Rich(s), Diana, Platt, Clark and every MOQer,
I'm not sure if I see what Rich is getting at (Glad to see you back!)
and so I don't know how to answer the questions directly, but his post
did evoke a few thoughts.
The thing that jumped out at me was the lack of distinction between
Dynamic Quality and static quality. Dynamic and static are listed among
the seven, but I think the MOQ insists that the difference between them
is first and foremost. The first cut is the deepest, the most primary
and the MOQ's explanatory power depends on fully recognizing that
distinction.
Static quality can be defined and talked about. The static patterns of
values ARE the world we can touch and feel and understand, to a certain
extent anyway. DQ, on the other hand, is associated with mysticism and
is not definable precisely because it is NOT static, not patterned. We
can sail, but we can't capture the wind in a box. Like DQ, we can feel
the breeze but we can't nail it down. DQ is beyond static patterns, but
that doesn't mean we can't experience it. When we talk about DQ, we're
talking about mysticism, which is very hard to do.
The levels of static quality are much easier to talk about and to
understand. We ARE those patterns, and so is the cosmos we live in. Its
all composed of static quality, the trick is to discern and discriminate
according to the levels. This is where we can really get a handle on the
"real world".
Did you see last Thursday's "Nothing but a moral compass" post? It was
pure Pirsig, with comment or interpetation. It needs none. He says what
he means directly and explicitly. The only thing one needs to see his
points are basic reading comprehension skills. That post was just a
reader's digest version of chapter 12. He put it all in context too.
Check this out...
Pirsig opens the chapter by recalling the "high country of the mind"
metaphor.
"This high country passage through the MOQ allowed entry into another
valley of thought in which the facys of life get a much richer
interpretation. The valley spreads out into a huge fertile plain of
understanding. In this plain of understanding static patterns of value
are divided into four systems: ...."
And he closes the chapter by saying how important this "plain of
understanding" was to Phaedrus.
"When this understanding first broke through in Phaedrus mind, that
ethics and science had suddenly been integrated into a single system, he
became so manic he couldn't think of anything else for days. The only
time he had been more manic about an abstact idea was when he had first
hit upon the idea of undefined Quality itself."
I think its pretty clear that Pirsig is saying that the static half of
Quality was just as important and the original insight in ZAMM. The
levels and the moral codes explain the whole world and solves age-old
SOM problems without resorting to mysticism or any kind of vague-ness.
**********************************
Ken, thanks for your response to that PURE PIRSIG POST. I was thinking
of getting more explicit about you notion that sentience allows evil in
a "big bang" universe. It seems clear to me that Pirsig means what he
says about the static patterns, that they are "moral" and have some kind
of awareness, even at the inorganic level. On the last page of chapter
12 he says...
"So what Phaedrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is
an ethical activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of
reality create life the MOQ postulates that they've done so because its
"better" and that this definition of "betterness" is an elementary unit
of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based."
When he says that everything is an ethical activity, he not talking
about conventional morality, but a much larger principle. Conventional
morality is just one part of the social level of static patterns. Ethics
and morality in the common sense of the word is just a fraction of a
fourth of the static half of reality. And as Pirsig points out in this
same chapter, the patterns that hold a glass of water together are moral
and so are the patterns that hold a nation together. They're both moral
in the larger sense, in the Pirsigian sense of the word. This is how he
dissolves the mind-matter problem and I think your ideas about sentience
are dissolved along with it.
DMB
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