[MD] SOLAQI, Kant's TITs, chaos, and the S/I distinction

[Laird Bedore]

Hi Case,

No worries about responses, being flogged about the head, or much of 
anything really. I'm here most of all to learn, and the stuff below was 
largely a thinking-out-loud exercise. There are plenty of holes and 
omissions and contingencies (especially the lack of quotes to quell the 
bow-to-authority/doctrine-follower types) in the stuff below that go 
unmentioned, but as my boss used to constantly warn me, "don't let 
perfection get in the way of good." Gotta start somewhere!

Stutvik's essay is thoroughly enlightening and in my opinion is 
profoundly more MoQ-compatible with the relationship of SOM within MoQ 
than Pirsig's (inorganic/biological) = subjective, (social/intellectual) 
= objective description, but not without its own shortcomings - 
exhaustivity, non-S/O intellect, etc. Fewer platypi, methinks, and 
revisable to resolve its issues.

After posting, some interesting discussion points came to mind:
Awareness, experience, where and how it fits, how certain answers may 
have intrinsic ties to determinism (pro or con)... this can also be 
applied to Pirsig's subjective v. objective reality position - I think 
doing so leads to fundamental contradiction, but I haven't tried working 
it out yet.
(possibly a semantic debate but) is the phrase "pre-intellectual 
awareness" misleading, in terms of time as well as intellect? What about 
"other-than-S/O intellectual awareness" (beginner's mind) ... or 
"other-than-intellectual awareness" (incl. biological awareness), both 
the words to describe the phenomena and the phenomena themselves... hmm.

