[MD] Idealistic static value patterns

[mail at tuukkavirtaperko.net]

Marsha, Craig, Ian, all,
I'm happy to experience such a positive reception to my work! Let's  
get to commenting then... it's Christmas and there's lots of other  
stuff to do too. :)

Now first of all I would like to point out an interesting difference  
between the idealistic patterns and LILA's patterns. The idealistic  
patterns are:

1I. Mental
2I. Communication
3I. Personality
4I. Practical

LILA's patterns are:

1. Inorganic
2. Biological
3. Social
4. Intellectual

These seem to be corresponding to some kind of common substance, and  
they do that in inverse order compared to each other. What I mean by  
"inverse order" is this:

---

Metal and Intellectual pattern correspond to something similar. It  
consists of thoughts, knowledge, assumptions, mental ideas and  
something like that. But the mental pattern is the existence pattern  
(lowest) of idealism, while the intellectual pattern is the control  
pattern (highest) of LILA's patterns.

Communication pattern and social pattern correspond to something  
similar. It consists of communication, culture, social customs, roles  
et cetera.

Personality pattern and biological pattern correspond to something  
similar. It includes living beings as separate entities with  
individual needs and goals.

Practical pattern and inorganic pattern correspond to something  
similar. It includes manipulating physical objects and affecting one's  
own physical surroundings. But again, the practical pattern is the  
control pattern (highest) of idealism, but inorganic pattern is the  
existence pattern (lowest) in LILA's patterns.

---

I don't insist that there's something called "substance". Pirsig  
denies the existence of substance in LILA, and I don't see why I  
should disagree with him on that. I think the "common substance" the  
idealistic patterns and LILA's patterns refer to is romantic quality,  
ie. the pre-intellectual but not necessarily Dynamic portion of reality.

Romantic quality contains the raw sensory data input we receive. Both  
idealistic and Pirsigian static value patterns are, I think,  
descriptive abstractions of that raw data. We form such abstractions  
in order to better understand and affect our surroundings.

[Matt]
>
>
>
> I think it is a mistake to understand Pirsig as suggesting "physical
> existence as a fundamental ontological category."  Pirsig's first
> metaphysical move is to make Quality the fundament of reality.  On
> my reading, that exactly makes normativity the fundamental
> constitutive category that undergirds all further modes of
> understanding existence.  To my mind, Pirsig exactly agrees with
> you as you move to extrapolate a more fine-grained analysis of
> levels.  (Dan Glover, in a conversation we've been carrying on for
> near two months, has in fact called this Pirsig's idealism.  I tend to
> agree with this sense of idealism as normativity.)

[Tuukka]
I was not referring to inorganic quality as the fundamental  
ontological category of the MOQ. To be sure, everything in MOQ is  
"Quality". But in and of itself, that is not an informative  
metaphysical statement. It is only informative as a statement on what  
context are we thinking in. If we say "Quality is this and that" then  
it's clear that we are using the MOQ as a context for our thinking. If  
we were to say "Mind is this and that" we would imply we're using  
idealism as our context. If we said: "Existence is this and that", we  
would not specify context.

But when we are already in the context of MOQ, saying that something  
is Quality doesn't mean much. Because in this context, everything is  
by definition already Quality.

Despite this, inorganic quality is not the fundamental ontological  
category of the MOQ, because static quality is more fundamental than  
inorganic quality. Inorganic quality is only the fundamental  
ontological category of Pirsig's theory of static value patterns. That  
theory is only a part of the MOQ, but right now, that was the part I  
was examining.

Pirsig can be argued to not agree with me on the grounds that  
according to the SODV paper, Cartesian mind is social and intellectual  
quality, and Cartesian matter is biological and inorganic quality. It  
could be argued that according to me, Cartesian matter is Pirsig's  
static value patterns and Cartesian mind is idealistic static value  
patterns.

Pirsig can also be argued to agree with me. This can be done if we  
suppose that by Cartesian matter, Pirsig means the romantic "common  
substance" shared by the inorganic and practical patterns and the  
biological and personality patterns. Likewise, Cartesian mind should  
then be interpreted to mean the "common substance" shared by the  
intellectual and mental patterns, and the social and communication  
patterns.

In any case, I think analyzing the correspondencies between Cartesian  
dualism and the MOQ can be a very difficult task. This is due to  
Cartesian dualism having problems of its own that are unrelated to the  
MOQ. The problems lead to ambiguity in trying to figure out what's the  
correct interpretation. There maybe is no single correct  
interpretation to be had. That's not necessarily a problem, because  
the problems of Cartesian dualism should not undermine the credibility  
of the MOQ, as long as Cartesian dualism is not used as an important  
component for constructing the MOQ. And I think it doesn't need to be  
used so. The MOQ can be constructed without mentioning Cartesian  
dualism at all.

Craig: Thanks, I was making a mistake then.

Ian: Sounds good! :) Happy to hear that.

-Tuukka