[MD] Know-how - an aside

[Mary]

Hi Marsha and Steve,

On Behalf Of MarshaV
> Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 2:28 AM
> 
> Hi Steve,
> 
> Since I still cannot find the words I'm looking for, I think I'll speak
> the words I have.  This is a beautiful post.  The quotes from ZMM are
> still as beautiful as I first remembered them. They are equal to my
> experience with the guitar and or listening to Mozart's Sinfonia
> Concertante.  When I was hopelessly lost somewhere between Philosophy
> East and Philosophy West, they were the ecstatic joy of finding a way
> home.  And reading these quotes this morning made my heart quicken.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> 
> 
> Marsha
> 
[Mary Replies] 

Steve, like Marsha, I found joy in these quotes.  Clear and powerful
imagery.  I enjoy your interpretation of them too.

They remind me of something I've been toying with for a while.  The idea
that the MoQ can be understood in many ways, depending on where you have
been already when you encounter it.  That's what's uncanny about Pirsig's
construction.  It can be interpreted in many lights and all are valid.

Thanks,
Mary

Steve:
Really? You can distinguish the static and dynamic aspects of reality in
practice? DQ/sq is the the first cut and a clean one as metaphysics, but
we've been talking about epistemology here. We are talking about knowledge,
and in doing so we are supposing a distinction between a knower (the "taker"
with the buckets) and what is known (the stream).  People have different
experiences because they bring to experience different sets of static
patterns. In our moment to moment experience we cannot completely
distinguish the static from the dynamic. As soon as we start talking about a
person _having_ an experience whether in terms of giving or taking, the
dynamic and static aspects of that experiences are conflated to the point
that it is impossible to say where the dynamic part ends and the static part
begins.

Remember this bit on relativism from ZAMM?
"Why does everybody see Quality differently? This was the question he had
always had to answer speciously before. Now he said, ``Quality is shapeless,
formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize.
Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms.
The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the
Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated
in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues
to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up
our language in terms of these analogues.
We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.''

The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they come to
it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic examples, showing
that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all sound identical to us
because we don't have analogues to them to sensitize us to their
differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking people cannot distinguish
between da and the because they are not so sensitized. It is not uncommon,
he said, for Indian villagers to see ghosts. But they have a terrible time
seeing the law of gravity.

This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition students
arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions.
They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge.
But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems
out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students'
ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well.

In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him.
People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because
people are different in terms of experience. He speculated that if two
people had identical a priori analogues they would see Quality identically
every time. There was no way to test this, however, so it had to remain just
speculation.

In answer to his colleagues at school he wrote:

``Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true
precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of
philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking
something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else
means) by the word quality cannot be broken down into subjects and
predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality
is so simple, immediate and direct.

``The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our
environment can understand is that `Quality is the response of an organism
to its environment' ...

``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.''


Steve:
In the above, the buckets are the analogues (later, the static patterns).
The stream is DQ, but it is not all of reality, it is only the dynamic
aspect of reality. It is constantly defined and never exhausts definition,
so it is undefinable. Reality is the collection of all the analogues in
addition to the buckets. The buckets aren't something outside of reality
that merely take from reality.