[MD] Social Intellectual

[david buchanan]

Marsha said:
Static patterns of value are overlaid onto Dynamic Quality to interpret reality.  SOM interprets this overlaid reality as "out there".  You, dmb, are misrepresenting what Bo is saying for the sake of winning an argument rather than understanding.  It is not very intellectual to dismiss everything that doesn't fit your world-view.

dmb says:
I honestly don't see how I was misrepresenting Bo. In fact, I was correcting his misinterpretation of me. He is saying that my interpretation is SOMist and so I explained exactly why that's not so. Apparently, this point was as lost on you and I can predict with the utmost confidence that this point will also be lost on him. Again. The explanation was taken from Lila but he says exactly the same thing in ZAMM. Please notice that the analogue, which will later become static patterns of quality, are the world as we know it, as we conceptualize it. 

"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.""I remember this fragment more vividly than any of the others, possibly because it is the most important of all. When he wrote it he felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words "All of it. Every last bit of it." Madness there. I think he saw it. But he couldn't see any logical reason to strike these words out and it was too late now for faintheartedness. He ignored his warning and let the words stand."



>From chapter 28 of ZAMM:

Now it comes! Because Quality is the generator of the mythos. That's it. That's what he meant when he said, "Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side...that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.


Don't you see how this goes so neatly with the explanations in Lila? The relationship between subjects and objects simply is not the same as the relationship between dynamic reality and static concepts (between DQ and sq). In the MOQ, subjects and objects are BOTH considered to be static concepts and neither one of them can be equated with DQ. Both of them are concepts derived from DQ and both are contrasted with DQ. Bo thinks I am somehow equating DQ with the objective world and this explains why that's not true. I'd take your criticisms more seriously if I thought you understood that, but like I said, this is thee central misconception from which all SOLAQI nonsense flows. 


I honestly don't understand what keeps you guys from seeing this. 

You don't understand Quality, the central term. You don't understand the DQ/sq distinction, the first and central distinction. And you don't understand the four levels of static quality either. And of all the characters to identify with, your gang picks the psychotic ex-prostitute or the unreliable narrator? Other than that, you've got the MOQ down pat. I mean, you guys have misconceptions about everything. And you're snarky and self-righteous about it to boot! It's outrageously sloppy, low quality readings are completely incoherent. 

Bo is trying to solve a problem that does not exist. He thinks Lila represents a relapse into SOM because he does not properly understand what it means to claim there is a discrepancy between concepts and reality. He takes that to be a barely disguised claim about the discrepancy between an objective reality and our subjective interpretations of it. He takes it as a SOMist claim. It's not. It is the claim of a radical empiricist. 

Don't you CARE what it really means, what Pirsig and James meant when they said it? Don't you care what Pirsig's MOQ actually says about that discrepancy? 

As far as I'm concerned, Bo's argument has been defeated many times. It's a dead issue. What's so frustrating is that you guys keep going at it anyway. Nobody with an understanding of the MOQ has any respect for it but y'all just keep blabbing anyway and even the most patient and substantive explanations are treated with derision and contempt. 

Oh well, maybe somebody gets something out it. But you guys are absolutely, pathologically incorrigible.


  		 	   		  
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