[MD] Science and the MOQ

[Heather Perella]

Arlo, Ian, Ron, and others,

SA:  erase and write and erase and write, and erase
and write, etc...  This is this event.  This is not
erase and then write, and now erase and now write -
this is erase, write, erase, write...

?,
SA



Arlo:
> No, I don't think we disagree. I personally like 
> strange loops and recursions, my point I suppose 
> was that we have to accept this circularity and 
> its limitations (and benefits) when we start to 
> define something according to itself.
> 
> There are certainly, as Ron points out, 
> "intellectual patterns" we talk about here that 
> are descriptions of the MOQ. But a metaphysics 
> (any metaphysics, I would say) is more of an 
> orientation, a "Way", the active construction of 
> the system in the first place. SOM runs into the 
> same self-referential question, is SOM-itself a 
> "subject" or an "object"? I'd say "neither", but 
> a way of framing the world INTO subjects and
> objects.
> 
> You see the "problem", of course. Any system that 
> "divides" the cosmos can't be contained within 
> any of its divisions. By definition, it is above
> those divisions.
> 
> Pirsig mentions this in ZMM. "Quality is the 
> continuing stimulus which our environment puts 
> upon us to create the world in which we live. All 
> of it. Every last bit of it. ... Now, to take 
> that which has caused us to create the world, and 
> include it within the world we have created, is 
> clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be 
> defined. If we do define it we are defining 
> something less than Quality itself." (ZMM)
> 
> I'm obviously on a "verb" kick here, and its not 
> entirely Ulysses S. Grant that is to blame, 
> although that quote sums up a lot of what I think 
> in very few words. Pirsig, by the way, also 
> supports this. "Quality is not a thing. It is an
> event." (ZMM)
> 
> In Pirsig's talk with John on the existence of 
> ghosts for Indians, he says, "Those Indians and 
> medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, 
> but the context in which they thought was completely
> different." (ZMM)
> 
> And that captures (I think) what I've said. The 
> MOQ is "the context in which we think".
> 
> It is a Way. A Weltanschauung (in the untranslated
> German sense).
> 
> And let me be clear, I don't think this is just 
> Pirsig's MOQ, but applies to the nature of all 
> metaphysical inquiries. Pirsig says as much in 
> LILA. "There already is a metaphysics of Quality. 
> A  subject-object metaphysics is in fact a 
> metaphysics in which the first division of 
> Quality - the first slice of undivided experience 
> ­ is into subjects and objects." In this sense, 
> I'd argue, "metaphysics of Quality" is redundant. 
> There is Quality. And there are Metaphysical 
> descriptions of that Quality. We more or less 
> look past this redundancy due to Pirsig's 
> particular use of the word "Quality", and maybe
> that's part of the confusion.
> 
> So we start with an undefinable Quality, that is 
> an "event" not a "thing", that is approachable 
> always only through allegory and analogy, our 
> "way" of dividing Quality becomes the "context in 
> which we think", our Way of Being (or maybe 
> Metaphysics with a capital "M", but this is 
> active not descriptive). And then attempts to 
> describe this context form the intellectual 
> patterns we refer to as a metaphysics - which 
> then kicks off the self-referential recursions 
> since these are descriptions can never contain that
> which they describe.
> 
> Make sense? (If so, you may be alone. :-))
> 
> Arlo
> 
> 
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