From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Mar 03 2003 - 06:02:27 GMT
Hi Rick,
Woah, you had exactly the same reaction to Dave's choice of language.
Rick to DMB: But I would submit to you that this identification
>of "data" with "substance itself" is precisely what Pirsig was trying to
>avoid by redescribing "substance" as an "inorganic pattern of values"
>because in a Metaphysics of Quality, 'empirical data' flows directly from
>the pre-intellectual, cutting-edge of reality... Dynamic Quality.
the cutting edge of reality is where expectations (patterns) become realized
(most of the time) by DQ. I think it is important not to disconnect DQ from
everything that came before, as though it could suddenly make glasses of
water into fishes. Things have a continuity because we expect them to. Or,
they vary and change, because we expect them to. If we truly expected water
to turn to wine, though, and it wouldn't conflict with other expectations,
then it would. Now, in this day and age, it conflicts with our
expectations, so it didn't happen. But on that day, it didn't conflict, so
it did. Kind of like, a few thousand years ago, the earth was only six
thousand years old, but now it is five billion years old.
>Pirsig claims that describing the empirical data in terms of value
>confers benefits like "an integration of physical science with other >areas
>of experience that have been traditionally considered outside the scope of
> >scientific thought (LILA, ch8 p121)."
The main area being morality. Now we can see that morality is not just a
code of values that arbitrarily attempt to govern certain aspects of our
culture, but is existence itself, every aspect of it. And it is all derived
from respect for things doing what they should, for no other reason. The
main benefit is providing an answer to petulant children who ask 'why should
I?'. Now we can say that disrepect for morality is truly capable of
destroying existence itself.
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