Horse and squad,
I am mulling over the Pirsig's present posts of the last few days in
preparation for an answer but your post this morning (May 22 - 9.44 AM) lit
a fire under me which I have to extinguish quickly.
Your ought-is, fact-value conundrum pushed my thinking a little further
and flings me back into the problem that I have been fumblingly trying to
answer without success for some time.
As plainly as I can state it, Value, the good, Quality, in my opinion are
based in and arise from the fact that the universe came into being with a
given amount of energy, and a fixed minimal organization. The pathway from
that beginning was thus predetermined. Complexity, due to the increasingly
complex organization of the universe, later effectively gave us what was
indistinguishable from free will. This is the initial condition which
defined Value, The Good, Quality for the life of the universe. All things
naturally flowing from that initial set of conditions (Quality) are also,
of necessity, Valuable, Good, and have Quality. Alll of the physical events
which flow from the initial set of conditions have Quality. That is why I
feel compelled, for clarity in my mind, to speak separately of inorganic
Quality and Sentient Quality.
I can see no problem with the operation of Quality until we come to
sentience. When sentience arose the universe gained the ability to observe
and judge itself. Sentience allowed us humans to make our own Quality
decisions in some cases. In many cases these sentient Quality decisions
were at odds with the Quality that flows from the initial set physical
conditions.
I think that Pirsig recognized this problem and sought to rectify it with
his "Many Truths" idea. In it he allowed for as many interpretations of
Quality as there are sentient individuals with the provision that there is
no one single truth. He says that we are all living our own truths which,
under the prodding of Dynamic Quality, are slowly coming into better
agreement with physical Quality. In this sense I separate universal Quality
from sentient Quality. Universal Quality can only generate Value and the
Good, Dharma, etc because it has no choice. Sentient Quality can generate
the whole spectrum from bad to the highest Quality because we have a
choice. Pirsig's "Many Truths" idea serves to slowly limit the range of
sentient choices and presumably will ultimately bring us into 100%
agreement with Universal Quality. Assuming that we do eventually reach a
meeting between universal Quality and sentient Quality we will still have
the remaining differences between sentient individuals to contend with. I
believe that his "Many Truths" idea will still operate among sentient
individuals to slowly reduce these differences. It seems Pirsig has given
us a pragmatic pathway to nirvana even though we will probably never reach
it. Ken
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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