[MD] Distinguishing Levels (Individual level)

[Ham Priday]

Platt and Arlo --

[Platt]:

> To my mind a dichotomy is a division between a larger entity.
> Like black and white is a dichotomy in the larger entity of color.
> But black is not "independent" of white. Without black there
> would be no white.  Just so, Pirsig makes a distinction between
> the intellect and social levels within the larger abstraction of the
> universal moral order.  If you want to call that distinction a
> myth or an illusion, your argument is with Pirsig, not me.
> My distinction between the individual and collective levels
> are synonyms for Pirsig's distinction between the
> intellectual and society levels.

You are absolutely right, Platt.  Arlo knows this, but is bound by Pirsig's
doctrine to reject a dichotomous reality.  So he rationalizes Intellect as
the "collective" that includes cognizant awareness, intelligence, ideas,
value-sensibility, creativity, desire, and motivation -- in short, all the
faculties that are proprietary to the individual.  The only human attributes
that he allows are "behavior" and "response".  These are acceptable because
they can be understood as objective patterns.  What the MoQ levels really do
is make everything, including the individual,
objective.  Quality (or value) itself is objective by this ontology.  This
puts Pirsig's philosophy on a par with scientific objectivism: i.e., all
reality is objective.

In other words, the claim that the Quality thesis has achieved a
metaphysical breakthough by overcoming duality is true only insofar as it
reduces all phenomena to objective otherness.  Awareness thus becomes a
biological phenomenon, the individuation of which is either an illusion or a
"stimulus-response mechanism".

[Arlo]:
> It is an illusion. Or a myth, such as Pirsig refers to when he says,
> "The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing
> itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended
> to invent a myth of independence from the social level for its own
benefit."

Only by ridiculing individuality as a myth of religious origin can the MoQ
acolytes effectively claim to have resolved duality.  The empirical fact
that experience is an individual function has nothing to do with religion or
quality levels.  To dismiss this fact out of hand as a myth not only
discredits the work of theistic philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza, Kant,
and Pascal, but goes against the grain of die-hard atheists who know
intuitively that subjective awareness is the core of reality.

As you have stated, Platt, a dichotomy is the division of a larger entity.
The most obvious division in existence is the self/other dichotomy.  Nothing
exists that is not split into the "black and white" dichotomy of subjective
awareness and objective beingness.  The "larger entity" from which this
dichotomy is derived cannot be a property of human perception, since
proprietary awareness is already separated from it.  Quality, Value, and
Intellect are all attributes of the individual perspective.  Therefore, the
"entity" that is the source of this dichotomy is something greater -- an
uncreated essence that is not subject to the pluralistic divisions of
specificity that comprise our experience.

No matter what calculus you use, or how you choose to apportion physical
phenomena, unless you believe that reality sprang out of nothingness, you
must account for a primary source whose singular identity encompasses the
whole of reality.  You know how I define the source.  But until you
acknowledge that the world of beingness cannot exist independently of
awareness, you'll be mired in the patterns and levels of objective
experience.

The topic "Distinguishing Levels" has now drawn well over 100 responses.
Can you truly say that you are any closer to resolving this issue than you
were last week?  Is there any logical reason to expect this discussion to
end in anything approximating agreement?

Essentially bewildered,
Ham