[MD] SOM & the MOQ's four levels

[david buchanan]

Arlo said:
You can argue that a better metaphysics must include pre-experiential 'things/patterns/objects/existence', but we really need to be clear that this IS "SOM", and that simply not using 'subjects' and 'objects' doesn't change that.


Ron replied:
And I think that is what Pirsig does when he employs the 4 levels explanation and evolution. Both concern the usefulness of pre-expeirential concepts. His terms change but he's talkin' SOM in the inorganic and biological levels which is what often causes quite a bit of confusion around here, the use of Pirsig quotes becomes contradictory and a whole lot of key strokes are spilled over a basic clarification of meaning.



dmb says:
Yea, I think you guys are getting at the source of much confusion.

Arlo is quite rightly identified the essential problem with SOM, a pre-existing reality (to which our true concepts must correspond). And yet, as Ron points out, the MOQ's four levels are supposed to represent evolutionary stages of development wherein inorganic matter pre-exists the human capacity for conceptualization by billions of years. This is the basic problem, right? It seems to be a contradiction.

Time and change are just basic concepts that emerge from Dynamic Quality, not primary realities of their own and yet evolution is nothing but change over time. So people wonder how to reconcile this or, much worse, they don't see any need for reconciliation. In the latter case, there is no conflict because Pirsig's levels of static patterns are just a new names for the same old pre-existing "things" that SOM says they are. Being a MOQer, in this case, is just a superficial change in lingo and not a real change of mind or perspective. In this latter case, where the rejection of SOM is little more than a banishment of the terms "subject" and "object", the Copernican revolution fizzled out, got short-circuited, or otherwise failed to materialize. 

As I understand it, the MOQ's levels don't divide reality into evolutionary stages so much as they divide what's in the encyclopedia. Pirsig says these levels include absolutely everything except DQ, which means it includes absolutely everything except reality itself. That is quite a lot to leave OUT of the encyclopedia, eh?

It seems pretty clear to me that the MOQ's evolutionary levels are only intended to organize our concepts and they should not be taken as a description of reality as it is in itself. In the MOQ, that's is DQ and it is not definable. You're not going to find the primary empirical reality in the encyclopedia and the immediate flux of life is not to be found in the dictionary, you know? The evolutionary hierarchy of the MOQ does not divide the undivided reality. It re-organized and re-cuts and re-imagines the ghosts, the analogies, the knowable, definable, static patterns. The levels are just a better way to handle our ordinary concepts, including "time" and "change", both the common sense and scientific versions.  Pirsig does not offer this hierarchy as anything more than a better analogy. It is not supposed to correspond to objective reality and we MOQers are supposed to realize that reality itself is experience as such. Anything we say about that primary empirical reality, the thoughts and the words that come after, will always be secondary. And so it is with the MOQ and its four levels. The MOQ itself is static, Pirsig says, and should not be confused with DQ, the ever-changing reality that it talks about.