[MD] Social Intellectual

[david buchanan]

Craig said:
IMHO Pirsig is speaking metaphorically here & still holds the MoQ view that higher levels emerge from lower.  A description & structuring of reality is something that humans do. But experience thru interaction is something patterns at all levels do, even before there were humans.

dmb says:

Yes, again, that's what common sense tells you but the MOQ challenges that common view. The idea that matter came before ideas is a really good idea but it's still just an idea. In fact, "matter" is a concept. This idea is so good that it fits right into the static levels, which describe reality as a evolutionary process. But this is not to be taken as a re-assertion of objectivity or the metaphysics of substance, not to be taken too literally. 

Don't forget how the whole thing starts; with ghost stories, ghosts like gravity. I think it's still the first day of the journey in the first book when he explains how ridiculous it is to think that gravity existed before human beings, especially before a particular human named Newton.

(His pals called him "Fig"and laughed about it but he never once thought it was funny.)



 		 	   		  
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