[MD] Awareness and consciousnes in the MOQ

[David Harding]

Hi dmb,

> dmb says:
> Well, remember that even in ZAMM classic and romantic are two different styles of thought. i.e. Aristotle's love of the many and the Platonic love of the one. This fits well with Pirsig's description of the two different ways to look at the handful sand, either by sorting into categories and taxonomies or as one whole pile of sand. But even back in ZAMM he was explaining that "Phaedrus was clearly a Platonist by temperament". "His Quality and Plato's Good were so similar that if it hadn't been for some notes Phaedrus left I might have thought they were identical. But he denied it. And in time I came to see how important this denial was." Some pages later...
> 
> "The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetorician it was not and Idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." You can see the static/Dynamic distinction here even though he's not using those particular terms. He's pitting his own "ever changing" Good against Plato's Good as a "fixed and rigid Idea". This passage makes it pretty clear, by the way, why Andre and I are always objecting to Marsha's description of static patterns as "ever changing". "Ever changing" is what we want to say about DQ, about the primary empirical reality, which is not to be confused with static patterns.

Nothing I disagree with here. But would proceed with caution - as applying 'ever-changing' to DQ is dangerous IMHO because Dynamic Quality is not to be confused with the change or motion from SOM.  Furthermore, things change as a result of DQ.  Things changing isn't DQ.  Pirsig used these 'ever changing' analogies in ZMM and didn't use them nearly as much in the MOQ.  I think this is because in ZMM he was talking to someone who, naturally, would still be seeing things from a SOM perspective. Change is undervalued in SOM and it's easy point this out and thus form an argument against the fixed and rigid SOM.  

> David H:
> Now from this perspective, I think that the awareness mentioned in ZMM is Pirsig still talking from a SOM perspective whereby "We" are always objects going through a certain space and time and that our intellects only capture a certain amount of this sensory experience.  The MOQ contradicted this and said that is a good idea but not actual reality.
> 
> dmb says:
> I disagree. To say that reality is a just small handful of sand is to present an alternative and a challenge to SOM. The explanation wherein Quality is the continuing stimulus that causes us to create the world of analogy upon analogy all the way down is part of this same challenge to SOM, even though it was dished up in a way that a Behaviorist (SOMish psychology) could understand. In both cases, Pirsig is saying something radical about the world as we understand it, namely that it's not objective, that we have selected it and built it, analogy by analogy. The sand piles and the piles of analogies are both are warm up acts for the idea that "man is a participant in the creation of all things". See what I mean?

Certainly - I see.  And I'm highlighting the SOM rhetoric used with the terms Awareness and Conscious. Pirsig is making his argument from a SOM standpoint. Pirsig's argument isn't wrong. It just expanded and made better with the MOQ. It's made better to the point where we can talk about these ZMM ideas from a larger perspective - like I did above.

> David H said:
> Further to your [Andre's] point about MOQ's Quality being the same as other stuff - I think we can draw these comparisons and claim they all really mean the same thing, but what value is there in doing so?  Northrop and James and Zen Buddhism and Christianity all screw up what the other person is trying to say.   You 'know' if they are talking about the same thing.  But what we're doing now is nothing other than intellectual tricks with no other goal than the fact that they are intellectual tricks... What's the point in comparing them? 
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> I think it's like shining light on the idea from different directions. It helps to eliminate misconceptions when you get lots of different kinds of explanations. "Nothingness" could easily be mistaken to mean the absence of everything, like something less than black empty space. But when you put it next to "undivided" and "undifferentiated" you can see more clearly that the term refers to an absence of distinctions, by which we understand "things". So the term mean "no things" or "no thingness". There's nothing black or empty about the immediate of flux of life. This no-thingness is a stream of full of rich and overflowing experience. This no-thingness is reality itself and it's definitely not nothing. It's quite something. 


Which of these people argues exclusively for the term "nothingness"?  I don't think that any of them does.  I don't think what you are talking about is what we would traditionally call comparing.  That is, finding value in the comparison itself.  What you are actually talking about is appreciating each of these modes of thought based on how good they are, irrespective of the comparison. That you were able to appreciate "Nothingness" more by reading another person does not mean that you were comparing them. All of these ideas are based in quality.  How good they are is not dependent on the comparison between them.  How good they are is how good they are - independent of any comparison made.  This is what I'm saying.