[MD] The SOL-ution

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Heather

On 17 Jan, you wrote after I had written:

> > The fallacy of an Essence or a Quality
> > that can be arbitrary split stems from diagrams
> beginning
> > with the motorcycle (ZMM p. 93) divided into
> > "components/functions". 
> > Here the MC obviously stands there unscathed, but no
> > Reality remains after the initial cut.    
 
Heather:

>  By arbitrary split, do you mean adverse to this
> original dynamic/static split?

A little introduction: In LILA somewhere Pirsig makes it sound as 
if Reality=Quality is the revolutionary thing, while the 
dynamic/static split (D/S) is an arbitrary choice. He even says 
that SOM is a subject/object divide of the said Quality. 

This I protest. The dynamic/static divide is the only one and built 
into all demonstrations that Pirsig gives of the Reality=Quality 
postulate ("The cutting edge .." in ZMM and "The hot stove" in 
LILA) even the first Romantic/Classic proto-moq has elements of 
it. While a Subject Quality/Object Quality divide isn't different 
from "ordinary" SOM.

This Super-Quality divided into DQ/SQ created endless confusion 
at this forum and I believe it finally caused a revision (somewhere 
Pirsig says that the Quality of ZMM is what became the DQ of the 
MOQ). My explanation for "trinity" confusion is the box diagrams 
in ZMM. So, yes, any "arbitrary" split different from the DQ/SQ is 
adverse to the MOQ.  

[Bo]
> > As said Essence=Reality is perfect with me. I may
> > even agree with you about "Quality an S/O appraisal"
> > because
> > Pirsig abandoned Phaedrus' insight and made Quality
> > a mere S/O subset.

Heather:

> Please elaborate on how Quality became "...a mere
> S/O subset." 

By the impossible intellectual leveI that should have been defined 
as the value of the S/O divide. This was Phaedrus original 
insight, and also how Pirsig describes intellect in LILA when he 
writes naturally For instance, all examples of intellectual patterns 
are directly from SOM, but then he checks himself and SOM 
becomes a bad idea that has contaminated an idea-intellect. Paul 
Turner (my antagonist for years) asked Pirsig about these 
anomalies and P. admitted the confusion and halfway met my 
SOL interpretation, namely that intellect arrived with the Greeks 
(described  as the emergence of SOM in ZMM) but then again he 
checked himself and delivered the "symbol manipulation 
definition" which is language.  

> I thought the MoQ, the Q is Quality,
> thus, Quality=Reality.

Yes that's the basic postulate, but if I may talk some more? I do 
not object to the Quality=Reality postulate (even if I claim that the 
DQ/SQ divide is built into it) Quality indicates an existence which 
is basically GOOD, while the the metaphysical reality that 
preceded it - the SOM - indicated an existence which is basically 
indifferent, quality a mere subjective phenomenon. However, 
if/when SOM is stripped of its metaphysical "M" and the 
remaining S/O split is kept as the 4th. static level ... then the cake 
is eaten and kept.

IMO.

Bo