[MD] Is this the inadequacy of the MOQ?

[rapsncows at fastmail.fm]

A,
Thanks for the recommendation to this Koestler fellow, I had never heard
of him before.

About levels...  First, I just composed my reply to Mark's (118's) post,
so to get a sense of my frame of mind it might be best to read that
reply
before starting on this one.  About levels, I just don't see what good
there is for me to get too into it.  Thinking about them casually is one
thing.  Knowing that there are these different sources of influence on
me (and others), and being reminded to consider them all if I get caught
up in a bad pattern (or if someone else seems caught in a bad pattern)
seems helpful.  But I really don't see a point to trying to make a
physics of it.  I guess this is the crux of a lot of my efforts so far
here: am I missing something big?

I happen to have read a little about Hitler for the first time a few
months back, so I can offer a couple things here too.  My understanding
is that Pirsig was on point when he said that Hitler was very much taken
by the patterns of his Victorian society.  I don't know a thing about
victorian society though :)  My understanding is that he was considered
a mediocre artist and a mediocre intellectual, and that he very much
wanted to be
an important member of society.  I don't know if it was the want of
power, or fame, or respect, but perhaps it was this that Pirsig was
talking about when he mentioned Hitler's being dominated by biological
patterns.  Now, as you mentioned, I guess the "biological moral" is: in
the battle between biology and biology, biology can do as it will.  But
I don't recall Pirsig giving us any rules for morality within a level! 
So, to the extent that there was a battle between a jewish society and
and Aryan society, and at the societal level, it seems all was moral. 
But I think that that was the intellectual argument offered by the
Nazis, or perhaps it was just their hope.  In reality jews were part of
a german society... so the intellectual level is supposed to solve the
moral problem.  But, the intellectual level is the highest static level,
so if there is no intellectual resolution, to what is the intellect to
yield morally? I guess the presumption is that there is an absolute
truth which judges intelligence fairly.  I don't know what Phaedrus
would say.  But, I do think that he would not accept your having granted
Hitler a mainly intellectual basis for his suicide!  As I understand,
Hitler had a preoccupation with suicide throughout his life, and many
times when his movement hit a bump in the road he gave in to despair and
mentioned that he should just kill himself.

Now, you said, "But what he [Hitler] did was enslaving intellect under
society, by a totalitarian ideology."  I have two directions to go with
this.  The old one you know: (I haven't decided yet on your wording, but
let me play with it here and see what you think) if the biological level
"informs" the inorganic level about morality, and it the social level
"informs" the biological level about morality, and if the intellectual
level "informs" the social level about morality, and if the dynamic
level is pre-intellectual, what informs the intellectual level of its
morality?  How is one to judge a totalitarian ideology?  It is an
intellectual conception.  Whatever the intellect will inform society
about will have a societal flavor, but a totalitarian ideology is an
intellectual idea.  It is difficult for me to imagine some absolute
truth answering: false!  For mathmatics, and for science on the
inorganic level, perhaps absolute truth has meaning.  But for social
questions I think the whole point is that there may not be absolute
truth; or if there is, which may be a better presumption, we can't
obtain
to an objective vantage to know it!  Perhaps Phaedrus would say that the 
Dynamic level will work it out in the end.

But this isn't quite satisfying.  So I have this second direction. 
Perhaps freedom will give us a clue!  Still we will not have the
objective vantage with which to be sure, but it seems that freedom might
suggest the answer!

Let me start with another example.  Murder.  If we can ask,
intellectually, is murder moral or immoral?  Is Murder high quality or
low quality?  Let us not look at the margins for the moment, but at the
center, think of the the murder of a nice, well-behaved child... playing
in the park one fine, summer afternoon.  The murderer might argue that
he should be free "from" restriction in this regard; the universe values
freedom, you should not put this barrier before me; the universe is more
interesting if I can murder at my whim, and that is why I was able to do
it; if reality wanted to prevent me, it would have done so; there are
plenty of possibilities that life has denied me: I can't fly like a
bird, or hold my breath like a while, etc. and etc.  This is a very
intellectual argument; I don't think that there can be a doubt about
that much.

