[MD] static patterns of value

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to dmb:
And please, the first sentence of my definition of static patterns of value stats "Static patterns of value are repetitive processes (multiple events), conditionally co-dependent, impermanent and ever-changing, that pragmatically tend to persist and change within a stable, predictable pattern."  Please note the static patterns "persist and change within a stable, predictable pattern." 


dmb says:

 It's contradictory to say they have two opposite tendencies at the same time (persist and change). It's also a contradictory misuse of the terms to claim that static patterns are ever-changing. I should point out that your first sentence has yet another problem. It is also redundant, circular nonsense.

"Static patterns of value  ..change within a stable, predictable pattern."?

What the heck is THAT supposed to mean? Patterns change within patterns? 

And where'd you get the idea that patterns are processes?

And of course your biggest problem is that your claim is directly contradicted by the textual evidence. The evidence says that DQ is ever-changing, not static patterns. "Ever-changing" is exactly the term Pirsig uses in ZAMM to describe the undefined Good of the sophists. They were teaching Quality as reality, AS OPPOSED TO Plato's fixed and unmoving idea.
"Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, EVER-CHANGING, ultimately unknowable in any sort of fixed, rigid way."
McWatt uses the phrase "continually changing flux" to describe this same "immediate reality". 
"Dynamic Quality is the term given by Pirsig to the CONTINUALLY CHANGING FLUX of immediate reality while static quality refers to any concept abstracted from this flux." (McWatt)
Paul Williams, a Buddhist scholar quoted by McWatt uses the term "ever-changing" to describe "the flow of perceptions" in an ongoing "series of experiences" and he contrasts this with "the conceptualized aspect".
"In order to understand what is being said here, one should try and imagine all things, objects of experience and oneself, the one who is experiencing, as just a flow of perceptions. We do not know that there is something "out there". We have only experiences of colours, shapes, tactile data, and so on. We also don't know that we ourselves are anything than a further series of experiences. Taken together, there is only an EVER-CHANGING FLOW of perceptions (vijnaptimatra)... Due to our beginningless ignorance we construct these perceptions into enduring subjects and objects confronting each other. This is irrational, things are not really like that, and it leads to suffering and frustration. The constructed objects are the conceptualised aspect. The flow of perceptions which forms the basis for our mistaken constructions is the dependent aspect." (Paul Williams, "Mahayana Buddhism", Routledge, 1989, p.83/84).
We hear the same language from Pirsig and James in Lila, where DQ is described as "the immediate flux of life," as "this basic flux of experience," and as "dynamic and flowing" reality. 

"Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which [James] described as 'THE IMMEDIATE FLUX OF LIFE which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES.' In this basic FLUX OF EXPERIENCE, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them." (Pirsig in Lila)
"There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is DYNAMIC AND FLOWING." (Pirsig in Lila)
The attempt to explain and qualify your use of the term 'ever-changing' only makes matters worse. You say you're using it "to more precisely describe how static patterns (as process) function" but static patterns are not processes, they are concepts. Reality is an ever-changing process but concepts are not reality. Static patterns are not reality. You keep talking about static patterns as if they were reality. The analogies you offer - skin, which is ever-changing, the ship of Theseus is ever-changing and the parade of replacements - are all based on objects, on the "physical" reality as it is conceived by SOM realists. I mean, you simply have the wrong idea about what static patterns. If you understand that static patterns are concepts, then you realize it makes no sense to describe them as processes or as ever-changing. The same evidence (above) that shows "ever-changing" is the term used for DQ also shows over and over that static patterns are "concepts abstracted" from ever-changing reality, they are "the conceptualized aspect", they are "concepts derived from" this flux, and these "conceptual categories" include "subjects and objects, mind and matter". 
The MOQ's first and most important distinction draws a line between static and Dynamic but you define the static as dynamic. If your aim is to be as wrong as possible about the MOQ's central terms, congratulations. Your "ever-changing" static patterns is perfectly wrong.