[MD] On Pirsig's letter to Paul Turner

[Tuukka Virtaperko]

All,
I'm back, and I have results to offer you. Today I participated to a 
cocoa ceremony. During the ceremony we went to a pier where a woman 
played the guitar and we sang. At that moment I realized the guitar is 
an inorganic pattern whose value is the same as the value of the calming 
and beautiful song. But when the woman stopped playing the guitar ceased 
to have this value.

An inorganic pattern has instrumental value when a biological pattern 
uses it to actualize a choice it has made. Obviously, this doesn't mean 
the guitar should be discarded after the song is over. Forgetting the 
guitar on the pier and and thus exposing it to the elements would've 
been a bad choice. But as far as we are concerned of quality, the guitar 
inherently has none. The reason for bringing it back in and taking care 
of it lies in the value of songs we'll play in the future, but preparing 
for the future this way is an intellectual pattern. It doesn't mean the 
guitar would inherently have quality.

Biological patterns accumulate value according to the choices they make. 
This is because biological patterns may have volition, which makes it 
possible to attribute the value of a choice to the pattern that made the 
choice. This value is inherent to the biological pattern in the sense 
that it stays with the biological pattern even after the choice has 
already been made.

Social patterns can be modeled as the power set of biological patterns. 
Suppose we have persons A, B and C, which compose the set {A,B,C}. The 
power set of this set is {{A,B,C},{A,B},{B,C},{A,C},{A},{B},{C},{}}. In 
other words, the power set of a set includes all subsets of that set 
(and, technically, the empty set {}). Each subset of the power set that 
has more than one member is a social pattern whose value is the sum of 
the value of its members. Social patterns, too, could be said to have 
volition but this volition manifests via biological patterns.

Whenever a biological pattern makes a choice, the justification of that 
choice accumulates the same value as what is the value of that choice to 
all that are affected by it. This justification is an intellectual pattern.

The merit of this model is that it provides a clear answer to a question 
Pirsig answered only vaguely and with some difficulty and uncertainty in 
his letter to Paul Turner. That letter is, first and foremost, about 
defining the intellectual level. Pirsig writes that although the ancient 
Egyptians had intellect, their culture was not an intellectual one. This 
can be expressed more analytically as follows.

The justification of any choice made by a biological pattern is an 
intellectual pattern in the sense that it accumulates value as the 
biological pattern makes said choice. That is to say, any such 
justification is intellectual with regards to how it accumulates value. 
But we can say that a pattern that is intellectual with regards to value 
accumulation is anyhow metaphysically biological if it only takes 
biological values into account. If it only takes social values, at most, 
into account, it is metaphysically a social pattern. These are 
*improper* intellectual patterns. A *proper* intellectual pattern takes 
intellectual values into account. It can do so by including statements 
about other intellectual patterns that are either proper or improper.

The difference between proper and improper intellectual patterns 
manifests via the abstract symbol manipulation Pirsig mentions in his 
letter. Let's suppose two hungry people, Steve and Jane, and a banana. 
Steve and Jane are biological patterns and if they only take their 
biological values into consideration it would, simplistically, mean that 
each one of them thinks: "I should get the banana" in which "I" is a 
biological pattern. Therefore this intellectual pattern would be an 
improper one.

Friends of Steve would want Steve to get the banana whereas friends of 
Jane would want Jane to get it, but this would only take social values 
into account. Therefore such judgements made by friends are also 
improper intellectual patterns.

A proper intellectual pattern in this situation could be something like: 
"The one who is hungrier should get the banana". In this pattern, "the 
one who is hungrier" is neither a biological nor a social pattern. It's 
a variable, as the hungrier one could as well be Steve or Jane. This is 
why it makes the justification properly intellectual. And variables are 
denoted by abstract symbols.

When we define the model like this, the social level necessarily 
accumulates more value than the biological level, and the intellectual 
level (including both proper and improper intellectual patterns) 
necessarily accumulates more value than the social level, just like 
Pirsig would have it. To be sure, Pirsig would probably say that the 
higher levels "have" more value, not that they "accumulate" more value, 
but this model anyhow explains what kind of a process leads to such an 
outcome.

This model does not verify the hypothesis that *any* higher-level 
pattern is more valuable than *any* lower-level pattern. It's not clear 
to me whether Pirsig thinks this way, but I got the impression that he 
might. I don't think this is a tenable assumption. Let's suppose a 
medical study, according to which a certain drug is safe with regards to 
certain risks, but the drug has some other very harmful side-effect the 
study did not take into account. If the drug is deemed safe because of 
such a study, the assumption of its safety is an intellectual pattern, 
but the choice of making the drug available for consumers is not 
valuable but has a negative value.

In his letter Pirsig also mentions that the argument that the 
Metaphysics of Quality is not an intellectual formulation is not clear 
to him. Within the model I have presented, the Metaphysics of Quality 
can be used as justification for making a choice and is in this sense an 
intellectual pattern among others.

Regards,
Tuk