove. We both disagree, but he labels Glove an idealist.
That's exactly what Solipsism is, radical idealism. Its a philosophy
with good instincts as it tries to escape from the SOM prison, but
doesn't have the metaphysical tools. The result is a retreat into the
extreme S part of the SOM metaphysic. In other words, it results in the
view that subjectivity is the only real thing, radical idealism. New
Agers have adopted a twisted form of the same view and are fond of
saying things like "each of us creates our own reality". Does it turn
your stomach too? : -)
I can see how a person might come to such a conclusion based on some of
the things Pirsig has said. He says that there is no "substance". He
says that Quality creates both subjects and objects. He says that there
was no law of gravity before the intellect invented it, or that it is
just intellectual value patterns. These all stike me as statements that
can easily be misinterpeted to mean something solipsistic.
I believe that making distinctions between the three branches of
philosophy within metaphysics is helpful in this case. If the "no
substance" idea is taken as a comological claim, then solipsism is a
reasonable conclusion. But seen as an epistemolgical idea, it simply
means that matter is not the solid and dead thing we imagine it to be.
This makes alot more sense in light of the MOQ's picture of matter as
inorganic patterns of value. I think it is the former, solipsistic view
that leads Roger and Mary to conclude that awareness begins only at the
biological level. I think this view of inorganic patterns contradicts
the very heart of the MOQ. All observable phenomena are patterns of
value. Even inorganic patterns are "alive" and aware, although they have
no thoughts or self-consciousness. Those are only found at the
intellectual level. The MOQ doesn't deny the existence of subjects and
objects it just says that there is more to the universe, and that they
are not even the primary reality....
Quality creates subjects and objects? This knot can be undone the same
way. I guess its actually pretty hard to squeeze solipsism out of this
one. Unless one can imagine that Quality goes POOOF! and you and your
toaster over simply appear out of nowhere. This can NOT be seen as an
epistemological claim without coming to some pretty absurd conclusions.
I can't seem to put my finger on it. It seems to work as a cosmological
and as an ontological claim. It seems to describe creation of the levels
and it orders existence into a scheme where Quality is primary.
The law of gravity is just a set of intellectual patterns of value. This
is meaningless as a cosmological claim. It can't mean that "objects"
fall only because we think they will. It can't mean that the Earth
orbits the Sun only because we think it does. (Wish I had that kind of
power!) It just that Pirsig wants to topple the notion that "the law of
Gravity" is something more than just a mental picture of a more primary
reality. Children fell and scraped their knees long before Newton ever
invented the law of gravity. This has to be seen as an epistemological
claim to make sense.
There is one more issue, but it can't be resolved by distinguishing
between the three branches. Glove says, "The QE occurs continuously as
the observer defines reality" and "Static quality patterns of value are
anything the observer defines". I presume the observer is a person and
the definitions he or she makes are static patterns? And static patterns
are the observable phenomena? So what you're saying is that there are
observers and that which is observed? Isn't this just another way of
saying subjects and objects?
I know this seems a little silly, since he's accused me of the same
relapse into SOM. He says, in response to the idea that some of Pirsig's
ideas should be seen in cosmological terms, "If we assume there is a
universal (cosmological) perspective, we must also assume that it exists
as an independently existing "something", perhaps like an object "out
there" that experiences quite independently from the subjective "us as
humans". "Independently exitsting objects out there" certainly smells
like SOM. But I never used those terms. I'd say we don't exist
"independently" because we are composed of the same thing as every other
phenomenon in the universe and we are a part of its overall evolution,
but I wouldn't make the claim for solipsistic reasons. Patterns of value
can certainly exist independently from our intellectual patterns, which
can only map the phenomena for our conveinience. As I understand it, the
first three levels of value patterns evolved without the benifit of any
of our definitions. Our ancestors lived in social groups long before the
intellect began to evolve. It seems obvious to me that there was a whole
universe BEFORE intellectual patterns ever formed. In that sense the
observable world is independent of us. Our intellet requires all three
of these levels in order to exist, it is dependent on them.
Just one more thought. I agree with Jeff's response to Mary. Pirsig's
painful DQ experience came first, the hard work to explain it came
afterward. I'll go even further and say the MOQ was invented to explain
the mystical experience, both his own and that of American Indians.
Pirsig says "...this whole metaphysics had started with an attempt to
explain Indian mysticism" (page 109 Lila HB)
David B.
MOQ Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
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