[MD] Unkludging the MoQ.

[David Thomas]

Hi Bo,
> Hi Dave T. 
> 
> 12 Aug. u wrote:
> 
>> I find it interesting that only the two of you failed to take a face
>> value that I did indeed make an error and send a junk draft file I
>> always keep in my e-mail folder to put bits and pieces of stuff in.
>> Also interesting is one says, "come back", the other, stay gone.
>> Though it's evident from both of your responses to "junk" and in other
>> messages that either of you credit my criticism with much value for
>> either your work or Pirsig's. DMB sums it up quite nicely.
> 
> I used half my resources to unravel only this paragraph ;-)
[Dave]
I don't doubt it! 
> 
>> While biology is dependent on both inorganic and "organic" chemistry,
>> not all "organic" chemistry requires DNA as this quote and the level
>> diagrams fails to make clear.  Early scientists made the same mistake
>> in thinking all organic chemistry was predicated on some "life force."
>> So long as the part "organic chemistry" prior to biology is understood
>> to be part of the "inorganic" level  the two bottom levels are
>> workable.
> 
> Pirsig went into the inorganic-biological transition at great length
> appointing the element carbon as life's building block (hardly great
> news) but gave us no clues what he saw as "carbons" for the bio-socio
> and socio-intellectual transitions. IMO he should have dropped ALL
> such pseudo-scientific stuff, the MOQ is is NOT an "expansion of
> existing knowledge" as some like to think, no Q-level really
> corresponds to the scientific categories, but leaves the scientific
> "objective" perspective completely for the moral perspective and the
> new-coined moral levels.
[Dave]
Bo, do all of us a favor and repeat after me this vow, "I [insert your name]
being of semi-sound mind and body do today [insert date] reject everything
Robert Maynard Pirsig wrote or said after the first copy, of the first
edition of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' was sold and there is
no such thing as a metaphysics of quality"

Amen & Halleluiah, I think I just had a religious experience.

>> However there is not any dispute that sometime, somewhere, there was a
>> transcendent leap in the quality of human animal's brain to process,
>> store, and use information in ways that no other animals can. It
>> doesn't really make a whole lot of difference whether it was
>> biological or social event or some combination of hundreds of each the
>> leap happened. And the best word candidate for that leap is
>> "intellect". And by RMP law you can't have an emergent quality without
>> an emergent level.
> 
> Agree, the human neocortex brain was clearly the biological "carbon"
> for the social development. The tendency to see "societies" with
> animals and even lower down is a failure to understand the MORALS
> of Q-society which is not merely banding together - animals do a lot of
> that for survival reasons - but that of rising above biology's "eat and
> proliferate" morality and it's here "traditional" morals enters existence.
> Moreover the biological-social transition is where matter changes into
> mind as many seem to believe (based on the orthodox theory how the
> MOQ subsumes SOM)

[Dave]
According to Darwin's theory of evolution the human animal evolved from a
long line of animals. Right? In a couple of months we (the people in my
neighborhood) will be starting annual maintenance to prepare our houses for
the winter. Yours may have already started the same thing. I'm quite sure
the squirrel couples in my front yard will be doing similar maintenance on
their winter homes at the same time. How is my social pattern (home
maintenance) more moral, a higher level of quality, than theirs?

As you see below I'm not sure we are all screwing up by confusing the word
designating a social pattern for the actions, habits, or behaviors that the
social patterns are built from.

>> Now I'm going to take a "Great Leap" and guess one of the qualities of
>> thought that was essential (maybe even the initial quality) for that
>> "Great Leap Forward".
> 
> The "Great Leap forward" is the social-intellectual transition ... no?

[Dave] 
Absolutely, but it's much more probable this transition happened much closer
to 60,000 years ago as opposed to 2500 as RMP claims. Which leads into what
has always bothered me about the intellectual level. By RMP's account it
leaps into being nearly fully formed and capable of dominating Grecian
culture nearly immediately.

If you compare that to what happened when the biological level emerged if we
were there with all our current best technology we probably wouldn't have
noticed that change for millions of years. Even if we grant that
intellectual patterns evolve much more rapidly that all the others what
happen in Greece was faster than the recent computer revolution which has
taken over 200 years.

More importantly he is mistaking an increase of quality in kind, to the
emergence of a new kind of quality. If Pierce and linguists are to be
believed all oral languages are at the most basic, abstract signs (words)
combined with more signs, grammatical rules. And by any account oral
languages came tens of thousand of years before Classic Greece. Again if you
define one of the key qualities of the intellectual level as the ability to
create and manipulate abstract signs the level had to emerge with the
ability. The first innsy wiennsy bit of abstract ability. Just like the
first ameba or what ever really was the first biological pattern.
 
>> Visual abductive reasoning. Yep circle right back to one of the fathers
>> of pragmatism dear old Charles Saunders Peirce. Do your research and
>> let me know. 
> 
> OK, Peirce is the father of the  "Semiosis Metaphysics" which
> compares to the MOQ at its early "trinity" stage, it skips the S/O
> dualism and introduces a "triade reality" of a SIGN (=Quality) an
> INTERPRETER (=subject) and an OBJECT (=ditto). But as we know
> that stage did not last long for Pirsig before he shifted to the (what was
> to become) Dynamic/Static Quality. That's my research this far.
> 
Well as I understand it, Peirce was some type  of an idealist (primarily his
own). RMP tippy-toes that line but wants to land on the realism side.
But I do think Peirce might be helpful on the upper two levels. For instance
from the source you love to hate. Which is just as confusing to me as it is
Dan Glover.

>[ RMP-PT Letter]
> When getting into a definition of the intellectual level much clarity can be
> gained by recognizing a parallel with the lower levels. Just as every
> biological pattern is also inorganic, but not all inorganic patterns are
> biological; and just as every social level is also biological, although not
> all biological patterns are social; so every intellectual pattern is social
> although not all social patterns are intellectual. Handshaking, ballroom
> dancing, raising one's right hand to take an oath, tipping one's hat to the
> ladies, saying "Gesundheit !" after a sneeze-there are trillions of social
> customs that have no intellectual component. Intellectuality occurs when these
> customs as well as biological and inorganic patterns are designated with a
> sign that stands for them and these signs are manipulated independently of the
> patterns they stand for. "Intellect" can then be defined very loosely as the
> level of independently manipulable signs. Grammar, logic and mathematics can
> be described as the rules of this sign manipulation.

Let's look at the social pattern "dancing" Overlooking the possibility that
there might be a "dancing gene" such that when anyone hears cajun type
boogie woogie music they just cannot keep from moving their bodies.
 
I think we would agree generally that "dancing" in all its forms is
primarily learned and done in social, group settings. Even if you can't or
don't dance if you have observed it at all in your culture, if you went to a
total new culture and saw people moving around more of less it time to
something that sounded like music, you would call that "dancing"

Now what is the social pattern? The moving and shake'n or the word
"dancing"? Or both? Or none? According to my understanding of Peirce the
"social pattern dancing" would be the OBJECT which is actual experience of
shake'n your bootie. The INTERPRETER (subject) which could be the actual
dancer, or the partner, or someone just watching. Any of you may have
previously acquired the SIGN though social learning, or on the fly create a
SIGN (the abstract intellectual pattern of quality) the word, DANCE'N. Thus
Chubby Checker can and did create the music, the dance moves, and the
specific SIGN (THE TWIST) that describes a particular type of dance moves
and music for them. If you are of a culture who understands the SIGN-(THE
TWIST) you can upon hearing the music recreate the social pattern
represents. 

You buy that?

Dave