[MD] Reading & Incomprehension

[skutvik at online.no]

To Krimel 

4 June:

[Krimel]:
> I appreciate the effort to stay focused on the central issues.
> Clearly this is one of them. You are not just saying that division
> is necessary but that a particular kind of division is necessary.
> Maybe it is a translation problem. Why do you think this is
> "required"? 

I think it is required because Reality = X, = Tao, = Green Cheese is 
good for nothing. However I agree 100% with Reality = Dynamic and 
Static Quality.   

> If you mean that humans, in virtue of their very nature, are
> required to make divisions; I probably agree. But that would seem to
> put the recognition of division squarely in the biological level.
> Again, I would agree with that.

What gives the MOQ its explanatory power is the point of its highest - 
static level being the previous SOM, thus there is no theoretical, 
abstract, conceptual ... whatever in the MOQ, all this is confined inside 
its 4th level. It also has a biological level and says that intelligence 
entered with brain, but does not consider itself as an intelligence (in 
the mind sense) product. 

[Bo] repeats the point about the impotence of Reality = X:
> Look. Pirsig had the insight that Quality = Reality, but this meant
> nothing so he soon started on a dualism based on Quality. 

[Krimel]
> The problem I see with this is that you have misunderstood not JUST
> what Pirsig has said but something very fundamental about the nature
> of "saying". The statement "Quality=Reality" means that these
> particular shapes on a page and the sounds associated with then can
> be used interchangeably and that when you produce one you might as
> well be producing the other. 

Language is the ocean in which we swim so all efforts to introduce
language is futile.  

> A further meaning of the statement "Quality=Reality" is that these
> symbols point to a set of experiences I have had and I associate
> with them and that I believe my experiences are of such a similar
> nature to yours that you can make this association as well. 

All this about each person a subjective island who may or may not 
communicate across the waters by language is intellect's (SOM's) 
business so I leave it. I admire your intellectual - conventional - 
knowledge, but cut it short, we are here to discuss the MOQ  

> If you look backwards in time you see all those ancient
> civilizations.

However, speaking about looking backwards in time It's a fact that 
ZAMM looked back on the past as a paradise lost before the big bad 
SOM "carved" its holistic existence asunder. And had Pirsig started 
LILA by "translating" ZAMM in the light of the MOQ he would have 
been forced to make the Aretê past = the social era and SOM = the 
intellectual, but he chose to leave these two books as separate 
universes and the MOQ a mess.    

[Bo] before
> He posits Quality at the top of a "box" diagram that splits into
> Dynamic and Static. This leads to the false impression that there
> remains an unscathed Quality atop the DQ/SQ dichotomy, and made the
> latter-day Pirsig (in the Summary of 2005) say that the MOQ is the
> "static" part of a still greater Quality/MOQ meta-metaphysics. This
> is horribly wrong IT IS QUALITY WHICH IS DIVIDED!. Must be. To say
> that reality is something is useless. There were no metaphysics that
> said that reality was NOT Quality, it was just SOM that said that
> qualities were subjective.  

[Krimel]
> Thus far I have tried to show that while conception is not
> mandatory; it is useful and it becomes increasing useful as we
> become more precise in carving things up. Again, you mistake the way
> we elect to carve things up for the thing being carved. 

The one good opening of LILA about "you can't avoid metaphysics" 
makes nil and void of this carving argument, wherever anthropologists 
went people had a "metaphysics" (always dualist by the way), but not 
in the sense of the tribe elder saying; "Bwana, this is our metaphysics", 
they neither knew any "reality" or "existence" or "experience", this is 
SOM having lodged so deep that we take its S/O (making theories 
about reality) for granted. 

I had high hopes for you Krimel but you too proved to a be a dud. A 
moq dud that is, plenty smart otherwise.   


Bodvar