From: Paul Turner (paul@turnerbc.co.uk)
Date: Fri Aug 06 2004 - 08:54:27 BST
Hi Scott
Welcome back!
Paul previously said:
> On the other hand (and I have not denied this throughout the
dialogue),
> without society, and biology, and matter, there are no intellectual
> patterns.
Scott said:
Why do you (and Pirsig) assume this?
Paul:
When I assume this, it provides an explanation which is logical, agrees
with experience, has great explanatory power for such tricky things as
good and evil, offers a good interpretation of history and conflict,
and, although I know you disagree, solves the mind-matter problem.
The thing to be aware of, though, is that this is the deduced,
evolutionary, stratified ontology of the MOQ. The MOQ also takes the
view that Quality creates intellectual patterns which precede everything
else, and it is from knowledge (ideas) that ontology is created. This
can get quite confusing.
Scott said:
True, our only experience of intellectual patterns is as embodied
beings, but some mystics (Franklin Merrell-Wolff and Rudolf Steiner, for
example) have different experiences, of disembodied intellect. There are
also probabilistic arguments against it from the Intelligent Design
folks, which, though not conclusive, should at least allow for some
doubt (though I have different disagreements with them, namely that they
are too theistic). And there is also my own argument (which I won't
repeat here) that you can't get intellect out of non-intellect patterns,
regardless of how complex the latter may be. To say that you can, as the
Emergence folks do, is so much arm-waving, a non-argument forced by a
dogmatic adherence to Darwinisim.
Paul:
I think intellect can be understood as effectively a learned behaviour
and this seems to offer the basis of an explanation for how you can get
intellect out of non-intellect. "Emergence" isn't really necessary, as
long as you don't deny that learning is real.
Paul previously said:
> But, finally, I really think it is important for you to appreciate
that
> the individual is not containing the patterns. A glass contains water,
> when you pour out the water, the glass remains. If you "pour out" the
> patterns of an individual human, only Dynamic Quality remains, which
> doesn't contain anything.
Scott said:
I agree that the container/contained model doesn't work, but I would say
that the individual should be seen as a localized version of DQ, and not
just of static patterns, that the DQ that is left after "pouring out" SQ
is
a part of the individual, though it would be better to say that a
(human)
individual should be seen as a locus of DQ/SQ interaction.
Paul:
I have made that last statement several times, in the post you are
responding to, in fact. As for Dynamic Quality being *part of* the
individual, I would say that this is the equivalent to one's Buddha
nature which is not part of an individual in the same sense as an
individual body or a job is. As such, I think you have to be careful
with such statements.
Scott said:
But there is "temporary permanence", one might say, that is, duration.
If you see a light go on, there had to be some continuity from the state
before the light went on to the state after, or there wouldn't be any
noticing of a difference. It is a return to (dualist) SOM to account for
the continuity by saying that there is a self independent of the change
in light, but it is also a form of SOM (materialist nominalism) to say
that the continuity is "postulation".
Paul:
How so?
Scott said:
The irony is that Pirsig had the solution (well, a pointer to it) in
ZAMM,
when he said that Quality creates the subject and object in acts of
perception, but then lost it in LILA when he redefined subject and
object
in such a way that it is impossible for the MOQ to account for
perception.
Paul:
Quality *is* perception in LILA as it was in ZMM. The bit that people
struggle with is that the MOQ denies that there must be a perceiver and
a perceived that can be said to exist separately prior to perception. In
LILA, this "conceptually unknown" cutting edge of reality becomes
Dynamic Quality and the perceiver and perceived are created, by
perception, in the form of static patterns.
Paul
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