[MD] The Essentials of the MOQ, part 1

[Ham Priday]

Bo -- 

On 16 Jan. you wrote:

> The one glaring inconsistency in the MOQ was its 4th. level
> that originally looked like "the cognitive capacity" and made
> people of the 3rd. level sound like half-wits. The cognitive
> capacity (AKA intelligence) reached an apex with Homo
> Sapiens and is evenly distributed among human beings.

I don't know what "people of the 3rd level" means.  Pirsig identifies it 
with "Social" and places it between Biological and Intellectual.  As far as 
I'm concerned, people (Homo sapiens) are constituted of  inorganic, 
biological, and cognitive properties.  With the possible exception of 
"societal" (which refers to people interrelating in the collective sense and 
is not a primary human "constitutent"), take away any of the others, and you 
lose human beingness as we know it.

> The essence of Kant is contained in this passage translated from
> the philosophy book I use.
>
>    "The solution Kant suggested he called Copernican: it
>    turns inside-out of an established way of thinking. It's not
>    experience that determines our geometry, arithmetics and
>    our causal natural laws, it's we ourselves who appear to be
>    geometric, arithmetic and causative. In a figurative sense
>    Kant again put man in the center of the world of
>    experience. To the degree the world is perceived as
>    existing in time and space, it's something created by man's
>    mental faculties. The world of experience is a world of
>    experience for US, not a world IN ITSELF."
>
> I guess this fits your view, and must fit any sane person whose
> premises are SOM.

It fits my view of man as a conscious being in the experiential world. 
However, it doesn't explain how self-awareness (the subject) is different 
than the objects of experience.  Pirsig's thesis is that there is no 
difference, and that they are both "levels (or patterns) of Quality". 
Instead of simple common-sense duality, which we all understand, he's 
"fractioned" something called Quality to replace subject/object with an 
endless, arbitrary and unnecessary cacophony.

> As said, from SOM's premises it would be silly to deny -
> in Kant's words - that "the world is a world for us". I have
> said many times that SOM's subjective side is the stronger.
> If you have read ZAMM you will remember P. being
> confronted by the two S/O "horns", his finding both untenable
> and then the break with SOM and the first tentative MOQ
> that began with a "pre-intellectual (to be dynamic) Q-reality /
> intellectual (to be static) S/O".  Later in LILA this had grown
> to the present MOQ where intellect's S/O had become the
> highest level.

Simply acknowledging the "subjective side as the stronger" doesn't overcome 
the objective side.  The two "S/O horns" may be a dilemma for Pirsig, who 
wants to reduce them to Quality for dialectical "simplicity" rather than 
confront the fact that existence -- being in the world -- is a dichotomy of 
sensibility and beingness.  Why not explain the metaphysics of THAT instead 
of inventing a fantasy paradigm, the core element of which is unrealizable 
without the subject he dismisses?

You still have not explained what "dynamic" and "static" mean as related to 
Quality or Value.  But, as I see that a "part 2" to your response is 
forthcoming, I shall hold my breath in abeyance until it arrives.

Thanks, Bo.

--Ham