[MD] Emptiness & Quantum Mechancics

[david buchanan]

Marsha said:
Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable.  What I say about Quality is not Quality, it is a static representation relative to my history and DQ.  Quality (unpatterned experience/patterned experience).


dmb says:

Sigh.

There you go again.

When Pirsig says Quality is indivisible and undefinable he is talking about Dynamic quality. That's what it means to say that DQ is unpatterned. When we're talking about static patterns, particularly intellectual static patterns such as the kind we use in physics and metaphysics, we're talking about patterns that ARE intellectually knowable, definable and divisible.

Just look at the evidence:

"The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called 'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.  Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics." (Lila, 64)

Guess what we're doing here. We are talking about metaphysics, a philosophical theory of truth and some philosophy of science. Any discursive process MUST be divisible, definable and knowable or there isn't any discussion. This does not mean anyone is trying to define or DQ itself. The cutting edge of experience or the immediate flux of life is prior to intellectual divisions and definitions and that's WHY it can't be defined. But, Pirsig says, a metaphysics MUST BE divisible, definable and knowable or there isn't any metaphysics. By saying that the MOQ's static patterns are undefinable and unknowable, Marsha puts flux where stability ought to be and the result is that there isn't any metaphysics in the metaphysics of Quality. The effect is that even intellectual truths are unknowable and undefinable. This is even worse than the foolish relativism of Rorty's cooperative freshmen. It's completely vacuous and that is definitely the wrong kind of emptiness.

What could be more intellectually paralyzing? What could be a deader end? What could be more solipsistic and nihilistic and useless? In terms of bad ideas and bad interpretations, I really can't imagine how it could get much worse.