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

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
There is no such thing as a preconceptual [tree]. It's one of "the forms which we make" and DOES NOT YET exist in "the basic flux of experience".

Pirsig said:
"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."  (Pirsig, ZAMM)



Craig Erb asked:
How do we reconcile these 2 quotes.  On the one hand, the tree is only in the FUTURE, after experience.  On the other hand, the tree is in the past BEFORE intellectual awareness. IMHO there are 2 varieties of the MoQ: anthrocentric MoQ (AMoQ) and pan-experiential MoQ (PMoQ).  In AMoQ spov's emerge from the experience of humans. In PMoQ spov's emerge from their own experience: amoebae back away from acid and iron filings value movement toward magnets, without humans being involved. 



dmb says:
The Pirsig quote comes from the middle of ZAMM, where he's trying to explain Quality in terms that could be understood by the faculty in Bozeman, who were behaviorists. So I don't think there are two varieties of the MOQ so much as there are simple and sophisticated ways to express this idea. In Lila, where the levels of static quality are organized into an evolutionary hierarchy, it is very tempting to conceive of them as evolving and emerging long before humans came along to experience them but that is a huge mistake. That way of taking it would convert the MOQ back into SOM because the world would be conceived as an external pre-existing reality, an objective reality by a new name. 

David Morey asked about this apparent discrepancy about three weeks. I offered some reasons and evidence to support it in response. I'll duplicate that now for your benefit. 

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 [or tress and dogs]. 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.