[MD] Essentialism and the MOQ

[Laird Bedore]

> [Chin]
> Hi laird,
>
> I hope I am the cause of or at least subject of some of your chuckles. 
> A little light-heartedness goes along way IMHO in keeping things in 
> perspective. 
>
> I understand what you are saying about Quality, and agree. In all 
> fairness, Ham did say earlier the dichotomies he comes up with 
> are “How we think,” and in the West, this is true. 
>
>   
[Laird]
Yes... at some points I pictured you as sublimely "finger pointing at 
the moon", talking to others and passively hoping that they'd follow the 
direction of your finger and gaze on the moon. I could picture you 
eventually getting frustrated and impatient, saying "dude! look at the 
freakin' moon already!" That one got me laughing for quite a while!

I try to be careful with reading statements and questions to see if 
there are SOM assumptions or conflicts between an SOM vs MOQ 
interpretation. The "How we think" statements often have very different 
interpretations from an SOM vs MOQ perspective, so I try to dig to the 
underlying points of contention. It's hard work for us brought up in 
Western thought, but that's why we're here on MD.


> [Chin]
> Per your scale, 0 would be pure evil, and 100 would be pure Good. I 
> asked if he admitted his philosophy was based on SOM, but don’t think 
> I got an answer on this. In his view, Quality would have to be opposed 
> to non-quality -- it would need be one or the other. It would go along 
> with the thinking in order to know what happiness is, you would have 
> to know sadness. 
>
>   
[Laird]
In the Flying Spaghetti Monsters thread that Ham and I have been going 
back and forth on, he brought this up. To quote:


 [Ham, previously]:

> > The Pirsigians think I'm an SOMist, but I'm really not.
> > If anything, I'm a "subjectivist".  We are the subjects
> > who create our world of "objects" from our own subjectivity.
> > If Essence is Absolute Sensibility, then proprietary awareness
> > is differentiated (finite) sensibility.  The appearance of
> > Finitude begins with Difference.
>   
I said to him, "I'd agree with "subjectivist" and understand how it can 
be seen as SOM-ish." A strict subjectivist by definition is working 
within SOM, emphasizing the subjects over the objects. But I'm not 
convinced he's a die-hard subjectivist... He does transcend SOM (not 
always, but neither do we!), and he's discussing here on MD, so that's 
got to be worth something. :)


> [Chin]
> I guess the best way to qualify this would be to look at Quality as 
> the Greek word Areté before, as Pirsig put it, “the dialecticians ever 
> thought about putting it in word traps”  -- the Greeks never had to 
> ask the question “What is good?” Like Dharma, it was just a way of 
> life. 
>
> Maybe he should have just used the word Areté, but then no one would 
> know what he was talking about, huh? -- plus I’d have to figure out 
> how to get that little thingy on top the e without going to the 
> Character Map. ;o)
>   
[Laird]
I think the problem isn't so much with the use of any particular word, 
but understanding the meaning as a continuum of values rather than a 
specific value. It's sort of like a sensor in a piece of lab equipment- 
the sensor gives you the value from within the range of possibilities, 
but is not itself _the_ value.


> [Chin]
> I’d try to explain Morality, but then all those Blue Haired Ladies 
> from the church might come after me with their umbrellas and 
> pocketbooks. 
>
> Anyway, I’m having fun, just hope I am not tooo irritating.  
>
>   
[Laird]
No worries. If you can get the Blue Haired Ladies to have some fun with 
Morality then we'll really be getting somewhere! :)

-Laird

>> [Laird]
>> Hi Chin,
>>
>> I've just been kind of chuckling my way through the branches of 
>> this 
>> thread... I like your response. But this is something I've just 
>> got to 
>> shout to everyone:
>>
>> Hint everybody..... MU!
>> The question is all screwed up!
>>
>> Okay. I'm gonna draw a quaint ASCII picture:
>>
>> Laird's metric scale of morality:
>> immoral 0 |=======50========| 100 moral
>>
>> This little pictograph says wonders about how people are using the 
>> term 
>> and idea of "morality"... So many people think of "moral" as the 
>> 100 end 
>> of this slide. Morality isn't 0, or 100, or anywhere inbetween. It 
>> is 
>> the WHOLE continuum.
>>
>> Morality is Quality. The Source. The One. In our reality, things 
>> happen 
>> that are anywhere from 0 to 100 on that scale, and they're all 
>> moral. 
>> They're all quality events. Some are high-quality and some are 
>> low-quality, but they're all quality. I can't even count how many 
>> times 
>> Pirsig illustrates this, I thought it was so obvious I almost feel 
>> bad 
>> bringing it up.
>>
>> So to touch on a (rephrased) question brought up somewhere in the 
>> threads, why do (high quality) things tend to happen?
>>
>> Well, both high-quality and low-quality things happen (DQ). I 
>> think it's 
>> pretty random. Some might call this chaos. I might too, I'm not 
>> sure 
>> yet. When enough fairly high-quality things happen, a pattern 
>> emerges 
>> (read: it latches statically). Low-quality things latch statically 
>> too, 
>> but they don't string themselves into recognizable patterns quite 
>> as 
>> easily cause their results are rather chaotic and 
>> indistinguishable. 
>> Eventually we've got humans and brains and we identify patterns. 
>> The 
>> ones that are furthest from chaos (the most "patterned" or 
>> organized) 
>> are the easiest to identify, and thus we identify them easily. 
>> From this 
>> process of identifying the most distinguishable patterns, we get 
>> the 
>> impression that an awful lot of good things happen and that it 
>> can't 
>> just quite be coincidence. Then we go on to ask questions like 
>> "why do 
>> high quality things tend to happen?"
>>
>> Mu. The question imposes an (implicit, exclusive) assumption that 
>> makes 
>> the answer unreachable.
>>
>> AH! Oh, I feel much better now. Sorry, long day at work and the 
>> cynicism 
>> needed an outlet.
>>
>> -Laird
>>
>>
>> PhaedrusWolff at carolina.rr.com wrote:
>>     
>>> How could man discover good and bad in an amoral universe?
>>>
>>> Good question Laramie,
>>>
>>> If humanity were not moral, we would not be having this 
>>>       
>> conversation. 
>>     
>>> If being moral is higher than being amoral, an amoral universe 
>>>       
>> could 
>>     
>>> not have created a moral being.    
>>>
>>> Chin
>>>
>>>