From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 04 2003 - 23:36:11 GMT
Bo, Paul, Steve, All,
The idea of a fifth level, as Bo said, has gotten much attention over the years, with good reason. Apparently Steve asked Bo about it, and Paul just did, so I thought it might be a good place to open it to the floor again. Or at least, its been a while since I've written on the topic, so I thought Bo and Paul would be a good launching point.
Bo said on Dec 3 (in the "Democracy and the MoQ" thread):
There is a long history for this 5th level idea (as long as the SOL itself) because if intellect is S/O, then the MOQ must "leave home". It has moved from postulating an outright 5th level, over a "budding" 5th to a "rebel intellectual pattern".
At first many caught on to the 5th level idea and suggested several scenarios for such a development, mostly sci-fi-like global mental-computer network, but this is not "beyond intellect" at all, rather projecting its mind/matter patterns on to new refinement. Mark (then Squonk) was one of those, but grew cold when I insisted that the Quality itself was the only candidate because it replaces the SOM.
You call such a 5th level's patterns "quality quality", but I stick to the "rebel" concept. It has not started to create its own static patterns, but spends an uneasy co-existence with intellect.
Matt:
First, I want to say that I've been sympathetic to Bo's formulation of the subject/object-divide-as-the-intellectual-level. The reason is that I've understood that to mean that binary thinking is what differentiates the intellectual level, i.e. there is no thinking without binary thinking (I don't think the social level counts as thinking at all). When Bo says, "if intellect is S/O, then the MOQ must 'leave home,'" I think he's wrong insofar as "intellect-as-S/O" means binary thinking. I've always read "intellect-as-S/O" as binary thinking because Bo doesn't say "intellect-as-SOM". If intellect were SOM, I would immediately reject that formulation because I take SOM's mistake to be the hypostatization of binary thinking, i.e. Plato's creation of metaphysics, what Dewey called that "whole nest and brood of Greek dualisms". I take Pirsig to be rejecting the "M" part of SOM, leaving simple binary thinking, and his reference to "metaphysics" as to what he's doing to be a me
rely terminological difference (he says tomato, I say tomatoe).
I'm resistant to the idea of the MoQ being a fifth level, or a rebel pattern, because I think we need to remember what Pirsig said about the differences between levels: they are discrete and radically different. Think about the differences between the first three levels. The rules at the atomic level are much different than the rules at the cellular level. The rules at the cellular level are much different than the levels above it. I would posit "social static patterns" to be non-linguistic social institutions and patterns of behavior and "intellectual static patterns" to be language (and therefore thinking). These levels play by completely different rules, very discrete, i.e. NO LOWER LEVEL KNOWS OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE HIGHER LEVELS.
I know people will disagree with my posits as to what the last two levels are (and possibly the biological level), but its not important to my argument about a fifth. The only important part is the part in caps. So, think about the way you define the levels. My suggestion is that to understand what Pirsig means by discrete, you have to accept the part in caps, and if your definition doesn't hold with the caps, then its not discrete enough. Carbon atoms don't know about cells, and cells don't know about the stomach, and the stomach doesn't know about the institution of the President of the United States, and the institution doesn't know about George W. Bush.
The major objection to the part in caps is that its wrong, that discreteness has nothing to do with consciousness. This is tied to the idea that consciousness is created by one of the levels, probably the fourth. At the fourth level, we become conscious of all the other levels in a way in which the other levels are not, that's what is distinctive. However, this doesn't necessitate an ability to be conscious of the higher levels. My main objection to this idea, however, is that I think it misses the point of Pirsig's ubiquitizing of Quality. Once Reality becomes Quality, every "thing" becomes a locus of _valuing_ (which is why I think Pirsig was wrong to call the Good a Noun, he should have called it a verb), and therefore, I think, a locus of consciousness. Further, the entire idea of a "locus," just like "thing," becomes blurred and relative to purposes once Quality becomes static patterns and Dynamic Quality. There is no ego or self that is the house of consciousnes
s once a person becomes a set of static patterns.
Pirsig's splicing of static patterns into four kinds is supposed to be empirical, and therefore entirely fallible and open to taxinomical revision. Its why we started talking about a fifth level in the first place. But if we take discreteness in all seriousness, we would never be aware of it. The closest we could come, I would think, is the experience of a new phenomena for which understanding would come only from our fourth level capacities.
This, of course, means that the MoQ _could_ be a fifth level, and that I'm simply missing it for the reason I just stated. But I doubt it, mainly because I don't think the MoQ is much of a new phenomena. But even if it was, it just doesn't do to try and _talk_ about it, because it would certainly appear that talking is a tool of the fourth level, meaning you are _condescending_ to the fourth level to argue for something that is incomprehensible to the fourth. The "battles" between levels, the so-called moral codes, are not explicit battles to lower levels. Our sex drive doesn't know about the social mores of sexual prudery. The prudery is what does the fighting, the sex drive just goes on and does what it wants to. So whatever battle that could be occuring between us fourth level beings and the fifth level are completely invisible to us, though not to the fifth level.
The only thing I could think of that could be a fifth level candidate is the mystic, the Buddha who has attained enlightenment. To my mind, they function oddly and at odds with most of the other rules of the other levels. I can explain what they do and how they behave by recourse to my own patterns of explanation, but its possible that until I make the paradigm shift, until I become enlightened, I will always be missing the point. But, like I said, you can't argue with me on this missing point, because you'd be condescending.
Matt
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