[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[Mary]

Hi Krimel & Andre,

If the Orient is so advanced because they thought up Tao and Zen and
Buddhism, etc., why are they the worst offenders in the world today?  It's
starting to look like they have no appreciation for their environment
(mercury, lithium, and lead in their water and soil) and have no respect for
human life (100's die in mining accidents we would not tolerate here) and no
intellectual freedom.  Why do you think computer programming jobs are being
offshored to India?  Could it be because they have no respect for the length
of a work day, and pay extremely low wages?  Hmmm.

I propose that the Orient is worse than the Occident because they supposedly
know about the Tau, Zen, Buddhism, etc. and yet choose not to organize
themselves by these principles.  Andre, I hope you are testing for heavy
metals in your drinking water.  Boiling is not sufficient.

Mary

- The most important thing you will ever make is a realization.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org [mailto:moq_discuss-
> bounces at lists.moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of Krimel
> Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2010 8:58 AM
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: Re: [MD] Reading & Comprehension
> 
> [Bo]
> Pirsig's claim is that Reality = Quality and that the MOQ is some
> arbitrary arrangement of this Quality Reality, hence his Quality/MOQ
> meta-metaphysics that undermines the MOQ. I claim that  the MOQ
> constitutes the Quality Reality, its Dynamic/Static split and static
> levels
> makes for the ultimate flawless metaphysics.
> 
> [Krimel]
> Reality ultimately defies description. This is not a some flaky
> mystical
> quasi-philosophical gobbledy gook. It conforms to our everyday
> experience.
> Reality is in flux and whatever we say it at a particular instant is
> neither
> what it was in the previous instant not what it will be in the next. We
> create conceptual patterns to help us navigate this flux and those
> patterns
> are concepts. Any description one offers comes in the form of
> conceptual
> patterns. Those patterns are not reality but descriptions of it. Bohr
> said
> it very well when he claimed that physics is not about reality but
> about
> what we can say about reality.
> 
> This is a critical point which you appear to have missed entirely.
> Until you
> deal with it everything else you say is meaningless.
> 
> Marsha for example gets this point very well. Perhaps too well. Forming
> concepts or dividing the indivisible is just what we do. To not do so
> is to
> be paralyzed. One does not derive greater meaning from abandoning
> conception. One merely achieves a conception of no conception or a
> state
> particular state of insight. This is not the sort of state that serves
> one
> well in rush hour traffic. To act in the world requires a set of
> concepts.
> What we argue about is always the Value of one set of concepts as
> opposed to
> another.
> 
> [Bo]
> No objections whatsoever, the Tao may well correspond to Quality, I'm
> no fundamentalist here, my point however is that all such "Reality = X"
> immediately requires a counterpart, so why not start with the dualism
> right away? One dynamic, active ...etc. source that causes static,
> passive ...etc. fall-outs. And now Krimel I ask you to concentrate on
> this single issue:
> 
> [Krimel]
> All you are saying when you say "Reality = X" is that Reality is
> undefined.
> That's what "X" means in algebra. We can then substitute various Values
> for
> "X" and see if they satisfy the equation. It may well be that Reality
> is
> ultimately dualistic; the Zoroastrians certainly thought so and
> introduced
> dualism into Judiasm by the time of the 1st century. But a great many
> thinkers like Moses, Pirsig, Lao Tsu and Einstein have resisted such a
> notion, largely for esthetic reasons.
> 
> [Bo]
> If Tao is the source then IT must be the Yang Tao that spawns Yin
> Tao, there is not a super-TAO that accidentally spawns Yang &  Yin,
> but just as well could have spawned X & Y . This is so crucial for the
> pesky Quality/MOQ issue that I stop here. What do you say?
> 
> [Krimel]
> In Taoism the Tao is "The Way", that is, the path of life, the road we
> travel from birth to death. Yang does not spawn Yin or vise versa. They
> are
> concepts derived from our experience of the path. Yin and Yang do not
> have
> specific meanings. They are ways of seeing and characterizing the
> binary
> divisions that appear so natural to us. Again Lao Tsu does not use
> these
> terms. They are the addition of later Taoists. Taoist metaphysics
> results
> from centuries of Chinese sages directly experimenting with and trying
> to
> understand randomness. The I-Ching is the culmination of these efforts.
> Taoist metaphysics were appropriated by Buddhists as the philosophical
> underpinning of Zen. It is this Zen corruption that hinders Pirsig's
> grasp
> of DQ and SQ. This misconception is then amplified by McWatt, dmb and
> the
> whole AWGI cult.
> 
> It is this Zen corruption of Taoist metaphysics that prevents the
> embrace of
> modern complexity theory. This more modern version holds that order or
> SQ is
> a subset of randomness or DQ. For example, during an infinite number of
> coin
> tosses, it is possible to throw a trillion heads in a row. If one were
> flipping the coins during this run of a trillion heads, it would appear
> that
> the world was an orderly place where heads was the only possible
> outcome. At
> yet for every toss the probability of throwing heads remains one half.
> 
> I would argue that the a dualism of SQ and DQ is only a matter of
> appearance
> and conception and that the underlying Tao remains undefined.
> 
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