From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Nov 02 2004 - 21:08:02 GMT
> msh says:
> What I've read in LILA is that individuals and the levels evolve, or fail
> to evolve (latch), through individual apprehension, or misapprehension, of
> Quality. Isn't this the sense of creation he's talking about? He doesn't
> mean, does he, that Quality creates individuals in the way a painter
> chooses paints and brushes to create a painting? Or in the way God is
> sometimes said to have created the heavens and the earth?
Pirsig writes: "Quality, on which there is complete agreement, is a
universal source of things." (Lila 6). Regarding individuals he writes:
It's Quality that dominates and possesses Lila. She's created by it."
(Lila, 11). He calls Quality "the force of evolutionary creation," (Lila,
17) and throughout he talks about forces of value creating and shaping the
world, similar to the way science attributes creation to forces of energy.
In Chapter 11 he specifically credits Dynamic Quality with creative
activity:
"Biological evolution can be seen as a process by which weak Dynamic
forces at a subatomic level discover stratagems for overcoming huge static
inorganic forces at a superatomic level. They do this by selecting
superatomic mechanisms in which a number of options are so evenly balanced
that a weak Dynamic force can tip the balance one way or another. The
particular atom that the weak Dynamic subatomic forces have seized as
their primary vehicle is carbon.
"What the Dynamic force had to invent in order to move up the molecular
level and stay there was a carbon molecule that would preserve its limited
Dynamic freedom from inorganic laws and at the same time resist
deterioration back to simple compounds of carbon again. A study of nature
shows the Dynamic force was not able to do this but got around the problem
by inventing two molecules: a static molecule able to resist abrasion,
heat, chemical attack and the like; and a Dynamic one, able to preserve
the subatomic indeterminacy at a molecular level and "try everything" in
the ways of chemical combination."
Note that the Dynamic force didn't merely respond but possessed the
capacity to "discover," "select," "tip the balance,." "seize," "invent,"
"get around the problem" and "invent" -- in other words, take a proactive
role to make things happen.
You may if you wish consider Pirsig's description so much poetic license
and thus not the way it actually happened. If so, the MOQ would be just
another bedtime story.
Platt
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