But is it short-sighted? or provincial?  The fact is, reality does
restrict certain seeming-possibilities.  There is another argument. 
Just like I do not have wings like a bird, if I am restricted from
Murder...  Let me say it this way: if we restrict ourselves from Murder,
perhaps that restriction opens up more freedom elsewhere!  Just like if
the atoms of a DNA molecule restrict themselves to their highly ordered
configuration, rather than a lightly ordered inorganic pattern, animals 
can go about flying in the air all over the globe, swimming to all 
depths of all the seas, and walking about the
Earth loving and thinking, etc. and etc.  Murder is but one possible
action, which has very depressing repercussions; while the restriction
from murder is also one action, but which has much more lively
repercussions.  If we could obtain to a perfectly objective vantage on
the matter, perhaps it would be overwhelmingly obvious that there are
more options in a society free of murder than there are in a society
open too it.  Does freedom pick not-murder over murder?

The intellectual idea of a totalitarian state might be defeated by a
similar analysis.  Though of course any such analysis, due to our
position subjectively within the problem, suffers from a lack of
objectivity: that is, we must always worry that our results are too
short-sighted or too provincial.  I don't know if this is what Phaedrus
thought when he identified dynamic quality as freedom...  But even if it
is, and even if it is on point, and even if it is useful for something
like murder, I don't see how it can be very useful for close calls. 
Like Lila, marital infidelity?  How are the levels (freedom) going to
help me answer that question?  In fact, it seems that any reliance on an
intellectual prognosis based on the levels will only take me from the
best dynamic answer and lead me into trouble.  Like I said to Mark, I
think this whole analysis of levels is a tool for getting out of the
"muddle", it is a tool for maintenance when the dynamic machine is out
of tune.

