LS Martin & Mike


Murdock, Mark (Mark.Murdock@Unisys.Com)
Tue, 2 Dec 1997 01:40:27 +0100


> Although, that certainly
> wasn't the biggest of his complaints. :-) His major one was that if
> we
> can't justify the objectivity of Quality, it can easily be eliminated
> with a
> swipe of Occam's Razor. Because if Quality is subjective, then we are
> complicating the issue by saying it is not in the mind. His argument
> was
> that Quality IS subjective, a position I have not been able to sway
> him
> from.
>
Martin,

The response to Quality is subjective, but Quality is a stimulus, THE
stimulus, and it is before subjectivity.

Imagine a room with a table and on the table is a pie. Let's make it a
pumpkin pie in honor the holidays. Now, into this room we parade three
people each from different parts of the globe (different analogues).

We ask each person this question, "Would you like to try some pie?"

They each smile and say, "Yes!"

Then they taste.

One admits that this is the greatest pie on the planet.
One admits that it's not bad, but not great.
One admits that it's making him sick.

Mike would argue that this example demonstrates how quality is
subjective and he'd be right because he defines Quality as a response.
Each person's response to quality is certainly different.

But they all three agreed up front that eating pie is a good thing.
That is, before subjective responses, they agreed that the stimulus,
eating pie, is Good. That's Quality as the stimulus.

Of course, Quality is both the source and substance, the stimulus and
response. This example was not intended to describe the undescribable,
only to point one into the direction of Quality, upstream, to the
source.

In Pirsig's English class example, Mike is again correct in stating that
quality is subjective and dependent on one's cultural analogues. Pirsig
concedes this also. The responses to quality are subjective, but the
source, the stimulus for these responses, is before subjectivity. It's
not the essay that stimulates a response, it's the meeting of the reader
with the essay. Each essay reader then knows what is good. The "what
is good" is subjective, but the source of the knowing, the stimulus, is
before subjectivity -- Quality.

The question then becomes "How do we know that which is before knowing?"
The answer is, intellectually, we can't. But, we can feel it like
Pirsig felt the Korean wall.

Unless I'm totally confused, you and Mike are engaged in the classic
dialectic that Pirsig describes in ZMM. At best you can only move the
dialectic in the direction of the source by continually pressing for the
metaphysical "egg" for each intellectual "chicken" Mike identifies.
Eventually the dialectic will reach a point where the answers become
something unknowable or mystical. That's when you are best
approximating Quality (God).

> Now,
> there's just one problem with that. I can't demonstrate it to Mike.
> :-)
>
And unless Mike agrees to step outside of intellectualizing, you never
will. You are doomed to suffer the fate of their circular argument,
Martin. "You're talking about faith," they'll say. In the end, they're
right. Funny, huh, how it's a circle, the symbol for enlightenment,
that stumps them?

I say Occam would love that circle.

M.

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