[MD] Where does DQ end and SQ begin and SQ end and DQ begin? It's all bananas isn't it?

[David Morey]

Hi DMB

One question, are animals able to recognise patterns, shapes, forms? Does 
the MOQ
see animals as intellectualising? Bad move I'd suggest, surely SQ is active 
in all
processes prior to the intellectual ones that humans undertake? At least 
that
is the view In take. How do you explain how non-intellectual processes work
without any SQ involved? That would be a chaos don;t you think? If not why 
not?
Luckily animals can identify a mate without any intellectual concepts 
required,
such is SQ I would suggest, regular patterns experienced as qualities with 
positive
value I propose. This is an idea but one about the ontology and activity of 
non-
intellectual processes, I think the MOQ says something about processes and
how they causally work not just about how we understand them. Otherwise
it is not really a metaphysics is it? it would just be an epistemology.

Of course I recognise that experienced phenomenon are prior to all theories 
we
develop tom explain and understand our experiences, not very hard to get 
your
head around unless you are a SOM materialist.

Thanks
David M


-----Original Message----- 
From: david buchanan
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 8:43 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] Where does DQ end and SQ begin and SQ end and DQ begin? 
It's all bananas isn't it?


David Morey said to dmb:
... Sure all concepts are SQ I agree. But is  all SQ conceptual? Are not the 
levels below the intellectual not forms of non conceptual SQ? I would have 
thought that is what Pirsig is saying? DO you agree? [AND] Is not the 
pre-conceptual also static and SQ patterned at times? Otherwise how were 
there any patterns that formed the inorganic and the organic before human 
beings came along to conceive the MOQ? Was not the reality of  SQ and DQ 
forming the cosmos before human beings came along?


dmb says:
These questions get at a very important point. This is where lots of MOQers 
(especially Marsha) crash and burn. People have asked Pirsig himself about 
this, as we see in Lila's Child.

"The MOQ does not deny the traditional scientific view of reality as 
composed of material substance and independent of us.  It says it is an 
extremely high quality idea.  We should follow it whenever it is practical 
to do so.  But the MOQ, like philosophic idealism, says this scientific view 
of reality is still an idea.  If it were not an idea, then that 'independent 
scientific material reality' would not be able to change as new scientific 
discoveries come in." [LILA'S CHILD, Annotation 4]

"The MOQ says that Quality comes first, which produces ideas, which produce 
what we know as matter.  The scientific community that has produced 
Complementarity almost invariably presumes that matter comes first and 
produces ideas.  However, as if to further the confusion, the MOQ says that 
the idea that matter comes first is a high quality idea!" [LILA'S CHILD, 
Annotation 67]

"It is important for an understanding of the MOQ to see that although 
'common sense' dictates that inorganic nature came first, actually 'common 
sense' which is a set of ideas, has to come first.  This 'common sense' is 
arrived at through a huge web of socially approved evaluations of various 
alternatives.  The key term here is "evaluation," i.e., quality decisions. 
The fundamental reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws 
approved of by common sense but the approval itself and the quality that 
leads to it." [LILA'S CHILD, Annotation 97]

"I see today more clearly than when I wrote the SODV paper that the key to 
integrating the MOQ with science is through philosophic idealism, which says 
that objects grow out of ideas, not the other way around." [LILA'S CHILD, 
Annotation 105]

It might be tough to wrap your mind around this point because of the way it 
seems to defy scientific materialism and common sense but it isn't very 
complicated. Quality or pure experience comes first and ideas always come 
second - and then inorganic patterns like "matter" are among those ideas. 
It's the same with big bang as it is with bananas. The whole history of the 
universe is made up of static patterns, of ideas and concepts and words.

We can go all the way back and find this crucial point in ZAMM too. Pirsig 
is quite consistent on this point. This is how he explained it to the 
faculty at Bozeman more than 50 years ago -  in terms that a behaviorist 
could understand....
"This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective 
world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn't mean 
it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, 
before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of 
nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can't 
be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and 
between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time 
lag. . .
The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time 
lag, is always in the past. . .This preintellectual reality is what [the 
author] felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually 
identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality 
is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects. . .
Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to 
intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The 
names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the 
Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated 
in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues 
toour previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up 
our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in 
terms of these analogues. . ."

"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our 
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth 
and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, 
philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues 
reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of 
truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not 
accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to 
invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which 
our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of 
it. Every last bit of it."


These quotes have been selected and presented to clarify that one key point. 
Do they clarify it for you? Do you see how radical this is? We really cannot 
rightly understand the MOQ if we think of static patterns as actual objects, 
as in SOM. The MOQ, in effect, says that scientific material and common 
sense realist are one giant reification problem.


Hope that helps - but after so many attempts I hold that hope very lightly. 
And if Marsha sees the point, it'll stop my heart and I'll die from shock. 
;-)



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