[MD] SOM & the MOQ's four levels

[david buchanan]

Dan G said:
Experience is pre-conceptual. That is why there is always a lag between experience and recognition. ...Experience and our conception of experience are never identical. Once we have pigeon-holed experience into categories it is no longer experience. It becomes a memory of experience, or in the MOQ, static quality.


Ant McWatt replied:
Just a small refinement but I think it would be clearer if you added the prefix "pure" to the word experience in the above paragraph as static quality patterns are a form of experience too (though a type of conceptualised/patterned experience)!



dmb says:
Right. You could say that immediate experience (DQ) and conceptualization (sq) are two phases of experience, two phases of a larger process.

Pirsig and James both give the same answer and it's a pretty good one, I think.

"We live as it were upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest," William James says, "and our sense of determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path," James says, "life is in the transitions". This reminds me of Pirsig's train analogy, wherein he says, "The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?" (ZAMM 283) It also reminds me of Pirsig invocation of Whitehead saying that we are led forward by a dim apprehension of we know not what. But the thing to notice about Pirsig's freight train analogy, I think, is that the whole thing is moving. The leading edge is preconceptual experience but all the boxcars and their contents are being carried along with that edge.

"The real train of knowledge isn't a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It's always going somewhere. On a track called Quality. And that engine and all those 120 boxcars are never going anywhere except where the track of Quality takes them.."

I think the idea is that DQ exerts a push or a pull in a certain direction, toward betterness, but you can never say in advance where this will lead. There is no program controlling it and yet the present moment, the cutting edge of experience, grows out of the past and leans into the future. It's the Dynamic transitional moment between our static memories and static plans. Consciousness itself is just a name for a series of experiences all knit together by this transitional cutting edge in a seamless stream of experience. I think he is talking about riding the wave of life and thought like a surfer. It's way too rich and complex to formulate any set of procedures or to be taught through verbal instructions. Riding this edge is more like a combination of skill and sensitivity, a matter of active engagement in the moment. 

But you bring the boxcars of knowledge with you to each moment, so to speak. The leading edge, all by itself, isn't a train at all.


"In the past Phaedrus' own radical bias caused him to think of Dynamic Quality alone and neglect static patterns of quality. ... But now he was beginning to see that this radical bias weakened his own case. Life can't exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power. To cling to Dynamic Quality alone apart from any static patterns is to cling to chaos."