[MD] The Quest for Quality

[Ham Priday]

Hi Bo --

[Ham, previously]:

> One of the problems here is that you are using "intellect"
> to represent what I call "experience".  To me intellection
> is the process of organizing sensory data into a structured
> whole - experiential existence.

[Bo]:
> You bet.  Pirsig's statement that the level arrangement
> isn't new makes the impression that the first 3 correspond
> to the scientific disciplines. The two lower may pass,
> but the social level has little to do with "sociology" and 4th.
> even less with the usual usage of the term "intellect", namely
> thinking in general.
>
> Your "... intellection is the process of organizing sensory data
> ...etc." sounds like a more complicated variety of "thinking"
> and as long as this definition reigns the MOQ is not understood.
> Its 4th. level is crucial and is the S/O distinction ...

If the 4th level is "crucial", why not forego the levels (which only cause 
confusion) and consider "intellect" (I would call it "awareness" or 
cognizance) the differentiated agent created by the primary division?   My 
cosmogeny posits Difference as the primary cause of experiential reality. 
(I'll leave its derivation from Essence alone for the moment.) Difference 
breaks the absolute source into two essential contingencies - sensibility 
and otherness.  From this dichotomy comes value-sensibility and the identity 
of self-awareness with a specific (biological) body.  Since Pirsig's levels 
are intellectually constructed by the individuated self, like all other 
concepts, I could care less about these labels.  They are arbitrarily 
defined, add nothing to the cosmology, and set up unnecessary hurdles to 
understanding.

> ... and a host of subsidiaries (mind/matter, soul/body,
> mental/corporeal, abstract/concrete, culture/nature,
> thoughts/what thoughts are about, symbols/what they
> symbolize ...and more I don't recall at the moment.

[Ham]:
> I won't quarrel with your assertion that Essence "belongs
> to the idealist camp" if you'll agree that Pirsig's Quality
> also falls into this camp.

[Bo]:
> The idealist/materialist distinction is a mind/matter variant so this
> affirms that you are firmly lodged in intellect's subjective camp.
> However you are acquitted, worse are the alleged moqists who
> are likewise lodged but don't know it. Worst are some utterances
> by Pirsig f.ex. the one about the MOQ as an intellectual pattern
> (ignores that the 4th. level is a MOQ "pattern") and about Quality
> as the "essence" with the MOQ some theory about it (an even
> subtler S/O)

I don't follow this either, which goes to show that leveling and patterning 
are only similes (mental constructs) for describing differences (i.e., the 
differentiation of finitude into diversified entities).

[Ham]:
> I don't understand what you mean by "intellect's premises".
> Are they mental constructs of cognizant awareness or
> patterns of an extracorporeal quality?......

[Bo]:
> Intellect's premises is the conviction that existence is split
> along the subject/object "fault" ...or the mental/corporeal one,
> or any of the subsidiaries.

Right.  So, you see, this "split" is the beginning of difference, without 
which there would be no experiential existence.  The cosmogeny is really 
that simple!

> The difference between intelligence and intellect is crucial.
> As said animals show different degrees of intelligence,
> but none (of them) has entered the intellectual level (society
> is the necessary step).

Why must intellect be associated with society?  This is another of those 
weird Pirsigianisms.  Can't we conceive thoughts and ideas on our own?  Must 
an intellecutal thought be communicated to others in order to have validity? 
Must everything we think have to come from other people?

[Ham]:
> You seem to be treating intellect as a property or function
> of the objective universe rather than the subjective individual.
> This [epistemology] is incomprehensible to me

[Bo]:
> The subjective/objective split (and its offshoots) has no relevance
> outside the 4th. level, the MOQ only recognizes the dynamic/static
> split. I wish this was "Pirsigianism" but he is notoriously ambiguous. I
> know the alleged moqist strongly dislikes the SOL interpretation, but
> someone must create order out of the master's wildly divergent
> statements.

[Ham]:
> By "a Q-development" do you mean that Quality acts as an
> external force to infuse or empower the individual with intellect?

[Bo]:
> A "Q-development" is a static level and its sub-sets. No,
> Quality does not act as an external force, nor as an internal,
> internal/external is another intellectual offshoot. You may
> say that it leaves little and the MOQ is immensely general,
> the worst fallacy is Magnus' who thinks it is some better science.
> Its force is the immense explanatory power the level
> arrangement offers.

Sorry, Bo, but what you call "immense explanatory power" I see as a gigantic 
stumbling block.  I fail to see what is so critical or metaphysically 
significant about levels, subsets, and patterns.  To me this is deceptive 
use of scientific constructions which have meaning only in the context of 
objective reality.  (Check out David Morey's reference to Deleuze and his 
theory of Difference preceding Identity.  It's "fundamental" and  may help 
you appreciate where I'm coming from.)

I'll wait for your next installment.

Thanks, and regards,
Ham