[MD] Quality and Chaos

[david buchanan]

Krimel said:
 ...as I feared the main points of my earlier post was lost. I am reposting it here in the hope that it will get the attention I think it deserves: Note: This BTW, is the essence of my understanding of the MoQ.  1. Shit Happens. 2. Quality is Chaos 3. Quality (Chaos) has two aspects DQ (uncertainty) SQ (certainty) 4. Value (meaning) is reduction of uncertainty.  (That is, meaning results from and results in,  our ability to create and manipulate static quality)  5. Biological organisms are the meaning (SQ) that evolution  derives from chaos. 6. As such organisms, we create meaning from chaos  7. We are beings that create SQ from the DQ around us or to use James' terms, We derive concepts from experience


dmb says:

I was trying to be polite, but since you asked twice I'll tell pay it some attention. 

It seems to me that the whole thing revolves around the notion that "Quality is Chaos". If that part of your picture is undermined everything else falls with it, more or less. We all know that shit happens. I'll certainly go along with you there. But if Quality is not Chaos, and it's definitely not, then the whole thing folds like a cheap card table, which it is. There are many pieces of evidence to choose from but I like the passages from the end of his second book, in this case chapter 30:

"One of Phaedrus' old school texts ..contained a good summary: 'RTA, which etymologically stands for 'course' originally meant 'cosmic order', the maintenance of which was the purpose of all the gods; and later it also came to mean 'right' so that the gods were conceived as preserving the world not merely from physical disorder but also from moral chaos. The one idea is implicit in the other; and there is order in the universe because its control is in righteous hands.'The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe. Rta is both. This is exactly what the MOQ was claiming. it was not a new idea. It was the oldest idea known to man.This identification of RTA and ARETE was enormously valuable, Phaedrus thought, because it provided a huge historical panorama in which the fundamental conflict between static and Dynamic Quality had been worked out."

"Dharma, like rta, means 'what holds together'. It is the basis of all order. It equals righteousness. It is the ethical code. It is the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction. Dharma is duty. It is not external duty which is arbitrarily imposed by others. It is not any artificial set of conventions which can be repealed by legislation. Neither is it internal duty which is arbitrarily decided by one's own conscience. Dharma is beyond all questions of what is internal and what is external. Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of 'rightness' which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life and to the evolving understanding of the universe which life created."


First of all, this strikes me as a very beautiful and very powerful summary of the MOQ. But it the point is to refute the notion that "Quality is Chaos". If it Quality itself is "the basis of all order" and "the principle of rightness which gives structure and purpose to all life" then Quality is the exact opposite of chaos. That would mean you were about as wrong as it's possible to be - and this error is about nothing less than the MOQ's central term.

What was that thing you were saying about elephants and gnats? Compared to the epic nature of this blunder, elephants would look like gnats. Yep, you practically gotta get in hot air balloon if you want to see the whole thing at once. It's visible from space. 


Just kidding. 

But it is pretty bad.