[MD] Replacing SOM

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[Krimel]
Find me somewhere where Pirsig talks about the downside of DQ.

[Arlo]
I think there is a misunderstand here. My guess is you're talking about things like hurricanes, and meteors, and cancer, and ice ages, and wars, and famine, and the 'fact' that one the entire cosmos will collapse back into a singularity and all these static patterns will be 'erased', and and stuff like this? 

Or, if I am wrong, can you list out some examples of what consider to be evidence or illustrative of the "downside of DQ"?

[Krimel]
If SQ and DQ are incommensurables how is it, that in experience they are so entwined?

[Arlo]
Yikes. You're using the terminology, but you're completely in a different ballpark than Pirsig. Maybe that's where you want to be, maybe that works for you, and all power to you. But when you say things like this I think there is really no common ground between what Pirsig is saying and what you are saying; same words but completely different discourse.

For Pirsig, of course, "SQ and DQ" are NOT "entwined" in experience. Experience IS DQ. SQ is what emerges or derives FROM experience. ("Static quality... emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality." (LILA))

This seems to be a point of fundamental disagreement you have with Pirsig, maybe that's your point, and that's fine. But its such a radical departure from Pirsig's ideas that I really don't see the value in forcing the common terminology. Bo had a different idea than Pirsig about what the nature of the intellectual level is, but I can see the common terminology because, apart from that, he was operating from the same foundation, and was using "SQ" and "DQ" with the same meaning as Pirsig. You are using the terminology so differently, I think it actually hinders rather than enhances your conversations here.

That said, I also think you're using "incommensurable" wrong as well. I take it to mean, anyway, "impossible to compare", and certainly Pirsig spends a great deal of time in LILA "comparing" Dynamic Quality with static quality. And if you are meaning "impossible to measure", that's kind of way off too, since of course we measure static quality all the time, in fact I'd say one could reasonable argue that within the MOQ static quality IS a measurement. But, no, we can't really 'measure' Dynamic Quality, since that would be to 'define' it, and DQ is indefinable.