From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Fri May 07 2004 - 03:02:59 BST
Steve and all MOQers:
Steve said:
(When Pirsig uses the phrase "static pattern" I don't think that he
means to exclude change or to associate change with Dynamic Quality.
...They represent structures or relationships that can include change as a
river is constantly flowing, yet these structures are static in the sense
that the patterns of flow persist over time.)
dmb says:
Because of your recent anger, it may seem like I'm just trying to be nice
for niceness sake, but my agreement is quite sincere. I understood almost
nothing about the first big paragraph, but when you got down to the topic it
was really good stuff. The river analogy is perfect and it makes a point
I've seen ignored by too many posters; that the flowing processes of nature
are static patterns too. War, for example, is not always an evolutionary
struggle. Sometimes its just people killing people for the best cave, the
richest land or whatever resources seem necessary at the time. The world as
we know it is a energetic and violent place with all kinds of motion going
on at all times, but it is still patterned.
Here is another idea along the same lines. Ideas are probably more
accurately described as sets of static intellectual patterns, but for the
sake of simplicity let's say an idea like gravity is a single pattern. And
think of that single pattern in terms of Steve's river analogy. Although the
idea may be expressed many ways and in many languages, whatever variations
on the form there may be, there is an essential idea under all those various
expressions. There is something recognizable about an idea even when we hear
it from two distinctly different voices and in different terms. By way of
intellectual history and other disciplines we can even see ideas evolve or
go extinct. It takes actual people in the process of course, but ideas at
least SEEM as real as any other living thing in the way they hold together
and even grow.
Thanks.
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 07 2004 - 03:07:56 BST