-Laird


Case wrote:
> Laird,
>
> I know how frustrating it can be to put a lot of thought into a post and
> have everyone ignore it. Heck everyone here does. So I just wanted to say
> that while I am not up on Stutvik's essay. The rest of what you say
> certainly resonates with what I have been trying to get across. I could
> nitpick here and there but that is kind of how I see it. I am a bit
> surprised no one has beaten you over the head over this. I do recall
> Stutvik's view being pretty seriously attacked in the past and I don't think
> my positions have sparked that many "Aha" moments from the faithful.
>
> Case
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org
> [mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of Laird Bedore
> Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 8:02 PM
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: [MD] SOLAQI, Kant's TITs, chaos, and the S/I distinction
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> These various ideas and the relationships between them have been 
> bouncing around in my head for quite a while. The recent discussions - 
> particularly around the S/I distinction and potential applicability of 
> the Bodvar Stutvik's SOLAQI - spurred me to stuff 'em into a little 
> essay and see what comes out. The ideas build on each other in some 
> faint resemblance of order. This is very much a thought experiment 
> in-progress!
>
> About the SOL:
>
> The first time I read Stutvik's SOL essay was just after it was 
> published on moq.org in May 2005. Despite that I liked some of its 
> ideas, it didn't set right with me and I wasn't sure why. One thing I 
> was sure of was my dislike of the word "logic" in the name: 
> "Subject-object Logic as Quality's Intellect". Since then I've come to 
> prefer "Subject-object Rationality" instead.
>
> The second time through I really liked it. Two things in particular came 
> to mind: First, Pirsig's description of the inorganic/biological levels 
> as objective reality and the social/intellectual levels as subjective 
> reality felt like a hasty dismissal of the question, "how to subjects 
> and objects fit into the MoQ?" His description felt like the Return of 
> the Hypothesis Problem (Part Deux!) - by answering the question, more 
> and more nasty questions arose. Second, snuggling up subjects, objects 
> and their interaction and calling it the intellectual level felt like a 
> better fit and gave me the feeling of answering more of those lingering 
> questions.
>
> The third time through I got an uneasy feeling. Some questions started 
> popping up, particularly around the origin of non-S/O-dominant mythos in 
> other cultures. treating SOL exhaustively as the intellectual level 
> didn't leave room for these other mythos! From my own experiences I 
> sense there's an ability to experience intellectual patterns prior to 
> (or without) the S/O split, although it's been an extremely rare 
> sensation. I equate the goal of Zen to the experience of all 
> intellectual patterns without an S/O split. So now I think that the 
> subject-object relationship is within intellect but is NOT exhaustive. 
> It is the predominant mode of the intellectual level, particularly in 
> greek-derived cultures, but not the only mode.
>
> About Kant's TITs:
>
> Well, not just Kant's TITs, this goes into ultimate reality and static 
> patterns of value in general. For what it's worth I think Kant had great 
> TITs which have gone misunderstood... Let's see if the following ideas 
> are any good!
>
> Static latching is the actualization of patterns from DQ. Static 
> patterns of value (SPoV) are those patterns actualized into being - ALL 
> the raw stuff of ultimate reality. Exhaustive. Building from the SOL, 
> ultimate reality is NOT analogous to objective reality because objective 
> reality is within intellect, whereas the exhaustive set of SPoV are not 
> only greater than the intellectual level but completely contain it.
>
> Solving A simplified pseudo-equation:
>
> ultimate reality = SPoV
> SPoV = (inorganic+biological+social+intellectual), thus
> SPoV > intellectual
> intellectual > (subject+object), thus
> intellectual > objective reality
> ... reducing to ...
> ultimate reality > objective reality
>
> Now, onto Kant and his TITs. Kant was struggling with the S/O split and 
> yearned to describe reality transcending subjects and objects. So he 
> coined the term "things in themselves" to describe this reality prior to 
> the S/O split. The term "things in themselves" is not analogous to 
> "objects in themselves". I think "SPoV prior to S/O split" is more 
> appropriate. He considered this reality exhaustive. An exhaustive set of 
> SPoV is identical to the ultimate reality above. So in short I think 
> Kant's TITs simply referred to all static patterns of value with no 
> intention of treating them as objective reality.
>
> On DQ / Chaos:
>
> The sensation I've got from Pirsig's writing is that he does not like 
> equating DQ with chaos... but ultimately the two terms point at the same 
> thing - absolute undefined potentiality. To me it seems a choice of the 
> "glasses" we use to filter the view - it's called DQ when wearing our 
> "MOQ/Good is a noun" glasses and called chaos when wearing our 
> "SOM/value-free" glasses. I've been looking for a show-stopping 
> distinction between the two but so far nothing has stuck for me. With 
> both, static stuff emerges from dynamic stuff. Quality is not always 
> "good" - it's a spectrum from the highest of high quality to the lowest 
> of low quality. In Pirsig's English class, there were high-quality 
> papers and low-quality papers, but both emerged from "nothing/nowhere" 
> and landed on a sheet of paper. So where's the beef? I think the word 
> "chaos" has a crappy connotation but I don't see any serious difference.
>
> Further into the thought experiment - DQ and chaos are both exhaustive 
> potentialities. Let's assume based on Pirsig's connotations (inorganic 
> triumphs over chaos/etc, intellectual stretches toward DQ/etc) that 
> chaos is an infinite amount of black dots on an endless plane and DQ is 
> an infinite amount of white dots. As I've repeated in too many ways to 
> make for decent essay-writing, both are exhaustive, infinite, so each 
> must be everywhere on the plain at the same time. The plane looks like a 
> massive sea of grey on and on to infinity... So why distinguish between 
> chaos and DQ? They could just as easily be the same and be grey with the 
> potentiality of being black, white, or any shade inbetween. When a 
> distinction is created, it seems like semantics in order to avoid the 
> whole potentiality factor, which is at the heart of both chaos and DQ.
>
> On the S/I distinction:
>
> The quotes Dan Glover provided were superb. The first one in particular 
> struck me as a good example of avoiding SOM traps to describe the MoQ 
> levels:
>
> "When getting into a definition of the intellectual level much clarity 
> can be gained by recognizing a parallel with the lower levels. Just as 
> every biological pattern is also inorganic, but not all inorganic 
> patterns are biological; and just as every social level is also 
> biological, although not all biological patterns are social; so every 
> intellectual pattern is social although not all social patterns are 
> intellectual. Handshaking, ballroom dancing, raising one's right hand to 
> take an oath, tipping one's hat to the ladies, saying "Gesundheit !" 
> after a sneeze-there are trillions of social customs that have no 
> intellectual component. Intellectuality occurs when these customs as 
> well as biological and inorganic patterns are designated with a sign 
> that stands for them and these signs are manipulated independently of 
> the patterns they stand for. "Intellect" can then be defined very 
> loosely as the level of independently manipulable signs. Grammar, logic 
> and mathematics can be described as the rules of this sign 
> manipulation." (Robert Pirsig)
>
> An idea I've been tinkering around with is to consider the social level 
> to be a level where only one layer (or a finite number) of abstraction 
> is possible, and the intellectual level allows many (or perhaps 
> infinite) nested/recursive layers of abstraction to take place. Not sure 
> if this is useful, but it seemed decent. Another simple little example:
>
> Social:
> (subject) person following the (object) rules of crossing the street
>
> Intellectual:
> (subject) person questioning the purpose of the (object) road sign
> (subject) road sign describing the (object) rules of crossing the street
>
> Well, that's all I can squeeze out of my noggin for tonight! Open fire! :)
>
> -Laird
>
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