Dear Rog, Rich, David, Platt, Jamie?, Avid, and other observers of Reality,
After starting this thead I couldn't contribute due to said reasons.
I however did follow it with curiousity and I like much of the input.
Funny thing is that I didn't start with words about my perspective on the
subject, but I tried to formulate a good question. This is something I
miss reading the contributions of late. There seems to be disagreement
where there aren't really opposite views (at least I don't see them).
Formulating a good question, or asking ourselves 'how can I descibe
what it is we disagree about?' IMO can improve our discussion.
Until now I haven't seen posts that refute my statement that the Reality-
debate among us members boils down to what individual
members think deserves the term 'Reality'. For me seeing this has helped
understand the way others used terms like 'Experience', 'DQ', 'Reality' etc.
For instance, someone who sees human reality as sublimated from
'the ultimate or nondualistic or whateveryouwannacallit Reality', uses and
refers to experience, when talking about atoms or trees as well as when
talking about human experience (David, me, Rich?).
Someone who refers to Reality only as what we can know/experience as
humans or moreover "what one experiences this instant" (Platt, Rog), uses
the term Experience subsequently in a different sence. The way we solve this "babel"
is coming up with subterms like "non-dualistic" and "ultimate". I say the
presuppositions we individualy use are different, but in the end we're not
contradicting eachother on the metaphysical view.
For me the question remains however what Pirsig's take on this is. After
reading Subjects, Objects, Data and Values again, I couldn't go around the
fact that Pirsig refers to Reality as primarily human-experience based.
He writes:
"The Metaphysics of Quality agrees with scientific realism that these
inorganic patterns are completely real, and there is no reason that box
shouldn't be there, but it says that this reality is ulimately a deduction
made in the first months of an infant's life and supported by the culture
in which the infant grows up."
Subsequently everything outside this "Reality" is the conceptualy unknown
or DQ. The more I think about this, the more I see that the term DQ has
become a reservoir of different concepts. It is everything unknown/unexperienced.
It is "the cutting edge of Reality". It is what static patterns in the evolutionary
scheme are migrating towards. In Lila Pirsig also talkes about the dynamic
choices of the carbon atom without it being a deduction made in the first months
of an infant's life.
Somehow this strikes me as incomplete. What I miss most is a term for the
ontologically speaking ever more complex balance of DQ and SQ. A term for
the depth or convergence in Reality.
Have to stop, too confused right now. What do you think?
A last thing about what Rich wrote:
[...] "Quality is One, Undivided"
This means that any distinction between "static" and "dynamic" is ultimately
false, though useful. Things and thoughts (reality) this way is MORE OR LESS
Dynamic, or static (-stable-), if you like?
Quality as shades, degrees, a continuous spectrum... rather than a
dualism. Does this sound good?
Beautiful Rich!!! Only thing I want to change is that I wouldn't say that "any distinction
between "static" and "dynamic" is ultimately FALSE", but LESS TRUE or LESS REAL.
In a non-MoQ view, something is either True or not-True, Real or not-Real. For me
epistemologic Reality in more like an optimum. To put it in a graph it would resemble a
Gaussian-diagram. Do you know what I mean?
Dtchgrtings,
Walter
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