[MD] MOQ and the Future: An Inquiry into Usefulness

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
Seems to me that by saying the universe emerged with Quality that 
you've ducked the question, "Why did the universe emerge?" Was it, 
"Oops, suddenly a universe appeared" as Arlo believes?

[Arlo]
No. It was "Oops/AHA!/Ahhh...". And it is from this "beginning 
response TO Quality", that everything emerges.

[Platt]
Pirsig says that Quality is "the source of all things."

[Arlo]
And right before that, he says, "all this is just an analogy". "Of 
course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy." (ZMM). Source, 
force, foundation, ground... all these are analogous ways to point to 
the undefinable Void. But, as Pirsig reminds us, some are "better" 
than others.

I've pointed out repeatedly why emergence is a better analogy than 
creationism. And I've done so by pointing to the MOQ's central tenet, 
the freedom of patterns to respond to Dynamic Quality. "Value" only 
creates in the sense that because OF value, because things respond TO 
value, what we perceive to be stable patterns of responses appear. It 
does not "create" in any ordered, manipulated, orchestrated way, and 
this necessitates an understanding that nothing, no pattern, was ever 
"certain". Indeed, the uncertain, the unexpected is at the very CORE 
of the MOQ's evolutionary position.

Pirsig captures this *precisely* when he wrote, "When inorganic 
patterns of reality create life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates 
that they've done so because it's "better" and that this definition 
of "betterness" -this beginning response to Dynamic Quality-is an 
elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based." (LILA)

Inorganic patterns of reality CREATE in RESPONSE to Dynamic Quality. 
They are FREE (albeit it a lot less free than biological patterns, 
which are in turn a lot less free than social patterns, etc.). That 
they did THIS or that they did THAT is and always was "uncertain". It 
is "uncertainty" that gives us our freedom, a freedom Pirsig's 
brilliance extends not just to "man", but all the way down in 
ever-decreasing circles to the smallest of subatomic particles.

DiSanto's Guidebook to ZMM offers the following thought.

"The parallel concerns the dynamics of creation-more specifically, 
the fact that the created world comes into being through the 
interaction of a polarity, a complementary twosome.

In the Taoist scheme of things, the Tao, the unnameable One, gives 
rise to the myriad nameable things by way of the Two, yin and yang. 
The Tao is neither yin nor yang but is the ground of both and 
permeates both. Yin and yang produce by their interaction all that 
can be named and defined. In Phaedrus' parallel scheme, as I 
understand it, Quality, the unnameable One, gives rise to the myriad 
nameable things by way of the Two, subject and object. Quality is 
neither subject nor object but is the ground of both and permeates 
both." (Guidebook to ZMM)

Quality is the "ground". It is the foundation. It is a "source" to be 
sure, but creation is the polaric response of a pattern to its experience.

[Platt]
Let's not be limited in our thinking by the scientific SOM worldview.

[Arlo]
Rhetorical device #4. When all else fails, accuse the other person of 
being "SOM".