[MD] kill all intellectual patterns

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
That's the meaning of "truth" in the MOQ. "Truth is a static intellectual pattern within a larger entity called Quality." ...and for pragmatists like Pirsig there are many truths, all of which are provisional and invented - as opposed to eternal and discovered.  

Ron replied:

Well, if we are to take Dynamic Quality as eternal and discovered, that which persists through time and extends beyond the individual experience then we are indeed speaking about a singular truth, that which the monism of MoQ is predicated upon...

dmb says:
You've directly contradicted the textual evidence, Ron. Sigh. It's so damn discouraging. Do I really need to explain HOW you're defying the evidence? In the MOQ, truth is a static pattern and DQ is the source and substance of all static patterns. Truths are subordinate to DQ and DQ is the  larger "entity" from which all static patterns are derived. DQ is not true or false because those designations are intellectual and static whereas DQ is prior to and more basic than anything we could say or think about it.
Let's be clear about what Pirsig is and is not saying, shall we? Again, here is the textual evidence. 

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions." 

"Truth is a static intellectual pattern within a larger entity called Quality."

You see how DQ cannot be considered any kind of truth, singular or otherwise?

Put another way, direct immediate experience is not true or false. It simply is. 
That is the distinction between DQ and sq. DQ is the primary empirical reality (direct experience) and intellectual abstractions (idea, concepts, definitions) are static quality. Primary means first, prior to, and concepts are secondary, are derived from the primary. Pirsig quotes James on this point: "There must always be a discrepancy between concepts [sq] and reality [DQ], because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing." 
That's the meaning of "truth" in the MOQ. "Truth is a static intellectual pattern within a larger entity called Quality."


dmb said previously:
There is nothing logically contradictory about having an experience while thinking at the same time. The idea here is to get them both working TOGETHER. And doing that means putting them in their proper relation, knowing which is which.


Ron replied:
Right, as A.N. Whitehead asserted, :"We must construe our knowledge of the appearent world as being an individual experience of something which is more than personal. Nature is thus a totality including individual experiences, so that we must reject the distinction between nature as it really is and our experiences of it which are purely psychological. Our experiences of the appearent world are nature itself."

Now there is a lot to chew on here and it has a quite a bit to say on the matter of truth as a sort of singularity, the ancients exhaulted truth as that which was the closest to the good, in other words truth is not just one of many static patterns it is the best and if it is perennial then there is something about it that persists through change, meaning that some truths are better or truer than others, some truths are more than personal they extend past the individual experience.

dmb says:
Although he is comparable to Pirsig is many respects, here Whitehead seems to be addressing the problem of SOM is a half-baked way, wherein the "subjective" construed as part of the "objective" world. That isn't quite enough to put him in agreement with Pirsig or the other pragmatists. For Pirsig and James, immediate experience is even prior to concepts like "the world" and the "individual experience" of it. For our pragmatists, experience is reality but this is pure experience or DQ, not the "individual experience" OF "the world". Whitehead's formulation is suspiciously like a subjective encounter with an objective reality, whereas the pragmatists say subjects and objects are merely derived concepts. It is known and had prior to designations like mind and matter, subject and object, mental or physical. For the pragmatists these are just the conceptual categories into which we sort experience. DQ or pure experience contains all the elements that will later be conceptually sorted and designated. 

Also, our pragmatists are quite deliberately rejecting ancient ideas about Truth. Pragmatism is an alternative to the long standing idea that the truth is whatever corresponds with the way things really are, the way reality really is, apart from and beyond our experience. For the Platonists, the Forms were the real reality and for Modern SOMers, the real reality is objective, physical reality. Pragmatism rejects this correspondence theory of truth, rejects all fixed and eternal truths and instead insists that experience IS reality. Truths can only ever be the ideas that work successfully within experience and should never be used to make claims about any reality outside of experience. These are just metaphysical fictions, the pragmatists say, and philosophers have no business talking about them. This is radical empiricism wherein the world just is the world of pure experience itself.