[MD] Reductionism

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Matt 

8 July you wrote:

DMB had said:
> > Even if my radical empiricist reading of DQ (of the MOQ,
> > actually) is not accurate, that reading doesn't suffer from the
> > problems of inconsistency that seem to come from your reading. And I'd
> > like to suggest that if one understands Pirsig's books in such a way
> > that any given quote makes sense next to any other quote such that
> > everything fits together coherently, then you are probably reading his
> > books rightly. Or, to say the same thing from the other direction, if
> > Pirsig's claims seen inconsistent or contradictory, then you are
> > probably not reading him rightly.  I'm not saying his books are
> > absolutely perfect, of course, but I really do not remember any case in
> > which a perceived inconsistency between claims was not a result of a
> > misreading of those claims. 

Matt commented
> Despite your gesture towards assuming "Pirsig's a bright guy who
> knows what he's saying," which granting he (or anyone else) is doesn't
> get us very far in interpretation (it simply pleads patience with an
> antsy audience--which I doubt I'd be a paradigm case of with regards
> to Pirsig), I'm taking for granted that your (now) assumption that
> Pirsig is internally coherent is something you worked for to achieve,
> and not something you simply assume for everyone.  Coherence isn't
> based on memory (though a good one helps), it's something that's
> created and displayed.  

You two have a knack for these debates. I on the other hand like to 
point to actual inconsistencies and DMB's (via Pirsig) is the 
Quality/MOQ (deduced from the Reality/Concept) metaphysics that 
superimposes itself on top of DQ/SQ.

MOQ's fundament starts in ZAMM with the "cutting edge" metaphor, 
that of a human being becoming aware of an object.

(NB I'm away from home and in this portable I have neither ZAMM 
nor LILA so it will be without quotes)

It says something like "You don't know you have seen a tree until 
after you've seen a tree, there must be a small delay". The delay 
spells the dynamic instant before perception, but DMB  interpretes 
this as the perception is that of a "tree" as a concept - but we know 
that animals roams the forests and see trees without conceptualizing 
them.

Pirsig's great mistake (in LILA) was the James' connection of Quality 
as undifferentiated versus concepts as differentiated, had he followed 
his own hunch he would have found that the aforementioned example 
is the intellectual level's perception: An subject perceiving the world 
as objects (SOM) and in ZAMM he actually does this: SOM is called 
intellect! He could have developed ZAMM's proto-moq (that onlyhad 
the intellectual level) into the complete MOQ where the first static 
quality level - the inorganic - is without senses or language and then 
the known development    ... except that the intellectual would have 
been as in ZAMM - the subject/object distinction or aggregate.         

As it is the SOM empire "hit back", it got a grip on the MOQ by way of 
William James and DMB has developed this travesty to great lengths 
and the lesser mind of this forum applauds him. 

Bodvar