Tim

On Tue, 2 Nov 2010 10:46:30 +0100, "Alexander Jarnroth"
<alexander.jarnroth at comhem.se> said:
> Hello, Tim.
> 
> In my own terminology, I would say that static patterns at a lower level
> CONFINES those at a higher, but that those at the higher INFORMS those at
> a lower.
> I could recommend anything by Arthur Koestler, but the best would be "The
> Ghost in the machine" (where he introduces the concept of HOLONS), for
> more on the concept of "levels". You shouldn't really consider them as
> stages in a progression, or evolution, which you called serial, but
> rather, then, parallel, as floors in a house. You could take the elevator
> to any of them, just passing by a floor or whatever.
> What comes in sequence, I think Pirsig meant, was the establishment of
> supremacy. That is: biological static patterns OUGHT to guide physical
> patterns, and so on up to dynamic quality (DQ).
> This is the evolution.
> 
> Concerning the Nazis, Hitler, in "Mein Kampf" for instance, argued from a
> kind of "social-Darwinian biologism" concerning the development of
> SOCIETY. The Jewish society was, to him, a threat to Arian SOCIETY. But
> what he did was enslaving intellect under society, by a totalitarian
> ideology.
> The biological moral he mentions, is right by strength. The reason he
> took his life, in the end, it seems, was that his opinion was that an
> unvictorious leader didn't deserve to live. But his biological moral was
> applied to the strife between societies, rather than within a particular
> society - in the latter case he was totalitarian. Intellect should
> produce those theories dictated by the ideology - and intellectual
> patterns threating the Nazi social system should be suppressed and even
> repressed.
> 
> Concerning freedom, I think Pirsig in most cases says that freedom is
> always a freedom from, rather than freedom to. The idea is that society,
> while morally obliged to control man's biological habits, is morally
> prohibited from controlling his intellectual "acts". That is, society can
> control what a man does, but not what he thinks. This is intuitively
> true. However, from such works as Orwell's 1984 we know that society
> could find means to try, anyway.
> 
> This is, of course, my own interpretation and I'm also quite new here.
> But I hoped it clarified something at least.
> 
> /A
> 
> -----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
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> Skickat: den 1 november 2010 22:30
> Till: moq_discuss at lists.moqtalk.org
> Ämne: [MD] Is this the inadequacy of the MOQ?
> 
> Hello!  I’m new here.
> 
> I have just read ‘Lila’ (and just before that ‘Zen’), and I’m stoked to
> come across this forum.  I had been wanting to discuss, and it looks like
> y’all take it seriously here.
> 
> I haven’t been sure where I should start.
> 
> I thought maybe I had better mention metaphysics generally, that I am
> ambivalent about it from the start, that it might very well be impossible
> to apprehend (necessarily, due to the constraints of
> individuation): but I will rather just point out that Mr. Pirsig
> adequately provided these warnings.  I can’t locate the warning he gave
> about his ambivalence at the outset right now, but on page 399 (of 409, I
> have a hard-back, November 1991, Bantam edition at the moment), chapter
> 32, is the latter.  In fact, he might even go too far! 
> “Strictly speaking, the creation of any metaphysics is an immoral act…”  And, “You never get it right.”  I also was interested, from here, in then trying to find redemption for the maltreated word ‘objective’.
> 
> Next, and separately, I thought maybe, rather than play the critic (the
> ‘philosophologist’), I should provide some real philosophy, my
> ____________ (thoughts on metaphysics) itself.  But that’s …
> 
> I have decided to start here:
> 	Let me say something nice real quick.  I see what all the fuss is about.  Quality, morality, dynamic capability: I can see why Mr. Pirsig could have thought sharing this stuff was the highest Quality thing he could do at the time!
> 	Now, critically, in the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) we seem to jump from the undefined fundamental ‘Quality’ (or value), skipping all the physics and metaphysics, to the highly developed concept ‘evolution’, which evolution is proposed to follow the SERIAL progression: 1) inorganic, 2) biological, 3) social, 4) intellectual, 5) Dynamic.  And we are given some rules about morality concerning ‘evolution’, but those rules don’t spring logically from Quality, or at least we are not provided the logic, but rather, we must trust Mr. Pirsig’s capacity at divining the moral code!
> 	On my page 309, chapter 24, “We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual FREEDOM [my emphasis: I misread this until just now…] for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good.  These moral bads and goods are not just “customs.”  They are as real as rocks and trees.”
> 	There seems to be something not worked out properly here.  Something glossed over at least.  It is important to highlight the difference between ‘Freedom’ in the above.  In the initial evolutionary progression, the higher is entirely subject to the lower: biology cannot deviate from the dictates of the inorganic.  But the lower leaves options for the higher, and we are to trust that when it comes to this freedom, the higher is to dominate the lower.  So, from the above excerpt, if the social represses the biological that is moral, and absolutely, but at the same time it would be equally as moral for the intellectual to repress that same social repression!  Is this contradictory?  I think that Phaedrus is comfortable that it is not!  But even if the fight is moral theoretically, what are we to say of the conclusion of the fight: remember, the environment in which the fight is had, and thus the outcome, might be influenced by immorality nearby.
> 	I’m still setting the stage for my critique.  Perhaps we need not worry about outcomes because immoral outcomes will engender new moral fights…
