[MD] MOQ and Completeness Theories (Sorry, Godel.)

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to dmb:
You are using the phrase "negative value"  and, as I mention to John, I have a problem with how this is conceptualized within a MOQ where Quality = experience. Since an absence of Quality would imply non-existence, I am not even sure what a "negative amount of Quality" would be.

dmb says:
Well, I don't take "negative" as a reference to the amount or quantity. It doesn't indicate an absence of the good so much as the presence of a negative charge. In fact, it would make sense to say that some situations have a huge amount of negative quality, which would be very unlike a neutral or inert Quality, which we simply wouldn't have any reason to notice. But, as in the cases you sited, a person jumps off a hot stove and an amoeba will pull away from acid. This negative value is a concrete experience upon which we act.

"Any person ..who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in a undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative." (Lila, 66)

"The negative aesthetic quality of the hot stove in the earlier example was now given some added meaning by a static-Dynamic division of Quality." (Lila, 116)

"A subject-object metaphysics ...ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive and negative, even the Dynamic ongoing edge of thought itself." (Lila, 116)



dmb continues:
That last sentence really gets at the idea, I think. It shows what I mean when I say Quality is aesthetically CHARGED. Pirsig is saying that the Dynamic edge of experience can be both positive and negative and the mystic takes this charge, this qualitative feel, seriously as a concrete guide, as real "information", if you will. The mystic will get off the stove first because he tries to be attuned to this charge rather than ignoring it whenever possible.