[MD] LC Comments

[david buchanan]

Magnus said to dmb:
Yes, yes. But you completely missed my point. As I said in my reply to Dan just now, a computer that supports intellectual patterns must support all lower levels as well. Not indirectly via users or anything but directly and at all times. The novel that is stored in a computer must be supported by social, biological and inorganic patterns *inside* the computer at all times.

dmb replies:

Biological patterns INSIDE the computer? Seriously? It seems you have a fairly bizarre position. I mean, as far as I know there is no such thing as a computer that operates with social or biological patterns inside it. Pirsig's static levels are a way to re-categorized all the stuff in the encyclopedia of everything. It can be used to describe actual computers but the artifact you've described is pure fiction, no? A computer with biological and social patterns is most likely to appear in a science-fiction horror movie, no? But in our world, computers are a system of logical relations made manifest in inorganic materials, the way a motorcycle is a system of rationality made of steel, chrome, rubber and maybe an old beer can. 


Magnus said:

Every quality event is the source of a subject and an object, right? And every quality event is of one level, right? So at each inorganic quality event, we get a subject and an object, at every biological QE, we get... and so on.

dmb says:

Three times no. I'm fairly certain that you have the wrong ideas going here. You seem to be using a literal and materialistic interpretation of "the quality event". To say it's the "source of subjects and objects" does NOT means that subjects and objects just pop into existence after each "event". The claim is epistemological, not ontological. It's about experience, perception and conceptualization, not things. It's just that those "things" called subjects and objects are the way we conceptualize experience. It's the common sense way to see the world in our culture and most people never really doubt it. You could also call it naive realism. But what Pirsig is saying is that common sense is one big pile of analogies, of ghosts and so our static reality is an evolved conceptual reality. And so Dynamic Quality is the cutting edge of experience, the pre-intellectual moment of awareness prior to our conceptualizations. Likewise, William James says that "pure experience" is not yet sorted into subjects and objects, mind and matter, or any other categories. Pirsig quotes him in agreement and says that subjects and objects are secondary and conceptual while the immediate flux of life is primary and pre-intellectual. 

So I think that if you say we get subjects and objects from an inorganic quality event, you've got Quality producing a metaphysics of substance. But the whole idea is to say that subjects and objects are abstractions, they have been inferred from experience. They are ideas that have been reified. (To mistake something abstract as real or concrete.) And since the claim has to do with how we know rather than what there is, I think the idea can't be applied on the inorganic and biological levels. Subject and objects are human ideas derived from human experience. Inorganic patterns "respond" only in an inorganic way, according to the laws of physics. But they aren't handed SOM glasses through which to view the world. They don't even poop, you know?




 		 	   		  
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