[MD] What does Pirsig mean by metaphysics?

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Marsha]
I think the MoQ tolerates paradox because...

[Arlo]
Agree. The passage you refer to is about encoding experience via 
symbolic meaning. The "analytic knife" passage from ZMM also goes 
over this ground.

"From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call 
consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process 
of selection mutates it." (ZMM)

Pirsig goes on to explain what continues to escapte Platt.

"To understand what he was trying to do it's necessary to see that 
part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, 
is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the 
landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all." (ZMM)

This sets the stage for his subsequent "All this is just an analogy" 
statement, indeed, just as he comments on how Socrates would by lying 
if he hadn't said this previously, so too does this hold true for HIS 
statements of "truth".

This is really not anything new, and was formalized by Godel's 
Incompleteness Theorums. Language, like "mathematics", is also a 
formalized symbolic system subject to these same limitations. It is 
not a failure of language, nor is it "proof" of some absolute, but a 
mu-recognition that all symbolic systems powerful enough to make 
meaningful descriptions of reality will always contain the paradoxes 
of recursion and self-reference. I think that was what Pirsig was 
talking about in the passage you provided.