[MD] Mystics, Brains -- Matt has a question

[Squonkriff at aol.com]

Hey Mark,

Yeah, I pretty much didn't accept much of what you  said.  From what I've 
understood of your redescriptions of Dynamic  Quality from your paper in the 
Forum, you'd like coherence to be a marker  for increased Dynamicness, 
"coherence aims at DQ" as you said here.   For the life of me, I can't make 
much sense of that because, as far as I've  understood the whole metaphor of 
static/Dynamic, Dynamic Quality is an  explicit _breaking_ of static 
patterns, the opposite of coherence.
 
Mark 28-01-07:
Hi Matt,
I have no descriptions or redescriptions of DQ.
Coherence is itself a static description of the unity of static  patterns.

Matt:
I deny being a fatalist simply because a fatalist in your sense is  a 
_theoretical_ fatalist, but fatalism only makes sense when talking about  the 
practice of people, not about "theory" at all.
 
Mark 28-01-07:
My sense of a fatalist is one who is satisfied to accept the  unexpected.
This is not theoretical, it is extrapolated from your own statements.
>From your own statements it may be seen you are a fatalist.
As such you are not a Dynamic pragmatist.
 
Matt:
That's why I want to 
describe DQ as something that _nobody_ can be  closed to--you'll never know 
when you'll get slapped in the face and you can  _never_ assuredly close 
yourself off from being slapped in the face.   If you could, then moral 
evolution--and any evolution--most assuredly could  never take place.  Think 
about it: static patterns want to continue to  be static.  If they had their 
way, they'd always be just the way they  are.  But they _can't_ have their 
way, not because they secretly don't  really want to have their own way or 
because some of them subtly leave  themselves open to not having their own 
way, but because static patterns, as  Pirsig has described it in SODV, sit in 
an ocean of Dynamic  experience.  Static patterns will try and get along as 
well as they can  for as long as they can until _they can't_, at which point 
they break and  evolve.  You can't theoretically predict that kind of thing, 
you only  find it through experience.
 
Mark 28-01-07:
This may appear so until one appreciates coherence as static quality -  which 
you fail to do.
Coherence is, by definition, a unifying process which accommodates  structure 
and openness to DQ: It may be were evolution takes  place.
What's more, this is predicted by experience.
It is verifiable.
 
Matt:
That's a theoretical description that you want to call fatalistic,  but I 
think that description is both more faithful to Pirsig and more  productive.  
The problem with subsuming behavioral identifiers like  "anticipation and 
problem solving" in a theoretical account is that you  can't anticipate new 
experience.  Anticipating new experience sounds  just like Kant's effort to 
draw a transcendental circle around all possible  experience.  Anticipation 
is a practical effort, not something to be  theorized about in this manner.  
Anticipation as a practical effort is  more like _finding_ new experience, 
going out and creating new experience,  rather than _predicting_ it as it 
sounds like in your effort to theorize  about it.
 
Mark 28-01-07:
 
There can be no practical effort without structured experience or theory as  
you put it:
The moq's description of static function and Dynamic function is  your answer 
here.

Satisfaction is an acceptance of the static.
Coherence is a unifying relationship between static patterns.

Matt:
Another way of putting this is that coherence is a bad  indication of DQ 
because you have to ask what you're being coherent with,  what you are 
harmonizing with.  But DQ is a placeholder for the new and  unimagined--you 
can't be coherent or harmonize with that unless you pinned  it down, which is 
exactly what Pirsig didn't want and made DQ undefined to  protect against.  
Coherence, in direct contradiction to you, is the  paradigm of staticness.  
Rupture is the paradigm of Dynamic.
 
Mark 28-01-07:
Coherence is an alternative to stasis.
It is has logical validity and empirical verification: Quality situations  
reduce differentiation when they, 'feel' right.
Terms such as rupture may be appropriate as severe static structural  
disruption.
Conversely. there logically exists the possibility of, 'Accepting' static  
structures which actually grow in response to, 'disruption.'
As such, rupture is certainly not the paradigm of the Dynamic, or DQ.
Your failure to imagine this may be a result of your own static  nature.
 
Matt:
In my theoretical description of DQ, I look like a fatalist to  you, but in 
my practice, I think I show all the traits you identify as  Dynamic, or at 
least I try.
 
Mark 28-01-07:
There is no theoretical description of DQ.
Therefore, i do not employ one.
Coherence is not a theoretical description of DQ.
Coherence is a static description of static unity.
 
Matt:
Opposed to that, your theoretical description of DQ looks 
Platonic to  me, an effort to enshrine.  You don't want to enshrine anything, 
you  don't want to encapsulate.

Matt
 
Mark 28-01-07:
You have made a fundamental assumption that DQ is being defined Matt.
It is not and cannot be defined.
 
Love,
Mark