[MD] Platt's Individual Level

[david buchanan]

Dan quoted:
"Man is always the 'measure of all things...'"

Dan commented:
Man measures with intellect, with ideas. Always.

Steve replied:
I think 'measure' in this quote ammounts to 'experience' in the MOQ which 
says that experience comes in several varieties of which intellect is only 
one kind.

dmb says:
Hmmm. I think you guys are misreading the quote. It seems that you're 
reading it as if it said, "Men are the measurers of all objects" but I think 
the meaning is something more like, "Humanity is the standard by which 
reality is judged" or even "Reality is the imaginative creation of Man". You 
know what I mean? I think it says we're it and this is it. There is no 
Other.

Dan commented on the quote about dropping bombs on Japan:
I think what Phaedrus possibly failed to grasp during his time in India is 
that though the nature of the world is illusory, that nature doesn't negate 
cause and condition. I think Phaedrus gave up on account of the fact he 
failed at the time to grasp that there is no separation between subject and 
object...he believed objects were things in themselves rather than 
intellectual patterns of value, a very difficult point to grasp. So perhaps 
it was just easier to give up and go home than it was to expand his 
consciousness to the point of that of his Indian professor.

dmb says:
The guidebook explains this scene. The authors say that Phaedrus asked his 
question from a conventional point of view but the Indian professor answered 
the queston from a Dynamic point of view, which was confusing and 
inappropriate. From an ordinary point of view, that answer was not wise. It 
was shear, heartless nihilism. And as I read the scene, Pirsig is expressing 
a pretty important criticism. I think he fled out of disgust and moral 
outrage at such a seemingly nihilistic comment. And maybe the West can offer 
something to the East on this sort issue. I mean, I think realizations about 
the illusory nature of reality are not supposed to be construed so as to 
negate the prohibitions against the mass murder of civilians or other war 
crimes. The MOQ, I think, would help prevent the sort of confusion that 
comes from asking on one level and answering on the other.  And I think 
that's a very good thing because such confusion can lead to moral nightmares 
such as shrugging off atomic horror.

And the last time a Hydrogen bomb was tested, it was 3,800 times more 
powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima.

I gotta get me one of them.

dmb

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