[MD] Dynamic Development at all costs?

[Matt Kundert]

Magnus invited:
And Matt, this connects pretty tightly to the "What is metaphysics..." thread to feel free to comment. But perhaps it's too MoQ-specific for your taste Matt?

Matt:
No, I do have opinions about the general layout of the Metaphysics of Quality, though your impression is largely right: I don't generally engage in debate about the specifics because I don't find them largely important to Pirsig's philosophy.  (Hence, my rhetorical choice in almost always referring to "Pirsig's philosophy" and not "the MoQ.")

I have to admit, I haven't been following any other titled threads aside from the ones I'd already thrown my hat into.  I don't have the time or energy to stay abreast of everybody's conversations, so I have to plead ignorance to the context of this one.  I only saw this in the archives (yes, yes, I'm an egomanic who searches his name in the archives to see who's talking to--or about--me: sue me).

Magnus said:
When we talk about how the MoQ works, we do it in statements like:

Biological patterns depend on inorganic patterns.
Inorganic patterns value inorganic value.
etc.

And if we really mean that our reality work according to such statements, we must also confess that these rules are somehow built into the fabric of that reality. A biological pattern isn't killed by someone else if the inorganic patterns it depends on are removed, it just die implicitly. Nobody is sitting next to every quality event to decide if this and that event is biological, inorganic or whatever.

But that's exactly the feeling I get when I read some of the Paul Turner letter, and the same feeling I get from much post-Lila writing from Pirsig. Take something like:

"There has been a tendency to extend the meaning of "social" down into the biological with the assertion that, for example, ants are social, but I have argued that this extends the meaning to a point where it is useless for classification. I said that even atoms can be called societies of electrons and protons. And since everything is thus social, why even have the word?"

Who are we (or Pirsig for that matter) to say where to draw some arbitrary line between social and biological patterns? And to draw that line according to some "usefulness for classification"? The only classifications we need are the levels, nothing else. Then why try to force some mapping from those levels to the old obsolete classification?

I think that Pirsig, after writing Lila, have been faced with some pretty difficult dilemmas regarding the MoQ, such as the one described in the quote above. But he doesn't bother to investigate it further, he just gives up and starts talking about usefulness. But in doing that, he also admits that there *is* someone sitting beside every single quality event to decide what level it is. There is no more metaphysics in the fabric of our reality, just a loose explanation about how the reality *may* work in *many* circumstances.

If he had investigated these dilemmas, if he had *trusted* the metaphysics he had discovered, he would have been able to find much better answers, and in doing so, discover so much more about the nature of the levels. But instead, he just said:

- Phhhff, guys, guys, I was just kidding. Don't take it so literally.

Matt:
Reminds me of Kierkegaard's comment about Hegel that if he had just written "this was all a thought-experiment" at the end of his books, he would've been the greatest philosopher who ever lived, rather than a joke.

Our difference is that I don't think Pirsig is giving up, I think he's not only making a strategic choice, but the best choice.  I think he saw the example of Hegel, and thought Kierkegaard was right.  Which is to say Pirsig chose pragmatism as opposed to Platonism.

For instance, when you talk about these rules being built into the fabric of reality.  I think you're right, that is something we should all confess, but I think there's two ways to do it: 1) suppose that these rules are in a language that we can translate and eventually speak (the metaphor of Nature as a Book that we are cracking the code to) or 2) that our "rules" and our "language" are things _we_ use to make our way about the world, i.e. reality could give a shit how we speak or function--Reality doesn't have a language that we can crack.  The first option suggests that we can represent reality correctly, thus breeding a separate field of inquiry, sometimes called "metaphysics," whose sole purpose is to define the criteria for knowing whether a person is representing reality correctly or not, as opposed to just dealing better or worse with reality.  The second options suggests that dealing better or worse with reality is all we need to worry about.

Pirisg can seem to be saying that with Man there is no Reality, but that's not it.  What we call an "object" (be they material or otherwise) is what Pirsig might refer to as a "value-cluster" or a "locus of evaluative gravity."  For instance, a rock is a locus of inorganic evaluative gravity.  I prefer just rock, but the point is that every locus that we can differentiate does its own valuing, so that other rocks are evaluated by my first rock, just as we evaluate the rock.

The crux of our difference, and I side with Pirsig, is that of usefulness--you seem to think that to judge our metaphysical meanderings by only usefulness is to not "trust" our meanderings, to basically caveat everything with a big "Well, maybe."  I think on the one hand, that's basically right, but on the other hand, I don't think it has anything to do with trust--we trust a meandering, or scientific theory, or a religious explanation all by the same criteria: its usefulness to our experience of the world.  Now, I'm supposing you have another category apart from usefulness in mind, something like "correctness."  The question for you, as opposed to me (since I've dropped the extra category), is what the criteria are for detecting correctness as opposed to usefulness.  If you don't have them, you can always claim that civilization is still working on them.  However, if you stipulate that we'll never have these criteria for correctness (as I believe you suggested as much earlier), but that shouldn't stop us from striving for correctness, then what you still need to further do is explain how striving for correctness is different from striving for usefulness.  Pirsig laid his cards out when he called DQ "betterness," as opposed to "correctness."