> 	On my page 364, chapter 29, “The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous, according to the Metaphysics of Quality.  There are different kinds of satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares.  The Holocaust produced a satisfaction among Nazis.  That was quality for them.  They considered it to be practical.  But it was a quality dictated by low level static social and biological patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and Dynamic Quality.  James would probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phaedrus didn’t see anything that would prevent it.  But he thought that the Metaphysics of Quality’s classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of debasement.”
> 	I am troubled a great deal by the sentence in the middle describing the Nazis ‘overall purpose’.  Since the author doesn’t offer any concrete examples, I can only guess, but I guess that his classification of the Nazis’ Quality as being dictated by “biological patterns” would be a self-admitted great mistake (never mind, after sleeping on it, the qualification “dictated by” seems to cover it, but I will leave the progression of yesterday’s argument in tact).  While jewishness is arguably a biological patter (transmitted by the mother), and while homosexuality (they were exterminated too) is arguably a biological pattern, hatred of these biological patterns is an intellectual pattern, and not a biological or a social pattern (though there may also be biological and social patterns that reinforce that intellectual pattern…uggghhh)!  It may not be a very developed intellectual pattern, but it is certainly an intellectual pattern.  No?  (and how close does this general problem of classification, which can probably get even more difficult, mimic the problems that Phaedrus himself found with the subject-object divide?!)
> 	So, when Phaedrus said “There are different kinds of satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares.”…  The first time through, following the prior analysis – which analysis might have defended the morality of both sides of a fight about the same issue – you might have thought this fine.  You might also have substituted “very low Quality state” for “moral nightmares”.  This Phaedrus would admit is perfectly proper; on my page 97, chapter 7, “Because Quality is morality.  Make no mistake about it.  They’re identical.  And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world.”  And then on page 98, the start of Chapter 8, “The idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value sounds impossible at first.”  But now, if Phaedrus must admit that the moral nightmare of the Holocaust (or even if I have to pick a less controversial example) was not just a low quality fight between different levels of his metaphysics, but rather a complex, low-quality-simultaneously-high-quality fight all within the ‘intellectual’ level itself… What is it?  What does the MOQ say about intra-level oppositions?  How can a metaphysics based on a single, simple concept resolve any conflict?  In deed, how can a metaphysics based on one single, simple concept even produce a conflict?  Isn’t the existence of conflict proof that a metaphysics based on one single, simple concept is inadequate?
> Certainly Phaedrus wouldn’t rest by telling me to be satisfied with his
> front-of-the-train sense, and to forget my own!  Would he?
> Does this get resolved by saying that intra-level conflict is the result
> of subjective discrepancies vis-à-vis the objectively real Quality of
> that level (at least for the static-intellectual and Dynamic levels)?
> That is, through our efforts (centered on Phaedrus’ from Lila) have we
> transcended the problem Phaedrus started with, or have we succeeded in
> conserving it?  Both?  Or have we gone awry?
> Or am I wrong, or missing something, or…?
> 
> I slept on this last night (probably I would have posted it if my
> registration had been confirmed) and I got to thinking about ‘FREEDOM’,
> somewhat miffed that I had totally read that passage wrong the first time
> through.  I got to thinking: was ‘freedom’ the source of Phaedrus’ serial
> hierarchy?  And had he even given us this, the principle to produce it? 
> Did Phaedrus intend to say that Quality is value, is morality, is
> freedom?
> 	I had noted two passages on this as I read:
> 	On my page 115, chapter 9, “It certainly felt right.  Not subject and object but static and Dynamic is the basic division of reality.  When A.N. Whitehead wrote that “mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language,” he was writing about Dynamic Quality.  Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new.  It was the moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuni.  It contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments.  Its only perceived good is freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself--any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of life.”
> 	Is this a different way of saying the same thing, or is Phaedrus trouncing his own metaphysical bedrock?  Anyway, I have much that I could say about that paragraph, but the second excerpt:
> 	On my page 220, chapter 17: “When THEY [my emphasis] call it freedom, that’s not right.  “Freedom” doesn’t mean anything.  Freedom’s just an escape from something negative.  The real reason it’s so hallowed is that when people talk about it they mean Dynamic Quality.”
> 	Perhaps this is the point.  And perhaps there isn’t much point in a critical analysis of the underlying intellectual framework for the terminology.  There is such a thing as ___________ (Quality–morality); we have access to it; and it is best if you can tune into it rather than trying to analyze what it was before, and then perhaps trying to predict where it might be…  If you get off track the intellectual analysis might be invaluable as a corrective, but the goal of the correction is to get back in tune, good working order, whatever.  The motorcycle is for riding, the maintenance is a bonus – a pre-requisite, but a bonus none-the-less.
> 
> Hmmmm, it seems the expectation of a discussion was enough for me to work
> through my hang-ups on the book; I may not actually need the discussion. 
> Perhaps it is still best that I post though…
> 
> Thanks for having this discussion group, All the best,
> Tim     
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