[MD] The Tao of Quality - Verse 1

[david buchanan]

David M said to Krimel and dmb:


Yes concepts and thinking are based on analogies, but analogies of what?

dmb says:
Krimel might share his ideas but he doesn't yet understand the basic terms of the MOQ and has no idea what Pirsig saying, do I wouldn't put too much stock in anything he says.

To put it simply, concepts are not based on analogies so much as the ARE analogies; they are analogies for experience. We invent these analogies (static quality, a.k.a words, concepts, ideas, abstractions, generalizations, etc) in response to the primary empirical reality (Quality or DQ). They are analogues of previous experience.

David M asked:
Where do analogies start, how do they get going? Do we not discover regularities in experience before concepts? 

dmb quotes Pirsig:
"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 to our 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."

David M asked:
Regularities like hot? Is not hotness a form of quality, a static quality we understand long before -as a species- we get to language and concepts. And long before we get to analogies about really 'hot' looking girls? You know whatever happened to those hot stove static qualities of value?

dmb says:
There is an unstated premise at work behind your question, I think, and that premise is false. I take your question to be something like this: "Didn't hotness exist way back in time before humans came along and developed language? Our pre-human ancestors had enough sentience to detect heat long before we formed any concepts of it, right?" The false premise here, in a word, is realism. You're treating static patterns as if they were just another name for physical substances, as if they are the pre-existing objective realities of subject-object metaphysics. The MOQ doesn't exactly reject the scientific worldview insofar as the concepts can rightly be consider true in the pragmatic sense, i.e. they are empirically based and they work quite well when you're doing science. So in some situations it does make sense to think of the evolutionary history of static patterns as happening in time and before we came along, but ultimately static patterns aren't really like that. They are all just concepts and ideas and words. 

Pirsig says:
"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] 

dmb resumes:
Again, to understand the world as an inherited pile of analogies is to understand that we created this world, that we carved it out, that it is far more plastic and malleable than the realists can imagine. When the oceans, earth, and sky are understood as analogies, as concepts, then the world of understanding loses its foundational status, its ontological primacy and is instead seen as an elaborate set of human concepts.
Think of those ZAMM scenes in the Chicago classroom, where Phaedrus says, "Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that." Likewise, his reply to the Chairman ("This entire description is just an analogy.") connects quite neatly with his earlier explanation of the world as "an invention" made up of "many marvelous analogues". And maybe it goes without saying but the scope and reach of this claim is consistent, simple, and clear. In Bozeman he says, "All of it. Every last bit of it."  This is what I mean when I say that MOQ is a giant anti-reification program. The whole of reality as we understand it conceptually is an elaborate system of analogies that we invented collectively. There are no pre-existing material realities as such. That is the view we call SOM and that is the view that the MOQ is supposed to replace. None of this can be said about DQ itself, which is the primary empirical reality itself and the source of all these analogues, the mother of all static patterns.