[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Andre

9 May u wrote:

> Mr.Pirsig, the creator of the MOQ states that it is the 'manipulation
> of symbols' that stand for experience. (PT letter). Intellect is
> simply 'thinking' ... <snip>

You dare refer to the Paul Turner letter where Pirsig forcefully rejects 
the "thinking intellect" 

    I think the same happens to the term, "intellectual," when one 
    extends it much before the Ancient Greeks.* If one extends the 
    term intellectual to include primitive cultures just because they 
    are thinking about things, why stop there? How about 
    chimpanzees? Don't they think? How about earthworms? Don't 
    they make conscious decisions? How about bacteria 
    responding to light and darkness? .... Our intellectual level is 
    broadening to a point where it is losing all its meaning  

> and one can think without involving the subject-object
> relationship.(LC,p 289). 

That's true, thinking (intelligence) predates both the 4th. and 3rd. level.

> At the intellectual level we experience in the 'abstract' thinking way,
> in the same way that at the social level we experience 'socially', at
> the organic level 'organically and at the inorganic level
> 'inorganically'.And all levels/forms of experience are as real as they
> come. 

To say that we experience in the (level in question) way is a platitude 
and that of the 4th. level being "... experience in the 'abstract' thinking 
way would have been correct had you said: "we experience that 
thinking is an abstract phenomenon different from the concrete 
reality". This is correct because it is SOM.

> This is a view you do not accept because it contradicts your
> interpretation of the MOQ's. We are here to discuss the MOQ's version
> and not the MOQ according to Bodvar (which has been criticized by Mr.
> Pirsig)...despite your non-acceptance of this.

This is not Bodvar's but Phaedrus'of ZAMM's radical insight  "Criticized 
by Pirsig" ... bah! You have learned Mr Buchanans tactics it looks.  

> Seems to me you're intellectual level is still stuck in the
> Lockean/Cartesian framework. What is so complicated about the MOQ
> 'model' you are referring to? We are talking values here, not subjects
> and objects.

It's the Cartesian (the final architect of SOM according to Pirsig) 
"intellect" MOQ's 4th. level is supposed to replace (Locke I am not so 
familiar with) And I did not speak of the "MOQ model" (on how SOM is 
subsumed by the MOQ) but about the method proposed in LILA.  

Andre:
> Hope you are not planning on going somewhere permanently Bodvar?!

One never knows, I'm not young any more.

Bodvar