[MD] What does Pirsig mean by metaphysics?

[skutvik at online.no]

Warm welcome DMB

(but that's all I can offer ;-)

25 Jan. 

John had said:
> I didn't know that the MoQ postulated one dq realm, one sq.  I thought
> the MoQ postulates one realm - experience.  This realm of experience
> can be sliced and diced innumerable ways,  but the best way we see to
> divide it, that is, the highest quality explanation we can come up
> with right now, is that experience has a dynamic aspect and a static
> aspect.  The dynamic we term DQ, the static sq.    In this
> metaphysics, experience is generated by Quality.  There is no
> pre-valuation of anything.  Until something is valued, it doesn't
> exist. That's the MoQ, and why, in MoQ terms, unpatterned is a
> fallacy.

I have already talked to John 

dmb says:
> Predictably, I'm going to suggest that the best way to understand the
> difference between dynamic and static is through radical empiricism.
> Dynamic experience is unpatterned in the sense that it is prior to
> conceptualizations or static patterns. 

We know that dynamic means dynamic, what we have advanced to in 
your absence is the pesky Quality/MOQ metaphysics that seemingly 
overrides the MOQ. Quality is the DQ that the MOQ speaks about 
...no?

> You can think of DQ as
> unpatterned value. Pirsig's remark about things not existing until
> they are valued refers to static valuations. 

The MOQ says that the first static fallout is the inorganic level and 
that's aeons before any "evaluation". The notion that all takes place in 
the human mind is SOM's idealist stance and is as foreign to the MOQ 
as SOM's materialist stance.  

> But the hot stove example shows how we experience the negative value of
> the situation and respond to it even before we think of the situation
> in terms of concepts like stoves and heat. 

The hot stove in an example of biological perception of good & bad 
value and works as well for the amoeba organism as for the human 
organism.

> Northrop, James, and Dewey all have their own terms for this
> distinction but the idea is the basically the same as Pirsig's. Such a
> variety of terms really helps you see what they're getting at. The
> unpatterned experience, for example, can be called the undifferentiated
> aesthetic continuum, the pre-conceptual reality, the primary empirical
> reality, pure experience, pre-reflective experience, immediate
> experience, noncognitive experience, pre-verbal experience, the
> immediate flux of life and the cutting edge of experience. 

I protest that all these corresponds to MOQ's "dynamic"  
"Preconceptual" the worst fallacy. Pre-reflective is also wrong, none 
were around to conceive or reflect the forming of the universe. 
"Noncognitive" is wrong too, the proverbial amoeba has no brain, yet it  
perceives biological value. "Pre-verbal!!! I say no more.   

> All these terms are contrasted with experience that is static,
> conceptual, verbal, cognitive, reflective, intelligible and
> differentiated. The idea is that we operate with both ways of knowing,
> even though most of us are barely aware of our preconceptual awareness.

You sound like Sigmund Freud. Why use the MOQ as a pretext for 
these you "Church of Reason" sermons?   

> It's been denigrated and pushed into the background as part of "just"
> what you like. We've been taught not to do just what we like, which
> results in a kind of numbing and deadening of this noncognitive
> category of experience. It's been dismissed as unimportant for
> historical reasons. I mean, radical empiricism serves as a basis for
> the reintegration of the affective domain into our rationality and into
> our philosophies. 

This may have been valid at the ZAMM stage when Phaedrus tried to 
bring the Quality Idea to bear and he saw intellect (=SOM) as Quality's 
sole fall-out. There he spoke about Pre-intellectual awareness (not 
pre-conceptual for Chrissake!!!) but in the full-fledged MOQ with the 
inorganic level the first fall-out this is very confusing to say the least .I 
hate to greet you with this seeming hostility, but it cannot be allowed to 
enter under guise of being MOQ "catechism".  

Yours nonetheless

Bodvar