[MD] The SOL-ution

[Ham Priday]

Hi Marsha (S.A.) --


 On 1/12 Ham wrote:
> Unless we're talking abstractly, all objects are either organic
> or inorganic.  Pirsig calls them "objective levels".  Both kinds
> are made of atoms and molecules, behave according to the
> laws of nature, and exhibit experiencable properties.

Marsha said:
> I am trying to be quiet, but I can't help asking about:  "Unless
> we're talking abstractly,".  Isn't this understood as the base
> to all this talk.  It's all abstraction?  Isn't the MOQ an abstract
> construct?

You raise an interesting point.  If I had not qualified "objects" at all in
this sentence, would you have accepted the description?   I inserted this
phrase as an afterthought, realizing that "objects" are sometimes construed
to mean goals or ends, symbols (i.e., words, names, results), or -- 
alliteratively -- as in "the object of my affection."

While I believe you're right that the MOQ is an "abstract construct", I
don't think a philosophy has to be, especially if it's a cosmology.  No
doubt a theory is an "intellectual construct", and to arrive at it requires
some abstractive thought processes; but is the theory itself necessarily an
abstraction?   For example, when Copernicus hypothesized that the earth and
planets revolve around the sun, was this an abstraction?   When Galileo
later provided scientific proof (using a telescope and astronomical
measurements), was he confirming an abstraction or a theory?

I am a literalist who happens to believe that objects are abstractions -- 
that they are intellectually derived from value; so, epistemologically, the
physical universe may be considered an abstraction.  But this doesn't make
the cosmology itself an abstraction -- or does it?  (I trust you can see the
ambiguity of this term.)

The point I was trying to make was that Pirsig's heirarchy of levels is
arbitrary in that it attempts to make disparate things -- objects, society,
intellect -- equate with Quality.  That is not only an abstraction, but a
perversion of common sense.  It forces us to redefine the meaning of society
into something like "the organ of mankind", and intellect as its "collective
mind", with the result that the individual loses its significance.  This is
abhorrent to me, because I believe in an anthropocentric universe in which
value is proprietary to the individual.  I suspect that Bo, and possibly
Laird and a few others here, hold to a similar philosophy but are
constrained by the multi-level theory in their efforts to articulate it.

In short, I see nothing wrong with an esthetic abstraction like Quality used
as a euphemism for man's "struggle for advancement".  But I do not subscribe
to the notion that intellect (subjective cognizance) can logically be
absorbed into objective reality in such a way that S/O is "overcome".

Thanks for your astute observation, Marsha, and for providing another
opportunity to clarify my objections.

Essentially yours,
Ham