[MD] Why does Pirsig write everybody's right about mind and matter although his theses imply the opposite?

Thu Oct 20 04:40:31 PDT 2016

Dan,

okay, looks like I should've studied Lila's Child better. However, if 
it's true that "matter comes before mind" and "mind comes before matter" 
then the MOQ is inconsistent. Obviously, the MOQ is not intended to be 
inconsistent. Furthermore, resorting to a notion of "complementarity" 
doesn't make the MOQ consistent.

In order to make the MOQ consistent, the statements "matter comes before 
mind" and "mind comes before matter" must be assigned to different 
contexts. In the citations you provided, Pirsig seems to make a 
rudimentary such assignment by implying that ontologically and/or 
epistemologically mind comes before matter whereas morally matter comes 
before mind.

But if it's moral to believe matter to come before mind it cannot be 
moral to also believe mind to come before matter unless it's moral to be 
inconsistent. And scientists are highly unlikely to find it moral to be 
inconsistent.

Therefore Pirsig's rudimentary context assignment implies that the MOQ 
is ontologically and/or epistemologically bad philosophy. Why would he 
intentionally imply that? The implication seems unintentional.

A more appropriate context assignment would seem to be: "Subjectively 
mind comes before matter but objectively matter comes before mind." 
However, this implies that Pirsig's theory of static value patterns is 
objective. Is that a problem?

Thank you very much,

Tuk

> Dan:
>
> Dubious? Moi?
>
> "...Bohr’s “observation” and the MOQ’s “quality event” are the same,
> but the contexts are different. The difference is rooted in the
> historic chickenand-egg controversy over whether matter came first and
> produces ideas, or ideas come first and produce what we know as
> matter. 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! I think Bohr would say that philosophic idealism
> (i.e. ideas before matter) is a viable philosophy since
> complementarity allows multiple contradictory views to coexist."
> [Robert Pirsig, Lila's Child, Annotation 67]
>
> DG:
>
> I would like to ask for clarification on a quote from page 178 of Lila
> that also seems related to this: “So what the Metaphysics of Quality
> concludes is that all schools of thought are correct on the
> mind-matter question. Mind is contained in static inorganic patterns.
> Matter is contained in static intellectual patterns.” The last two
> sentences here seem to contradict the earlier division of
> inorganicbiological as objective and the social-intellectual as
> subjective, although, now armed with the information of these notes, I
> sense it relates to philosophical idealism (ideas before matter)?
>
> RMP:
>
> Yes, the relationship of the MOQ to philosophic idealism is an
> important one that is not adequately spelled out in Lila. In a
> materialist system mind has no reality because it is not material. In
> an idealist system matter has no reality because it is just an idea.
> The acceptance of one meant the rejection of the other. In the MOQ,
> both mind and matter are levels of value. Materialist explanations and
> idealist explanations can coexist because they are descriptions of
> coexisting levels of a larger reality.
>
> 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. [Dan Glover and
> Robert Pirsig, Lila's Child]
>
> 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. [Robert
> Pirsig, Lila's Child]
>
> 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.
> Since at the most primary level the observed and the observer are both
> intellectual assumptions, the paradoxes of quantum theory have to be
> conflicts of intellectual assumption, not just conflicts of what is
> observed. Except in the case of Dynamic Quality, what is observed
> always involves an interaction with ideas that have been previously
> assumed. So the problem is not, “How can observed nature be so
> screwy?” but can also be, “What is wrong with our most primitive
> assumptions that our set of ideas called ‘nature’ are turning out to
> be this screwy?” Getting back to physics, this question becomes, “Why
> should we assume that the slit experiment should perform differently
> than it does?”
>
> I think that if researched it would be found that buried in the data
> of the slit experiment is an assumption that light exists and follows
> consistent laws independently of any human experience. If so, the MOQ
> would say that although in the past this seems to have been the
> highest quality assumption one can make about light, there may be a
> higher quality one that contradicts it. This is pretty much what the
> physicists are saying but the MOQ provides a sound metaphysical
> structure within which they can say it. [Robert Pirsig, Lila's Child,
> Annotation 102]
>
> Dan comments:
>
> Hopefully, these sources will help further our discussion.
>
>> In chapter 12 of LILA Pirsig writes:
>>
>> "Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of evolution than
>> social patterns of value."
>>
>> A higher level of evolution does not come before a lower level of evolution.
>>
>> Protozoa came before humans. What kind of ideas did they fathom?
> Dan:
> It is a good idea to believe protozoa came before humans. But since I
> am not a protozoa, unless of course if you ask my ex, then I have no
> idea what kind of ideas they fathomed.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Dan
>
> http://www.danglover.com
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