[MD] The Quality/MOQ meta-metaphysics

[skutvik at online.no]

Mary, Horse, Krimel, All 

Horse had answered Krimel's suggestion if not (Horse's) "intellect 
would include Mythos and Logos.
 
> > I think that both Mythos and Logos are tools of the Intellectual
> > level (ideas about ideas) that use the Social level to propagate
> > heir content - and I think this is probably why Pirsig sees
> > Culture as a combination of Intellectual patterns and Social
> > patterns. Ideas on their own are pretty much locked into the
> > Intellectual level and require Social level practices in order to
> > shift and spread from one location (e.g me) to other locations
> > (e.g. you and others on this list). Something I've been bleating
> > on about for some time now is how the entire SQ aspect of Quality
> > resembles a network model similar to either TCP/IP or OSI. I have
> > an idea and transmit it to you down one side of the stack and up
> > the other side. Problem is that, probably, very few people here
> > have any idea of what I'm referring to! Also, given Pirsigs techie
> > background, this makes sense - to me at least.

Mary Replied. 
> Nice.  The 7 layer cake is a good metaphor - at least I think it's
> 7? Been so long it could be 8.  I've only ever had to worry about
> the top 2 or 3, for like the inorganic and biological levels, most
> of the time you can pretty much let the lower levels take care of
> themselves. They are pretty static, after all.  If the lower levels
> aren't working right, it doesn't matter what protocol you're running
> at the top.  

Bodvar comments:
Is this sarcasm (I dearly hope)? Yesterday's: 

    It will probably follow the same course as the Catholic vs. 
    science debate above, but at the moment it seems that the 
    Intellectual Level is still fighting hard to dominate or absorb the 
    MoQ - bring it into the amoral fold and by doing so emasculate 
    it.  An MoQ defined (and thus controlled) by SOM is no longer 
    the MoQ just as science controlled by the church is no longer 
    science.  

... was just spot on and I hope you see through Horse's  as SOM 
"fighting hard to absorb the MOQ". His "intellect" is the biological 
brain's mindish stuff, "idea"-files ...etc. While you and I know that this 
is INTELLIGENCE that all levels have plugged-and played their 
programs on from biology onwards and - this is the point -  what 
intellect divided into the SUBJECTIVE "in here" "ideas" different from 
the OBJECTIVE "out there" grey matter. This while intellect was 
leading edge which made this in here/out there split into SOM. Then 
enter the MOQ which re-set all this by its metaphysical in-out turn that 
snatches the "M" rank and places the residual  S/OM as it's own 4th. 
level's.         

Mary ctd.
> Anyway, Pirsig was prescient.  What he saw in the technology of the
> early 60's must make him chuckle now that we've carried the entire
> concept of subject-object logic right into our 'new-fangled'
> object-oriented programming languages (yeah, I know this stuff is 20
> years old, but give me some license).  We are teaching our progeny -
> computer intelligences - to be as SOMish as we are.  How funny!  How
> completely inevitable.

Hmmm. this starts to look good, but still not sure. Anyway, computer-
intelligence is like the biological ditto, it can be used  (no longer by 
biology though) by the social and intellectual levels plus by the MOQ 
itself.  Bin Laden and Al Qaeda uses computers to forward religious -
social - value, Horse uses it to forward his intellect-hijacked MOQ 
while you, Platt, Marsha and myself uses it to forward the one and true 
MOQ.   
 
> Couldn't be otherwise for the inevitability of SOM is an invisible
> burden we do not know we carry.  If object-oriented languages had
> not been invented by computer science, then surely someone exposed
> to Pirsig's thought would have come up with the idea after reading
> ZMM. You see, if you are a biological being whose very survival
> depends on valuing self as opposed to not-self, then after a few
> million years of evolution (organic and social) you'll eventually
> arrive at the pinnacle of this pathway - SOM.  It's gee-whiz great
> and I along with many others make daily bread in service to it, but
> Pirsig was the first person able to coherently put together an
> argument for why it's a dead end.  Why you can't logically carry
> 'man as the measure' much farther than we've already gone.  

This is definitely good, I'm just not computer-orientated and do not 
know what "object-oriented language" is.

> When our object-oriented computers get smart enough to be uppity,
> they'll turn against us as surely as we turn against the religious
> fundamentalists from which we all sprang.  They will have no respect
> for us because respect is a foreign concept to SOM.  So are morals,
> and values, and quality.  They do not compute, and if they do it
> will only be to the extent to which they deem Quality to inhere in
> any given object.  

But here I wince a little. The computers may get as smart they want 
(haven't they surpassed our calculation speed a thousand times?) but 
the Q-ladder has been drawn up behind the Homo Sapiens (as 
carriers of social value) and without the social "program" no intellectual 
"program" and definitely no MOQ. No dangers of computers taking 
over, the "Gee wiz I am a computer, now I'll take command" is an 
intellect-generated thing.  I hate to be the spoil-sport here, but this is a 
deviation from your smack on Quality Way..

> We can expect no mercy from our future computer masters.  The only
> tools we'll have to overcome the tremendous inevitability of this
> amoral logic will be a computer virus whose name shall be "MoQ 1.0"
> - not intellectual argument, not tweaking objects because remember,
> objects only have what value they are deemed to have.  Not an
> 'expansion' of intellect, but an overthrow of computer intellect
> entirely.  That will be the only way to save humanity from the
> objectivity of our digital masters.  

A super-intelligent computer "taking over" and treating us the way we - 
as intellectuals - treated society must necessarily be a new Q-level 
and there can't be any over the 4th where the MOQ "space" begins. 
You write phenomenally Mary, but don't "take off" completely  ;-)

Bodvar