From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri May 09 2003 - 20:48:27 BST
Hi Johnny,
> I thought you
> left it out becuase YOU thought morality was only the "stale old static
> patterns" and I was reminding you that morality is everything. You don't
> have to tell me that.
I'm glad.
> >Experience is universal. So morality (as defined by Pirsig) is universally
> >shared. Interdependency is secondary to the primary reality of experience.
>
> Yes morality is universally shared. But experience happens to one
> consciousness at a time.
Since consciousness has no plural form, I take it to be even more
"universal" than experience.
> When two people share an experience, like the
> same feeling when listening to Rachmaninov, it is because they share static
> patterns.
Since they don't experience the same Quality, they don't experience the
same static patterns. Static patterns come after experience.
> So I wouldn't say that interdependency is secondary, because the
> static patterns that interpret the experience and give it meaning have to
> be there first.
Art (music) is first of all an experience. Later you can interpret and give
the experience meaning if you like. About art, especially music, there's
no need to think or say anything.
> Rachmaninov had to come first, and someone had to
> introduce you to him, before you could experience his concerto, so there is
> a dependence there before your experience. And others depend on you to
> educate them about static patterns, or Rachmaninov might never be
> experienced again.
This is your determinism bit that I completely reject simply by
performing the simple experiment of wiggling my finger to the left or the
right as I wish, anytime I wish.
> Pure experience without any static patterns in which
> the experience acts means that there is no difference between the
> experience of a blow job and a hand grenade, or whatever the stale old
> metaphor we use around here is...
This is where you miss one of the major points of the MoQ. Experience is
always of Quality. The two occur simultaneously only they are not two.
Experience and value are exactly the same phenomenon. There's no
difference, no separation. Morality and experience are identical. It's
Quality that tells you the difference between one thing and another.
> >Morality in the MoQ is not restricted as in common parlance to how
> >humans out to dutifully behave in mind or body, either the "middle way" or
> >"outside the box." Pirsig "frees" morality from that stale old static
> >pattern.
>
> That's what I meant by "Connotation-wise" Platt. The "common parlance" of
> those words is in each case less than what the MoQ says about them. You
> dutifully expanded reality and experience and value, but left morality to
> rot in the common parlance. Pirsig freed it from the modern negative
> connotation, but you tried to keep its liberation hushed up.
If I led you to believe that morality as used in the MoQ refers solely to
social level morality and human behavior, I apologize for my lack of
clarity.
> >Morality as you like to define it is a set of social patterns that varies
> >from culture to culture. Exceptions to your claim of "universal" moral
> >social patterns such as adultery are easily found. Morality as Pirsig
> >defines it includes but transcends social patterns.
>
> When I talk about the universal morality, I am talking the same universal
> morality that Pirsig is. It is superfolous however to say that we live in
> reality, so the usual meaning that comes out when I use the word morality
> is the cultural context.
Yes, I thought you used morality in the "cultural context." I've left that
context behind with the advent of the MoQ. To say morality is reality is
not superfluous at all: it's the central postulate of the Moq.
> You agreed with Mati that context is another term
> for reality in that post, but here you see a need to make a distinction
> (though you say I make the disctinction, which is laughable, my whole
> mission here has been to get people to see social morality on the same
> ontologically significant MoQ terms, not a different kind of morality but
> the exact same thing as gravity and carbon bonding). Phyllis was looking
> for shared moral precepts that different cultures might have in common with
> which to settle conflicts, so I supplied her with some like adultery. You
> don't have to tell me that not all cultures have the same things in common,
> but to satisfactorily work out conflicts without coercion, they had better
> find some from which to begin to agree. You are sounding a lot like the
> cultural relativists you usually mock all of a sudden, you know.
To recognize that different cultures have different standards of social
morality is not to be a relativist. Relativists assert that we must honor
and respect the morals of all cultures alike, even though we may judge
their morals to be terribly wrong. That's what "diversity," a very popular
term on the left, is all about. Under the rubric of diversity we are
supposed to tolerate all forms of social behavior. Fortunately, we now
have the MoQ to explain rationally why headhunting and socialism are
wrong and shouldn't be tolerated. As for not using coercion, heed the
words of Pirsig:
"The ideal of a harmonious society in which everyone without coercion
cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a
devastating fiction."
> >People can do whatever they want so long as they don't harm or
> >threaten harm to others. "Caring" feeds the ego and gives rise to
> >victimology. Our "shared morality" is that we all live in a sea of values.
>
> Sure they CAN, but they shouldn't. They should do what they should.
> Denying this is denying the whole principle that keeps patterns together,
> it would make the universe collapse into nothing. It makes a distinction
> between between social morality and the whole of morality as to how they
> work and what they are.
You ignore the distinctions in kinds of morality that the MoQ describes.
There's one kind at the inorganic level, another at the biological level,
another at the social, and another at the intellectual. These four moral
forces, each with different powers and goals, are constantly fighting
each other for dominance. These forces are competing within each of us
all the time. "Lila's battle is everybody's battle, you know?" (29)
> Social morality, because it is stale and old, need
> not be followed, but the rest of morality, well that's different. They are
> the same.
No, the rest of morality is not the same, as explained above.
> It is wrong to redefine social morality as what people
> prudently, rationally, ought to do, divorcing it from the patterns of what
> people actually do. This is why what people actually do is important,
> because their actions create morality, and morality is what causes people
> to do what they do.
I don't know how many people are involved in your definition of "people."
But what two or three people do, like get drunk every Saturday night,
does not a standard of social morality make. What people should do is
follow their individual, innate sense of Quality, recognizing that
sometimes what feels good biologically, like being in a gang assaulting
schoolmates, destroys the upper levels that makes human beings
human.
Platt
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