LS Whatever works

From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun May 09 1999 - 11:27:57 BST


Keith, Roger, Pirsigians, lend me your eyes...

A question has emerged. Are static patterns real or are they just
intellectual constructs? Was there an historical evolution of the cosmos
which laid down the basis our reality before intellectual patterns
could emerge or does our experience create that "reality" in some way.
Is there really a road or do we have only maps of roads? Is there an
external reality or not? (Obviously, these are just different ways of
asking the same question.)

The question gets at the true nature of static patterns, which is the
aspect of Quality that Pirsig says we CAN define. As I understand it,
there really is a road. The universe had a long history of evolution
before our kind of consciousness arrived. I think Pirsig wrote Lila
because ZMM leaves largely Quality undefined and a lot of readers were
bugged by that mystery. Instead of hard definition, he only suggests
lots of ways that we can know Quality in our lives. (You can sorta tell
these things.) In Lila he introduces the static/Dynamic split. Lila
describes the levels of static patterns, their relationship to each
other and their relation to DQ. Lila's DQ is a lot like ZMM's Quality.
Both are left largely undefined. Indeed, Pirsig explicitly says DQ
itself is beyond definition, beyond intellectual static patterns. SQ, by
contrast, is definable Quality. The "maps only" view says SQ is defined
quality. I say its knowable whereas the "no external reality" school
says it is known. Know what I mean?

I think the MOQ holds that there is an actual, external, historical
reality. I believe that is what Pirsig means when he talks about static
patterns of quality. I don't think he doubts the world, he just says
that to think of it exclusively in terms of subjects and objects can be
very misleading. (A very bad map for the high country of the mind.) I
don't think he endorses any kind of solipsism, he just rejects amoral
scientific objectivity and the materialist's soul-less clock-work
universe. He replaces this dead-matter lonely-mind view of reality with
a metaphysic that paints the cosmos as alive, interconnected,
intelligent and growing. (Solipsism is also a rejection of objectivity,
but remains within the SOM and so goes to the extreme in subjectivity
saying all of reality is in the mind, the "maps only" view.)

Pirsig's original quest sent him searching through ancient Greek history
looking for the place where Western philosophy went wrong, and he thinks
he found it. Pirsig describes how the intellectual began to assert
itself and become independent of the social level. He describes the
historical change in the Zuni tribe. He talks about the Victorians, the
hippies, the puritans and changes in science all in terms of history.
There are a zillion reasons to think there's a there there, unlike
Oakland. Things happen in space and time, not just in our minds.

One of the features of the MOQ that tends to be misleading is the idea
that experience creates reality. This is exactly what a solipsist would
say, but from a SOM perspective. Solipsism is a completely different
view and doesn't fit into the MOQ for lots of reasons. Nevertheless, in
the MOQ, experience creates reality...

Keith says, "It seems to make good sense that having some 'thing' that
stays the same and something that changes is a prerequisite for
experience." It immediately reminded me of an idea I read concerning
the big band, the birth of the universe. They say the initial explosion
was caused by a tiny disruption in what was once a perfectly symmetrical
singularity. Before the big bang was like an infinite black hole where
all space, time, matter and energy were still unarticulated. This giant
black hole was a infinitely tiny speck that contained all the potential
in the universe, but it was balanced out in such a way that all time and
space were still all folded into one thing. Then something (DQ?) tipped
that symmetry ever so slightly and... BAANG ! One tiny differentiation
(SQ?) tipped the whole thing out of wack, thank god, and sent the cosmos
on it's evolutionary way. Even time and space, even the stage upon which
the universe is set are inorganic patterns of value and were created by
experience, inorganic experience that is. Matter and energy have
experiences too. Its not exactly the same as our experiece, but not
altogether different either. We can experience heat and weight and mass
in out bodies. Biological patterns of value are created by experience
also and we can relate to that level's type of awareness even better.
Hunger and thirst spring to mind. We know them intimately without having
to think about it. Social and intellectual patterns are much more
obvioulsy engaged in experience, so I won't go on. The idea is simply
that Pirsig has simply done away with SOM's dead cause and effect
universe and replaced it with one that reaches out and grows through
experience. It is not just human experience that causes universal
evolution, the whole thing is made of experience, the whole thing is
like a living organism. Even subatomic strings have experiences and can
"decide" to be a particle or a wave. And the really cool thing is that
we are composed of static patterns from all levels. We are a microcosm.
We can relate to the entire evolution of the universe because it is
within each of us. Our experience is not just intellectual, we
participate in all levels. And of course, the levels are just different
kinds of static quality. Its all make of Quality, every last bit of it.
The knower and the known are made of the same stuff and they're both
"real.

Essentially, I'm saying that "experience creates reality" is true only
if understood as a cosmological claim. Its a statement about the
evolution of reality. Experience caused the big bang and everything
right up to this e-mail.

Pirsig's ontological re-shuffling of the deck supports this view too, I
think. The old Aristotelean way of organizing and classifying "things"
into subjects, objects, cause and effect is replaced with the MOQ's
static patterns and the force of value. Cause and effect is dead and
amoral, whereas the force of value indicates some kind of awareness and
choice.

Both the evolutionary cosmology and the new ontological scheme reflect
the core idea that experience creates reality and that makes them seem
more anthropomorphic than they really are. Most people off the street
would just assume one was talking about a person if the words
"experience" or "chioce" were used. But in Pirsig's case, I think he's
just talking about how the universe evolved and how it's present state
can be categorized. He's confused us all by putting consciousness and
perference at every level of reality when we thought it belonged only to
us humans. In the MOQ we are not seperate from or different than the
rest of reality.

"Schoepenhauer hated the idea of an external reality and rejected it
entirely, until he realized it was really the only place you could get a
good steak." WOODY ALLEN

"Is there really more Quality in the higher priced cuts of meat?" ROBERT
PIRSIG

Co-incidence? I think not.

David B.

P.S. Don't even get me started on the epistemology... I'm hungry.

MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org



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