Matt

BTW, your explanation of the dilemma dodged the dilemma, mainly because there isn't really any dilemma to solve.  Your explanation that "atoms are not societies because they are not held together by social value" is tautological because you basically said that atoms aren't societies because they are inorganic static patterns, whereas societies are societies because they are social static patterns.  The argument Pirsig was responding to, which I think you evaded by merely reiterating the definitions of the categories (and oddly suggesting that ants are not held together by gravity, when everything is held together by gravity), is that, for instance, if you watch enough Nature programs on TV, they will regularly refer to "animal societies."  The question is: how far does the analogy between animal interactional forms and human interactional forms extend?  Pirsig's right, you can extend "social" all the way down to atoms by analogy and a little imagination ("The electrons and the neutrons and protons are all part of a community called the 'atom'..."), but why would you?  What Pirsig doesn't do, that I've never be satisfied with, is explain with greater clarity how he differentiates the social from biological, human organization from animal.  In this short section, he basically kinda' shakes his head at it, but why _specifically_ are ants not social?  I think the answer is language, but Pirsig's never really pointed at differentiating criteria (at least, that I can remember, and I would think within the last almost eight years, I would've read _someone_ having remembered and quoted them).

>> Magus:
>>> In the Paul Turner letter
>>>
>> (http://www.moq.org/forum/Pirsig/LetterFromRMPSept2003.html)
>>> he tries to
>>> put arbitrary limits to the levels according to
>>> their "usefulness" whatever that is.
>>> I don't consider a resulting system from such level
>>> definitions a
>>> metaphysics, it's rather a lack of definitions. This
>>> is one of the
>>> reasons I started the "What is a metaphysics to you"
>>> thread.
>>
>>
>> SA: I'm not arguing against you. I don't know what
>> you mean here. Could you elaborate more?
>
> Ouch, that's a pretty big one, but I'll try.
>
> In the "What is metaphysics..." thread, we talked much about what a
> metaphysics *is*. But we didn't talk much about how it works.
>
> When we talk about how the MoQ works, we do it in statements like:
>
> Biological patterns depend on inorganic patterns.
> Inorganic patterns value inorganic value.
> etc.
>
> And if we really mean that our reality work according to such
> statements, we must also confess that these rules are somehow built into
> the fabric of that reality. A biological pattern isn't killed by someone
> else if the inorganic patterns it depends on are removed, it just die
> implicitly. Nobody is sitting next to every quality event to decide if
> this and that event is biological, inorganic or whatever.
>
> But that's exactly the feeling I get when I read some of the Paul Turner
> letter, and the same feeling I get from much post-Lila writing from
> Pirsig. Take something like:
>
> "There has been a tendency to extend the meaning of "social" down into
> the biological with the assertion that, for example, ants are social,
> but I have argued that this extends the meaning to a point where it is
> useless for classification. I said that even atoms can be called
> societies of electrons and protons. And since everything is thus social,
> why even have the word?"
>
> Who are we (or Pirsig for that matter) to say where to draw some
> arbitrary line between social and biological patterns? And to draw that
> line according to some "usefulness for classification"? The only
> classifications we need are the levels, nothing else. Then why try to
> force some mapping from those levels to the old obsolete classification?
>
> I think that Pirsig, after writing Lila, have been faced with some
> pretty difficult dilemmas regarding the MoQ, such as the one described
> in the quote above. But he doesn't bother to investigate it further, he
> just gives up and starts talking about usefulness. But in doing that, he
> also admits that there *is* someone sitting beside every single quality
> event to decide what level it is. There is no more metaphysics in the
> fabric of our reality, just a loose explanation about how the reality
> *may* work in *many* circumstances.
>
> If he had investigated these dilemmas, if he had *trusted* the
> metaphysics he had discovered, he would have been able to find much
> better answers, and in doing so, discover so much more about the nature
> of the levels. But instead, he just said:
>
> - Phhhff, guys, guys, I was just kidding. Don't take it so literally.
>
>
> BTW, the dilemma in the quote above is very simple to solve. Atoms are
> not societies because they are not held together by social value, but by
> inorganic value. On the other hand, ants are not held together by
> inorganic value, there's no gravity, electromagnetism etc. involved.
> They are also not held together by biological value, if it were, the ant
> finding food wouldn't tell the others about it but just stay there and
> eat it. It's simply a textbook example of a social pattern.
>
> Magnus
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